GPP Leverage: Week 16

Welcome back for the Week 16 edition of the NFL GPP Leverage column. If you missed the Week 1 edition of Leverage, I recommend you take a minute to read the intro from that week to get a feel for the goals of this column.

Programming Note 1: We will have a show breaking down this Saturday’s two-game slate with Cody Main, John Daigle, and myself on Saturday at Noon ET. 

Programming Note 2: Due to the holidays in Week 17 and the incentive-focused nature of the Week 18 slate, this will be the final GPP Leverage column of the season.

If you asked Santa for more NFL football this Christmas, you’re in luck. In addition to the normal main slates and primetime showdown slates, the NFL has also gifted us with a two-game slate for Saturday, a three-game slate on Christmas, and another two-game slate next Saturday. We’ll also have plenty of short slates for the NFL playoffs in January.

Last year in Week 16, we used Leverage to focus on how to attack these short two- and three-game slates that generally get overlooked in DFS content. That article received a lot of positive feedback, so we’ll do the same again this year. 

Here were the major takeaways on how to attack short slates from last year’s column:

• DFS players often try to differentiate their lineups by rostering players who carry very little ownership, sometimes by setting rules in optimizers to include at least two sub-5% players. While that strategy has some viability, it’s often not necessary to play more than one dart throw in a single lineup. Utilizing roster construction at the macro level can help us avoid getting so far off the board at the micro level. 
• We should avoid implementing lineup rules commonly utilized on full main slates, such as:
  • Limit skill players facing rostered D/ST
  • Max 1 RB from the same team
  • Dock touchdown-dependent RB when paired with QB
• We should consider constructing unique rosters by:
  • Playing for one game to fail entirely and another to provide a fantasy-rich environment
  • Playing otherwise-popular pieces in a contrarian manner; for example, building a stack without the QB’s top pass catcher

Let’s take a look back at the previous short slates of the season to investigate how last year’s trends have held up this year. All lineups examined are from the $20 flagship contests on DraftKings. These contests had roughly 88K entries on the MNF slates and 594K entries on the Thanksgiving slate.

Week 2 MNF: Buccaneers at Texans | Chargers at Raiders

Winning lineup, per RotoGrinders ResultsDB: