Welcome back for the final GPP Leverage column of the season. As I wrote in the Week 1 edition of Leverage, it’s been an honor to have succeeded both Drew Dinkmeyer and Gary Hartman in writing Leverage this season. My hope was to also inherit from them the achievement of winning $1 million in NFL DFS, but sadly, the financial part of that inheritance has not yet come to fruition.
On a serious note, I hope Leverage has provided value to you all this season. If you have any suggestions for improvement or specific topics you’d like to see covered, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
On to Week 18! The final week of NFL DFS is typically the most chaotic of each season. We have some teams trying their hardest to win and others just mailing it in with backups. As a result, we have a unique environment from a motivational standpoint, and that adds an additional layer of uncertainty and fragility into each player’s projection. For detailed context on Week 18 motivations, check out Anthony Amico’s Motivation and Incentives articles.
For this final week of Leverage, I wanted to dive into how past Week 18 slates have been won, but, fortunately for me, Gary already did this last year. If you have a few extra minutes, I highly recommend pausing here and going back to read Gary’s Week 18 Leverage article from last year. In case you don’t have the extra time, the tl;dr is that on each of the final slates in 2020, 2021, and 2022, the optimal lineups included players with motivation, players without motivation, and at least one complete “random”.
We saw a similar story in 2023’s Week 18. Here was the winner of the Week 18 DraftKings Milly Maker, per the RotoGrinders ResultsDB:
Once again, we saw a mixture of both players with maximum motivation and minimal motivation find their way into the winning lineup. The Vikings were in a must-win situation and were quite chalky as a result. Meanwhile, the key contrarian piece in this lineup was Breece Hall, who had nothing to play for at all, as both he and his opposing defense had already been eliminated from the playoffs. There were also several low-owned randoms that would have made it into the winning lineup had they been paired with the right chalk pieces:
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