GPP Leverage: Week 11

Welcome back for the 11th NFL GPP Leverage column of the season. If you missed the Week 1 edition of GPP Leverage, I recommend you take a minute to read the intro to get a feel for the goals of this column.

I’ll be taking a little bit of a different approach to Leverage this week, as I am going to be an honored guest on this week’s Establish The Million. As a result, I’m going to save my Week 11 main-slate thoughts for the show. Instead of the typical slate breakdown, we’ll use this space to do a very quick review of the Week 10 main slate, with a focus on my favorite topic of the season: onslaughts.

I have spent a lot of time focusing on onslaughts already this season, both here in Leverage and on the DFS Tournament Review show. I actually held back from writing about it further on a couple of occasions, as I felt like I was being too narrow in my choice of topics to cover. But after the strong success of onslaught lineups for the Week 10 main slate, I would be remiss if I didn’t revisit them now. As a refresher, I consider onslaughts to be any QB stacked with three or more of his teammates in the same lineup. 

Onslaughts hit in a big way last week, particularly through Baker Mayfield and Jared Goff. Our content, projections, and sims all liked these spots for both QBs, and it was awesome to see so many subscribers have massive wins using these onslaught lineups. In reviewing both my own lineups and those of subscribers from Week 10, a common theme was that many lineups that were successful but did not win were a 2v2 away from the actual winners.

My primary purpose for utilizing onslaught lineups so much is that if we can find a reasonably condensed offense that scores a lot of points, we should be able to have half of our lineup provide value in a highly correlated way. Put another way, onslaughts give us the chance to capture half of our roster spots with a single bet on an offense as a whole rather than trying to parlay four individual player bets together. Even if we were to single-stack a QB with a receiver, that still leaves us with a larger multi-leg parlay for the remainder of our lineup. 

The drawback, of course, as we saw in Week 10, is that many lineups can end up looking very similar to each other when they utilize the same onslaught structures, even if individual player ownerships remain relatively low. As a result, we can end up in situations where our lineups are just a 1v1 or 2v2 away from a handful of other lineups. But does that mean we shouldn’t utilize onslaughts as often?

Looking at ownership rates from the $150 3-max Power Sweep with approximately 3,700 entries, Jared Goff was 11.6% owned overall. As shown in the table below, 21.0% of all Goff lineups were onslaughts with Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jameson Williams, and Sam LaPorta, accounting for 2.4% of all lineups in the contest.