DFS Payline Analysis: NFL Week 15 Review

With just two weeks left in the NFL regular season, time is running out for you to hit pay-dirt in one of the many well-known GPP tournaments on FanDuel and Draftkings. However, by looking back at how tournaments played out in Week 15, we can all have a better shot at improving the quality of our lineups.

Week 15, as I predicted last week, was the second week in a row that GPP contests top scores dropped, as the top scorers on Fanduel and Draftkings put up four and three percent fewer points than they did in Week 14. The paylines also dropped for the second straight week as we saw a five percent decrease in the paylines for GPP tournaments on FanDuel and a four percent decrease in the payline on Draftkings.

Week 15 was an interesting week because most of the breakout performances came from players that didn’t have high ownership. Drew Brees, Matt Barkley, and Carson Palmer were three of the top scoring quarterback as they all topped 300 passing yards and threw for at least two touchdowns. The prevailing roster construction where players paid up for running backs was not entirely effective if they used the two most expensive players, David Johnson and Le’Veon Bell, as Bell put up just 18.1 points and Johnson ended up with 26.8. Players that pivoted off of Johnson and Bell to lesser-owned options like Ezekiel Elliott, LeSean McCoy and Devonta Freeman fared well this week as the second tier of running backs went bananas. The wide receiver position was tough for players to navigate as well, seeing that Brandin Cooks and Tyler Lockett were the two highest scoring players, beating out the likes of Mike Evans and Odell Beckham.

Without further ado, we’ll take a closer look at some of the contests on both sites in order to figure out how things went down in an unpredictable Week 15.

FanDuel

We’ll lead off our FanDuel section by taking a look at some of the large field GPP tournaments that had small buy-ins, which includes the $1 Dive, $2 Snap, and $5 Sling TV Rush. These three contests’ top scorers all finished within a point and a half of each other as the Snap winner finished with 194.16, the Sling TV Rush winner had 194.76, and the Dive winner put up 195.46. All three of the winners in these contests utilized a two-man Saints stack of Drew Brees and Brandin Cooks, who were both less than four percent owned. The two Saints players combined to put up 63.46 FanDuel points, which accounted for 32.5 percent of top scoring teams’ final scores. When you are able to get that much output from a two-man stack, you can afford to make some pitfalls with the rest of your lineup and still cash but these three users were able to hit it big on LeSean McCoy, and from there the rest of their lineups fell into place.

For the medium buy-in tier of tournaments on FanDuel, we’ll examine the $12 Kickoff and the $25 Sunday Million. User ocdobv was able to take down the $30,000 first prize in the Kickoff on the back of a Drew Brees and Brandin Cooks stack and was able to win despite selecting Antonio Brown who had a $8,500 salary and scored just 7.3 FanDuel points. They were able to vault up the leaderboards by pairing Ezekiel Elliott and Devonta Freeman, who combined for 58.8 points. In the Sunday Million, user oneistheloneliestnumber, which has to be the longest username I’ve ever seen, won $200,000 by playing a lineup similar to ocdobv’s, as they both had a two-man Saints stack and Devonta Freeman. The Sunday Million winner was able to get solid performances at low ownership from Michael Crabtree, Golden Tate, and Kyle Rudolph, and when it was all said and done they squeaked by the second place finisher by two-tenths of a point.

In the high buy-in portion of the slate, which includes the $100 Blitz, $300 Monster, and the $1,000 Gunslinger, DFS heavyweight chipotleaddict absolutely crushed all three tournaments. In addition to taking top place in all three contests, chipotleaddict had eight lineups in the top 10 in the Blitz, six lineups in the top 10 in the Monster, and the top two lineups in the Gunslinger. Their highest scoring lineup featured the same Saints stack that every other top player utilized, as well as Ezekiel Elliott, Devonta Freeman, and Michael Thomas. If you were playing in the high stakes GPP tournament schedule on FanDuel, chances are you lost some money to chipotleaddict but there’s no shame in that.

As always, we’ll take a brief look at the paylines for the FanDuel slate, and in the lower buy-in portion of the slate, you needed to score at least 118.54 in order to cash and in some spots you needed to score over 124 points in order to finish in the money. For the rest of the slate, you needed to score 123 points or more to cash, with the Blitz and the Monster tournaments being the toughest to crack on the day as you needed to score more than 124 points in order to cash.

In order to figure out how cash games went for Week 15, we’ll examine the Big $25 Double Up which had 6307 lineups submitted. The payline was entrenched at 113.04 for this particular contest this week, which is 28 points less than it took to cash last week. One of the main reasons that the payline plummeted so much was the sheer number of people who rostered Le’Veon Bell last week during his 50 point outburst. This week it was much tougher to find players that put up big points as some of the higher priced options disappointed their owners. Le’Veon Bell was almost 87 percent owned after his performance last week but managed to put up just 15.6 points as the Steelers offense struggled to get the ball into the end zone. The payline for the Big $25 Double Up this week was the lowest that it’s been since Week 8, so it’s fair to expect the payline to move up a bit in Week 16, somewhere above the 125 mark. 

Draftkings

Kicking things off for our Draftkings analysis, we’ll look at the lower buy-in contests, which includes the $3 Play Action and the $9 Slant. User jal3030 was able to secure a $50,000 payout by placing first in the slant with a lineup that finished with 233.26 points, which is around the mark that it normally takes to win this tournament. They were able to put up a massive amount of points due to a stack of Brees, Cooks, and Michael Thomas and supplemented these points with 30 point efforts from Ezekiel Elliott, Devonta Freeman, and Ty Montgomery. Devonta Freeman was the only player on this lineup that had more than 14 percent ownership, so the Play Action was won on the backs of clever pivot plays. In the $9 Slant, user xthex2007 won the first place prize despite not utilizing Drew Brees as their quarterback. With Matt Barkley locked into their quarterback slot, they were able to get a big game out of Cameron Meredith and solid performances from Jeremy Hill and Ladarius Green. The $9 Slant continues to be a tournament worth entering, as the winner of the tournament was able to take down first place despite not having the popular stack that went off.

Moving onto the Millionaire Maker, which is the premier tournament on either site in the medium buy-in range. User Mallen21 outscored the second place finisher by almost nine points and took down the $1,000,000 prize by putting together a lineup that reached over 240 points. The final score of 240.12 is the highest point total put up in the Millionaire Maker since this column started back in Week 7. Mallen21 had an interesting roster construction where they relied on a few cheap value plays in order to shoehorn in three tier 2 running backs, and it worked like a charm as both J.J. Nelson and Ryan Griffin scored more than 14 points despite their salaries being $3,900 and $2,500 respectively. By hitting on their value picks, they were able to afford Ezekiel Elliott, Devonta Freeman, and LeSean McCoy, as well as Ty Montgomery in the wide receiver position. These four players alone combined for over 136 Draftkings points, and gave Mallen21 the best lineup we’ve seen on the site since Week 7.

In the high buy-in portion of Sunday’s slate, user sox22 was able to edge out chipotleaddict in the $333 Luxury Box tournament, winning $150,000 in the process. When it was all said and done, sox22 put up 223.66 points, which is the highest point total in this tournament since Week 7. Sox22 utilized the popular three-man Saints stack of Brees, Cooks, and Thomas, and was able to vault up the leaderboard thanks to running back and flex plays of Freeman, McCoy, and Montgomery.

As far as the paylines were concerned on the Draftkings GPP slate, it took more than 133.5 points in order to cash in the smaller buy-in tournaments but the larger buy-in tournaments payline wasn’t much higher as it took just 140.78 points to cash in the $333 Wildcat. Last week on Draftkings the gap between the easiest competition to cash and the hardest competition to cash was over 25 points, so contests this week were much tougher on players than last week. As a whole, the payline in Draftkings GPPs dropped four percent, which isn’t too surprising seeing that there were fewer breakout players on the slate this week.

In Review

Week 15 was a great week for daily fantasy players that like diving into game theory topics, seeing that the players who pivoted off of the two highest owned running backs to the second tier at the position found themselves well ahead of the field. Some weeks you can outthink yourself by trying to think too hard about game theory or by fading the wrong player but Week 15 showed us that you have to be able to be contrarian sometimes if the situation is right. That’ll take care of things for Week 15. Good luck, and let’s cash some tournaments!