DFS Payline Analysis: NFL Week 9 Review

Week 9 in the NFL lacked a certain degree of oomph but the 4 PM slate of games provided us with some interesting shootouts and great fantasy performances.

After an interesting Week 8 slate that saw scores across FanDuel’s GPP slate slip on an average of 17 percent lower than they were in Week 7, scores for Week 9 contests were a bit scattered. The scores that it took to win GPP tournaments was actually one percent less on average than it was last week, while the scores that it took to simply cash in these tournaments rose seven percent from where it was for Week 8 contests.

One thing that I haven’t had the opportunity to fully dive into in this column yet is the idea of game selection, and I’d like to quickly touch on one of my findings of the GPP slate offered on FanDuel. If you are looking for a tournament that represents good value for your buy-in on FanDuel, I strongly recommend that you play in their Sling TV Rush tournament, which is a $5 dollar buy-in.

Over the past three weeks, this tournament has been pretty soft, which I was able to determine by comparing it to the $2 buy-in NFL Snap. The Sling TV Rush garners around the same amount of entries as the $1 buy-in Dive, and about twice as much as the Snap, but the amount of points that it takes to win this tournament is less than the two lower buy-in tournaments, and the amount of points that it takes to cash is roughly the same. Normally when you move up the scale of buy-ins it becomes easier to win, but tougher to cash, but this has not been the trend for the Rush due to its large amount of entries. The Rush offers a much better value than the next highest buy-in tournament that we look at each week, the $12 NFL Kickoff, seeing that the Kickoff has been harder to cash in than the Sunday Million.

I’ll keep an eye on the rest of the contests on both sites and will be sure to update you if I find any other interesting tidbits relating to game selection. Without further ado, let’s dive deeper into the tournament results on both sites.

FanDuel

Starting off with the lower buy-in portion of the FanDuel slate, user charles1943 was able to take the top spot in the $1 Dive and zefdeljevic18 won $25,000 in the $2 Snap. Upon further review, both of these players were able to win without using a single player (besides the Chiefs defense) that had an ownership percentage of more than 22 percent. This marks two weeks in a row where the lower buy-in tournaments were won by deviating from some of the more popular options.  Charles1943 was able to put up 191.28 points thanks to a bountiful three-man Packers stack that included Aaron Rodgers, Davante Adams, and Jordy Nelson. They were also able to rack up points thanks to Melvin Gordon and Latavius Murray both going over the 31 point mark. In the Sunday Snap, zefdeljevic18 also went with a three-man stack but went off the radar a bit by using Drew Brees, Mark Ingram, and Michael Thomas. Many DFS players stay away from these type of stacks due to potential negative correlation between a team’s running and passing games but the Saints were able to impose their will on the 49ers through the air and on the ground.

For the medium buy-in portion of the slate, which ranges from $12-25 in buy-ins, it took between 176-178 points to win the NFL Kickoff and Sunday Million tournaments, which represents a nine point and five point increase respectively from last week. User getfitak ended up winning $50,000 dollars with a roster that included a two-man stack of Phillip Rivers and Melvin Gordon as well as strong performances from Michael Thomas, Jason Witten, and Mike Wallace. In the Sunday Million, user guymuntag was able to win $200,000 by playing the same three-man Packers stack that charles1943 used. In addition to the three Packers players, they were able to get 64.2 points worth of production out of running backs Mark Ingram and Melvin Gordon, both of whom had less than 12 percent ownership.

In the high buy-in portion of the slate, it took between 166-171 points in order to take the top spot in Week 9. In both the Blitz and the Monster tournaments, the score that it took to win in Week 9 ended up being less than it was last week, which is surprising seeing that last week was a down week for many fantasy football players. This demonstrates to us that even on the toughest of weeks, the top professionals in daily fantasy have the ability to still perform well.

As far as what it took to cash in these GPP tournaments, you needed to put up over 125 points to cash in the $1 Snap but outside of that tournament the payline hovered at around 130. This is similar to what we saw in Week 8 where the payline of the Snap was 112.6 and the rest of the slate was somewhere between 117-120. Profitable daily fantasy players have to do more than just cash the tournaments that they are entering, as you will not be able to sustain your bankroll simply by cashing for the minimum each week.

In order to get some clues about how Week 9 went down for cash games, let’s dissect the Big $25 Double Up, which featured 8275 lineups this week. Altogether there were almost 1000 less lineups played in this contest compared to Week 8. The payline in the $25 Double Up surged this week from 98.6 points to 125.58. The large increase in the payline can be attributed to the fact that many of the more popular players in the slate were able to produce decent results, albeit not to the degree that they did in Week 7. Aaron Rodgers and Ezekiel Elliott both experienced huge ownership this week as they were both on more than 69 percent of all rosters in the tournament. Rodgers and Elliott also had high salaries, which means that roster construction for most teams ended up being somewhat homogenized. Seeing that the combination of Rodgers and Elliott cost 30.5 percent of the team’s total budget, players were forced to come up with cheap options at running back and wide receiver.

As we saw in Week 7, when a majority of the cash game rosters are constructed in a similar manner, the payline will move up when the popular plays hit, and that’s exactly what happened this week.

Draft Kings

As we work our way into the Draft Kings side of things, we’ll first take a look at the lower buy-in portion of their offerings. In the $3 Play Action tournament, a winning score of 231.48 was posted, which is remarkably similar to the 231.32 winning score in the tournament last week. Another tournament that is worth monitoring for game selection purposes is the $9 Slant, which was won with a relatively low score of 215.42. Over the last three weeks, the scores that it takes to win and cash in the Slant have both slipped 13 percent, so if these numbers continue to go down, it could be sharp to sneak an entry into this $9 buy-in tournament if your bankroll can afford it.

Moving onto the Millionaire Maker, which is the premier medium buy-in tournament on Draft Kings, user ph1982 finds himself $1,000,000 richer today after putting together a team that was able to top the leaderboard with a 225.32 point performance. Ph1982 didn’t use a single player that had over 15 percent ownership, which is a large deviation from previous weeks where winners had a lineup that featured four players with ownership percentages over 35 percent. Week 9 was the second week in a row that the score that it took to win the Millionaire Maker dropped but I wouldn’t expect this trend to continue next week barring many heavily owned options flopping.

In the large buy-in tournaments, it took 204.72 points to win the $333 dollar Wildcat tournament and 186.68 to win in the $1,500 Luxury Box tournament. As is normally the case in these types of tournaments, the score that it takes to win these tournaments is much lower due to the high barrier of entry surrounding the large buy-in. In the Luxury Box tournament, ownership was concentrated on a popular Packers stack of Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams, who both had over 37 percent ownership and were on the winning roster.

In terms of what it took to cash in these GPP tournaments on Draftkings this week, you needed to put up at least 142 points to cash, and in the two highest buy-in tournaments you needed to score more than 145.5. The difference between the highest score and lowest score to cash this week was just 4.22 points across six tournaments, which means that there was a great deal of parity amongst all of the entries of the tournaments that we gather data for. Altogether, the payline for this week on Draftkings rose four percent from Week 8.

As far as cash games go on Draft Kings, we’ll take a look at the Massive $25 Double Up which had 25,287 entries this week. The payline ended up at 141.98, which was 13 percent higher than it was last week, and 21 percent lower than the payline in Week 7. The increase in the payline in cash games this week can be contributed to the popularity of Aaron Rodgers, Ezekiel Elliott, and Davante Adams. All three produced for their owners but required daily fantasy owners that utilized them to construct their rosters in a similar manner, which raises the median score significantly.

In Review

Week 9 was a tricky week for daily fantasy players as it didn’t have too many matchups that were clearly going to be shootouts. GPP tournament scores rose across the board this week after a rough Week 8 where scores plummeted 19 percent on the heels of chalky options underperforming. This week there were highly owned players that panned out, and those who didn’t (I’m looking at you Charcandrick West), and as always we need to identify which highly-owned players to play and which to fade but that is much easier said than done. That’ll do it for the Week 9 payline and DFS tournament breakdown! Good luck this week!