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Bettings

Showdown slates are some of the best sweats that NFL DFS has to offer. If you’re building lineups correctly, you can take advantage of these quick sweats week in and week out. I’ll be going through position-by-position to break down everything you need to know for the showdown slate that night.

What does Vegas think?

Team

Spread

Moneyline

Total

Carolina Panthers

-8

-410

43

Houston Texans

+8

+310

Notable injuries

On the Texans side, they’ll be without Tyrod Taylor, Danny Amendola and Nico Collins. From a fantasy perspective, there are no notable injuries on the Panthers side.

Quarterbacks

Sam Darnold is showing out on his redemption tour thus far and the Panthers look pretty solid all around, as the FTN Daily splits tool shows.

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The offense is scoring more this year compared to last year and they’re running more plays overall through the first two weeks. That is turning into production for Sam Darnold.

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He’s averaging nearly 8 more DK points per game to start the season compared to his marks from last year. With the way the Panthers have started their season and a QB making his debut on the other side it’s easy to tell yourself a story where the Panthers just run away with this game.

We want to gain from shocks that less people will be on, though. If I’m making 20 lineups, I probably will have only 10 lineups that assume a Panthers blowout. With the variability that comes along with Davis Mills making his first start, we have a wide range of outcomes. There’s asymmetric downside in his range, obviously, but with showdown we need to put ourselves into position for less likely (and therefore more valuable) ceiling outcomes. Mills doesn’t really have any rushing upside so I’m not sure he gets into the optimal lineup without 3 passing touchdowns. We’ll talk about ways to get access to those touchdowns as we make our way through the rest of the positions.

Running backs

Christian McCaffrey is over $20,000 for the captain spot here. I’m not going to sit here and talk you out of playing him in general, but a fade case is there for the captain spot. Just from an opportunity cost standpoint, it’s hard to go too heavy on him. Your lineups get gross quickly with him in the captain spot. There are some ways to make it work, and it shouldn’t be an outright fade. That said, I’ll be underweight with him in the captain spot.

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Since his rookie year, McCaffrey has averaged nearly 30 DK points per game. His receiving workload alone is nearly 15 points. For context, Calvin Ridley and Davante Adams are averaging 15 points per game to start their season.

Sterculius (the god of odor) is looking down on the Texans’ RB room of Mark Ingram, Phillip Lindsay and David Johnson beaming with pride. It’s a total mess with little to no clarity and even less appeal.

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Ingram is getting the valuable red-zone carries, but Johnson is seeing the most targets and Lindsay is just present enough to get in the way of either of them having too much value. Ingram and Johnson are both viable contrarian captain picks, but it isn’t something that needs to be over the top in your builds. Lindsay is completely fadeable and I’ll have very little captain exposure to either him or Johnson.

Wide receivers

DJ Moore, Robby Anderson, Terrace Marshall and Brandon Zylstra are the Panthers wide receivers who are in play.

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Moore and Anderson have seen their roles switch back to what we would have originally expected from them but didn’t see in 2020. Moore’s aDOT coming back down below 10 yards is a good thing in the long run for him given his YAC ability. He is 16th in the league in WOPR, a measure of a player’s opportunity within the passing offense. Moore is one of my favorite captains for the week, especially in builds where I’m assuming the game will be closer than expected. I’ll be rotating in the other three throughout my lineups. In the optimizer, under stacking options, I’m using this rule:

Brandin Cooks might be the next spokesperson of Burger King because he leads the league in WOPR. Ok, they probably don’t really care about WOPR, but I’m hungry while writing this. Cooks will be captain in about half of my lineups and will be locked into a flex position in every lineup that he’s not in the captain spot.

After Cooks, it’s a barren wasteland. Seriously. Sometimes we joke about these things, but this is a sad, sad list. With backup QBs there’s always a chance that they lock in on a random receiver down the depth chart. If I were Mills, though I’d be actively trying to get Cooks 15 targets here.

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Tight ends

Dan Arnold and Ian Thomas have been involved in spurts through two weeks.

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We’re not looking at a couple of target hogs here, though, so I’d tread lightly. Jordan Akins and Pharaoh Brown are the tight end options on the Texans side of the ball. They’re both sub $3,000 on DraftKings.

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A couple of catches from either of them and they pay off their salary, but it feels pretty thin to go in that direction. One of them makes sense as a way to save some salary when CMC is in the captain spot.

Kickers

With a lower total game, Zane Gonzalez and Joey Slye are in play. I’ll have one lineup apiece where they’re in the captain spot and are the only players on their team in that particular lineup.

Defenses

The Texans DST will be excluded from my 20-lineup build. If you’re throwing in 150, I guess it makes some sense if Sam Darnold starts seeing ghosts again, but it feels extraordinarily thin as they’ll most likely be on the field for quite a bit tonight. The Panthers DST will be popular for obvious reasons — rookie QB making his debut for a team that doesn’t look likely to put up much of a fight.

Favorite captain plays

Favorite contrarian captain plays

Slate edge

I’m probably going to sound like a broken record, but the edge always lies in the less likely outcomes for showdown. It’s important to understand the context of the slate, too. The Panthers could run away with this game very easily and still only have fantasy relevance from Darnold, McCaffrey and Moore. It’s tempting to go with Carolina onslaughts, but it’s important to mix in some random pieces from Houston and hop to find a touchdown or two from them.

Favorite optimizer rule

This is the way that I’m playing my Darnold captain lineups, using our stacking options in the optimizer.