Single-Entry NFL DFS Lineup Review for Week 15

Each week, I’ll review my single-entry DFS lineup, as well as a couple others. I will also track my success rates throughout the season. The criteria for the other lineups to make the article (and tracking) will be over 10% of my overall investment. This week, that included:

• My single-entry

The goal here is to hold myself accountable for the decisions I make while also helping to provide a blueprint for long term success in GPPs. 

Throughout the year, I’ll emphasize the top 10% and top 1% hit rates. While profit/loss is at the mercy of significant variance at the top of tournaments, these hit rates stabilize much faster and can therefore paint a stronger picture of our performance. My cash rate is now quite strong, but it hasn’t resulted in any major hits. Hopefully the positive variance is on its way!

The Single-Entry

Rather than go through my usual evaluation of the process of each aspect of my lineup, let’s continue the discussion stemming from my Predicting NFL DFS Performance piece. In particular, I’d like to discuss the “movement” of ownership and how it relates to performance — from last week’s SE Review:

“Since the thesis is that the industry is great at forecasting WRs, perhaps early-week ownership projections are as predictive or even more predictive of success than actual ownership, which is more affected by roster construction priorities. I’ll look into this more.”

Here are the top five receivers in “negative movement,” meaning they ended up less popular than expected:

Now, the receivers with the largest “positive movement”:

Well, how interesting is this! This is obviously just a two-week sample and could therefore be total noise, but there definitely seems to be a pattern here. So, what might the phenomenon be? 

The first relates to the bias of ownership projections themselves. In other words, “negative movement” could simply be the industry under-estimating the strength of the play while ownership projections did not. This isn’t too useful to us, however, since there would be no way to anticipate which players would come in below projections if this were all that was occurring. 

The next one relates to a saying I love — “first thought, best thought.” Our initial impressions are strong and accurate, and then we overthink (this is an oversimplification, but the point remains). In other words, ownership projections reflect the sentiment of the industry about certain players more than actual ownership does. Actual ownership can move drastically based on roster construction priorities. For example, why did Diontae Johnson end up more than twice as popular as Stefon Diggs? Probably because Gabriel Davis was mega-chalk and people didn’t want two Buffalo receivers outside of a Josh Allen stack. Now this is actionable. This is something we can potentially predict.

Why did Brandin Cooks come in lower than expected? Likely because the James Robinson love made people too confident in Jacksonville as a whole (speaking to myself here!). For example, I thought I was so sneaky with the Marvin Jones play, but Jones ended up slightly more popular than Cooks! If I had anticipated the possibility of that movement, Cooks over Jones would have been an incredibly easy decision.

There’s real potential here, friends.

Takeaways

To be clear, I am not saying that we should expect negative movement receivers to consistently outperform positive movement players. Instead, I’m saying that this positive movement is largely inefficient and something we can take advantage of if we can anticipate it.

Saturday night or Sunday morning, I’ll drop some notes into the Discord, speculating about the kind of movement we could see, and the positions we may want to take in order to capitalize on it.