As usual, I’m going to toss in the winning lineups of our members this week. We had quite a few, but the volume of sharing is down a bit this week. Not sure why, but it is what it is. I know from the chatter in our VIP Slack forums that we still had a very solid week, collectively. It’s still not too late to get involved with our VIP coaching. NBA is rolling right now thanks to the hard work of Keith, Al, and Sconnie. If you ever wanted to give NBA a try, now is a great time as your NFL season starts winding down.
Winning Lineups Week 15
This time mine popped in first. I might not hold the 2nd place in the 153man contest, but the rest are secure. I may slip to 3rd depending on Kirk Cousins’ performance tonight. That one is bittersweet for me because I have Kirk in my season long and need a nice night from him to play for the championship next week in my local league. I stand to win more than $10 from it, so if Kirk takes me out in the FantasyDraft contest, I think I’ll still sleep pretty well at night. Either way, $5 in and about $21 out isn’t a bad ROI, right? (Oh, and Cousins is in both my FanDuel lineups tonight set to climb in some small league play. So, it’s not as if he’s completely dead to me in DFS.) Hopefully, you guys had success this week, too. Scroll down to see the rest of our members and their winners……
Like I said, volume here is a little low. Maybe it’s the holidays. Maybe it’s the season winding down. Maybe it’s waiting to see what happens tonight. I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you we have had no shortage of winning lineups each week since about week 2. And, generally, we love sharing with each other and rooting each other on inside the DFS Army. It’s truly a community that wins as a unit and cheers one another on as we get wind of some players climbing leaderboards around the various sites we play. I’ll say it again, watch for those army helmet avatars. When you see one, your victory is earned. We don’t go down without fighting. We aren’t like some of these NFL teams with nothing to play for. We fight to the end….
If you enjoy this kind of interaction, consider following our team on Twitter. I’m @ChoppoDong, but we have others. Look for our other coaches….
@BoomersDFSDaddy,@texan0322,@dfsarmypvaaron,@14AdotWalsh,@FFootballGeek, and a couple others I didn’t see on my timeline to get in here. Follow us and let’s build a community that leads by teaching and sharing.Oh, and my little coupon gift is an easy one. BECOME A MEMBER – If you decide to become a member and jump into our slack, take advantage or our cheatsheets and player picks for all sports, utilize our Domination Station optimizer that helped two guys build Bahamas lineups, and generally get complete access to our list of coaches, my code is CHOP. Use it for 20% off the life of your membership. Seriously, I drop $20/mo down to $16/mo for you. Ummm….look around at lineup sellers and other subscription sites. We’d clearly rather keep your bankroll in your account than take it for ourselves. As we add features and incur expenses, I can’t guarantee our price is always $20/mo. However, I can guarantee your $16/mo never goes up……if you jump now. It really makes no sense to wait until “maybe next NFL season.” You might want to do it now. Just sayin’.
Week 15 in Review
I’m taking a little different approach here. Let’s talk point spreads/totals/Vegas and cold weather. I made a big deal about it a couple of weeks ago. There was snow forecast in a few places, very cold temperatures, some wind, and a lot of outdoor games. Same this week in several places. After a couple of weeks ago, a regular contributor in our forums (Legendofpablo) pointed out “the takeaway here is not to worry too much over weather.” I, for one, heard that loud and clear.
Yes, it’s true that cold weather means something. The ball is a little harder. It’s a little slicker, too. Your hands are cold and it gets a little harder to turn, cut, grip a ball, catch a ball, all that stuff. Logic states running would be emphasized, along with defensive scoring, and passing might be suppressed somewhat. But, let’s look at what really happened this week in terms of what Vegas saw and see if we can take anything away from it.
In week 14, OAK/KC was a cold one. It sucked, but it was also on Thursday night. PIT/BUF went for 47 points after LeVeon’s monster game. It was projected at 45. CIN/CLE was supposed to have snow and wind. 41 points projected. 33 points scored. ARI/MIA had a monsoon and people were upset wishing they knew that. Well, it scored 49 points…….that doesn’t qualify as affected by weather. Palmer wasn’t much, DJ did alright I guess, Tannehill lost his knee (maybe weather related on slick turf, but I didn’t research it), Ajayi wasn’t much, and Jarvis Landry went 4/103 while Kenny Stills went 6/97/1. Seems Ajayi would be better and the passing would suck if rain was really messing things up, huh? The SEA/GB game was supposed to be cold. Snow was supposed to be over before game time, but it was supposed to be cold. Heated and covered turf fixes a lot. We were on this as a sneakier shootout and while I said “temper expectations” from a cash player’s perspective, Keith Hall (our GPP pro) was stacking this game everywhere expecting a shootout. Well, GB did their part and went for 38 points. Russ, well, he really crapped our bed and did his best Ryan Fitzpatrick impersonation by throwing 6 picks. Who knows what could have been, but it doesn’t appear weather affected this one much, either.
Week 15 brought a chance to really learn and add to the sample size. CLE/BUF wasn’t bitter cold and performed as expected. GB/CHI was supposed to be below zero the whole game. Well, it was 11 degrees at kickoff. Not warm, but not the ice bowl reincarnated everyone was expecting the night before. Total was 40, and we got 57 from it. Hmmmm. KC was cold as hell and only gave us 36 points. The Jets game on Saturday was supposed to give us 39 points, but gave us 47. The Giants game was supposed to be rather unaffected and was set for 42 points but gave us 23. Denver game in Mile High was “cold.” It delivered 19 points, but I don’t think we expected Denver to do a lot of scoring on NE. That’s more a Vegas thing than a weather thing.
My point in all of this as I bounce around the cold, or weather impacted, games is to show that we definitely tend to make a bigger deal of this stuff than we need to when it comes to crafting our winning lineups. Big games disappoint, and lower scoring games can blow the roof off so to speak. We just don’t know. However, historically, Vegas is pretty close and we can continue to use that as our guide with much greater confidence than any weather report. Hell, even the “high winds mess up passing” needs to be thought out a little. Sure, it affects deep passing and kicking, but don’t teams just adjust? Don’t they just run some shorter routes for some added ball control? Don’t they do that already these days? Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and some of your other noted gunslingers will amaze you with their average route depth numbers. Sure, they air it out on occasion, but they don’t average routes of even 20 yards downfield. The massive majority of their routes are much shorter. How much does a 15 mph wind affect a 2 yard slant or swing pass? Not a lot.
The lesson learned here is two-fold. 1- Don’t believe the hype about weather the overwhelming majority of the time. I’ve fallen victim to it, too. 2- There is an advantage to GPP players here that realize most people don’t read this and will just panic again the next time weather pops up in a juicy looking game. The GPP player will flock to that game like Keith was screaming and the naive will run far, far away and hide. As more of a cash game player, I won’t go nuts and dive into that game head-first, but I won’t run away either. I’ll have pieces if it still looks good on paper. I’m not letting weather decide my plays nearly as importantly. I’m keeping it in the back of my head as a consideration for assembling my winning lineups, but I’m not making it a determining factor, and neither should you.
Week 16 Preview
Well, let’s start this week off by talking about the weather. It is December in the northeast after all.
Just kidding. C’mon, man. I’m going to toss some sarcasm and humor in there on you once in awhile. It’s what I do. Anyway, looking ahead….
We are missing some totals, but once again it appears we have only one game over 50 points as of now. IND visits OAK. Keep your eyes on that one. It’s likely your chalk game with only a 4 point spread. Most of the others appear to be rather middling in nature around 43 to 45 points. I will, however, point out some spreads. New England has to lead history in big spreads. How does 16.5 over the Jets sound? Look, I know the Jets have given up, but 16 points is a lot to cover. I’m not a sports betting person, per se, but I would hope the Jets can keep it closer just on the fact some of the players’ moms will be in the stands and it’s Christmas Eve. If not, I’d take back their drones and put a lump of coal in their stockings instead because that’s just embarrassing. San Diego is a road favorite of 6 points vs CLE. That’s interesting with no Melvin Gordon. Green Bay is a full touchdown favorite over Minnesota as these teams are heading in opposite directions. (Hint: I will be on GB defense.) Seattle is a 9 point favorite over visiting Arizona. That doesn’t feel right to me, but I’ll have to reserve more judgement until later in the week. And, Dallas opens up as a 7 point home favorite vs DET. This leans Zeke again as a nice Monday Hammer play.
Stay tuned as the week unfolds because like weather forecasts, these initial looks are also bound to change.