UFL GPP Breakdown: Week 3

Welcome back, spring football diehards, to the third edition of the UFL GPP Breakdown. Each week we’ll examine the slate through a GPP lens, discussing both macro- and micro-level angles I’m exploring in tournaments on DraftKings. I’ll share my thoughts on roster construction, ownership and slate-specific nuances that are ever evolving in the wild wild west of UFL DFS. We’ve already covered some of the basics to being successful in UFL GPPs like late swap and rules to consider in optimizers. This week, with a few data points under our belt, we’re going to examine the slate on a more granular level and discuss some of the ways I’m thinking about deploying specific players who have separated as premier DFS assets and how I’m attacking some of the more ambiguous spots on the Week 3 slate.

Expected Chalk and How To Play It

By my count there are four players who have separated from the rest of the pack as every slate DFS options for as long as their respective price points remain where they’re at and another handful of players who have suddenly become premier options on this particular slate given recent changes in injury or depth chart information. Given how this Week 3 slate is priced, fitting many – or all – of these options in a single lineup isn’t tough to come by and it’s going to result in exceedingly high combinatorial ownership on a number of groupings. As we know, rostering highly-owned players isn’t inherently bad, so long as we can still effectively build lineups around those players that still have paths to climbing the leaderboards. 

Jacob Saylors ($10,500, 48.1% pOwn) – The bull case for Saylors is easy; he’s the league’s most efficient RB on a per-touch basis in what to this point has been one of the league’s most run-heavy offenses and is at home as a 7-point favorite against a Defenders defense that is yielding 4.9 YPC to enemy backs and just lost their long-time defensive coordinator. We also have a sample that dates back to last season to suggest Saylors isn’t simply running pure to start his 2025 campaign and this level of efficiency, while likely unsustainable, isn’t a massive outlier for him. Add in just how loosely priced this Week 3 slate has become with how small even the largest-field contests on DraftKings are this week and you have a perfect recipe for St. Louis’ RB1 to check in as the highest owned player on the slate. He is, by definition, ‘good chalk’, projecting to finish in optimal lineups at a rate that is roughly equivalent to his projected ownership.