GPP Leverage: Week 15

Welcome back for the Week 15 edition of the NFL GPP Leverage column. If you missed the Week 1 edition of GPP Leverage, I recommend you take a minute to read the intro from that week to get a feel for the goals of this column.

It’s hard to believe the NFL season is already almost over, but here we are, through the bye weeks and on to Week 15. Here in Week 15, with no teams on bye, the Sunday main slate on DraftKings is notably larger than the slates we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks. Additionally, because so many of the league’s most potent offenses are featured on the main slate, as opposed to being reserved for primetime or holiday slates, we actually have a lot of fun matchups to parse through, and the winning scores of DFS contests will likely be higher than we saw in either of Weeks 13 or 14.

Despite having 13 games on Sunday’s main slate, only two games stand out for being the clear best fantasy-friendly game environments: Ravens-Bengals and Lions-Rams. These two matchups are the only games on the slate with a Vegas total over 50; they’re the only two games featured in Pat Thorman’s “Up In Pace” section; and they’re the clear top two games in our GPP Game Scores at the time of this writing. This week in GPP Leverage, we’ll go game by game with a particular focus on Ravens-Bengals and Lions-Rams.

Ravens at Bengals (1:00 p.m. ET)

This matchup has a plethora of different ways to attack it, as each team has viable options at each position. However, it is going to be tough to play this matchup while also avoiding ownership, as I could reasonably see all of Lamar Jackson, Derrick Henry, Zay Flowers, Mark Andrews, Isaiah Likely, Joe Burrow, Chase Brown, Ja’Marr Chase, Mitch Tinsley, and Mike Gesicki pushing double-digit ownership. Besides all of these pieces fitting together nicely for game stacks, the most popular salary relief options of the entire slate will come from this matchup, particularly Tinsley and the TEs.