GPP Leverage: Week 2

Welcome back for the second 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 from last week to get a feel for the goals of this column.

In last week’s column, we discussed the idea that Week 1 is all about uncertainty. That uncertainty stemmed primarily from having not yet seen any of the teams or players in regular-season action. Although we had a plethora of preseason action, quotes from press conferences, and beat writers’ speculations to base our utilization predictions on, we were still lacking the best indicator of all: a robust sample of in-season action.

Now, entering Week 2, we finally have some in-season action to base our predictions on, but that one-game sample is far from robust. As a result, Week 2 is generally a great time to create leverage against the field when the market grows overconfident in what it did or didn’t see in Week 1. When the market puts too much emphasis on what happened in Week 1, we should generally lean into our priors and play as if the market is wrong, at least for the purpose of DFS tournaments. On the other hand, when the market dismisses what happened on the field in Week 1 in favor of overconfidence in its priors, we should consider playing DFS tournaments as if what happened in Week 1 is the new normal.

In other words, because Week 1 is such a weak sample size, we should at least consider acting against the market in situations where the market grows overconfident in its ability to predict what will happen in Week 2 based on the outcomes of Week 1 alone.

One macro trend we saw last week was especially low scoring across the league, as 12 of the 16 games in Week 1 went under their Vegas point totals. The low game totals directly impacted fantasy scoring, as not a single player on the DraftKings main slate eclipsed 30 points last week. Between both written and audio content, I’ve talked a lot recently about my belief that onslaughts are underutilized on DFS main slates, and when scoring is low across the league, we have the ideal environment for onslaughts to thrive. 

To demonstrate from a high level, last week when only one game on the Sunday main slate exceeded its Vegas game total, and not a single player reached 30 DK points, the winning Milly Maker lineup won by managing to roster most of the best performers on the slate and featured little correlation. That’s because when scoring is so tight and few players manage to score even 20 points, you’re going to need the few ceiling performances available in your lineup to win. Similarly, when fantasy environments are rich across the board, we run into the same scenario of needing to hit the parlay of rostering the best performers across games, and correlating game stacks won’t help us much.

On the other hand, if only one or two games provide rich fantasy environments on a given slate, we can easily gain positive leverage against the field by heavily rostering players from those one or two games. For example, if Sunday Night Football’s Ravens-Bills matchup happened to be on the main slate, lineups that featured onslaughts from either team would have easily vaulted up leaderboards due to the game scoring significantly more points than any other on the slate. In Week 1, the winning lineup in the DK Mega Millionaire scored 161.32 points. Had the Ravens-Bills matchup been eligible for the main slate, you could have earned 137.06 points just by rostering the Josh Allen onslaught with James Cook, Keon Coleman, and Dalton Kincaid alongside a Zay Flowers bring-back. That game stack still leaves you with four open roster slots, likely would have been affordable, and doesn’t even use Derrick Henry’s 33-point performance.

Of course, it’s easy to speak in hypotheticals. But the point remains that, in weeks when scoring is relatively low across the league, all we need to do is find our way onto the one or two best fantasy environments of the week in order to put our lineups into contention to win DFS tournaments. As a reminder from last week’s content, here are the stacking trends we analyzed from 2024, which demonstrate that the best lineups utilized onslaughts at a higher rate than the rest of the field:

One of the questions I’ve heard most with regard to onslaughts is “How do I know when a game is a good candidate for an onslaught?” This week in Leverage, we’ll walk through a handful of games to discuss which matchups may or may not be ideal for building onslaught lineups in Week 2. We won’t be able to get to all 12 games on Sunday’s main slate, but hopefully the concepts discussed can be extrapolated to the remaining games. Along the way, we’ll also consider where we might be able to gain additional leverage on the field based on overreactions to Week 1 results.