GPP Leverage: Week 9

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Welcome to Week 9 Leverage! Last week, we looked at how often low-total games supply useful tournament pieces, even when we don’t want to build our primary QB stack around them. Browns-Steelers had the lowest total on the slate, and I took a stab at an especially contrarian Denzel Boston–DK Metcalf mini-correlation. Ultimately, Harold Fannin Jr. was the Cleveland player appearing in the $20 Milly Maker winner, though, while Jaylen Warren from Pittsburgh appeared in the $1,500 Midseason Main Event Milly winner. I didn’t land on the right pieces, but that game was another example of why we shouldn’t dismiss players simply because we don’t expect their games to produce many points.

This week, I want to look at another decision that can change how we build the rest of our lineups: paying all the way down at QB. Drew Lock and Shedeur Sanders are both available at the $4,000 minimum on Sunday’s DraftKings main slate, with Joe Milton III just above them at $4,100, and a few other QBs available further up the $4,000 range. Lock, Sanders, and Milton all project well enough to deserve consideration, and the first two are expected to attract considerable interest. With several expensive players we’d love to roster elsewhere, there’s plenty of reason to explore these cheap-QB builds.

But what do we actually need from a QB at that price to compete near the top of a tournament? Can an ordinary game be enough if the rest of the lineup smashes, or should we still be looking for a big score from the QB himself? And how should that affect whether we stack him with a receiver? I looked at previous slates with similarly priced QBs to help think through those decisions.

To explore how these cheap QBs have worked out historically, I looked at 77 starts priced from $4,000 through $4,500 on main slates with at least eight games, from 2022 through last week. The table below shows the 20 starts at $4,000 or $4,100, closest to this week’s cheapest options, while the broader analysis also includes the slightly more expensive QBs. For the tournament results, I focused on entries finishing in the top 0.1% of Milly contests.

We don’t necessarily need our cheap QB to have a big game for a lineup to finish near the top. Of the 75 starts at $4,500 or less with Milly data available, 34 appeared in at least one top-0.1% lineup, and 14 of those did so while scoring below their projection. Case Keenum’s 12.3 points were enough for an 11th-place Milly finish in 2023 Week 15, while Joe Flacco’s 18.8 supported a second-place finish in 2025 Week 6.