Super Bowl Sunday!  The Rams and Patriots square off at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta all the Monies!

My name is Josh Thomas, and I write the Chalk Donkey article for NFL VIPs as well as focusing on the showdown/single game and the Monday-Thursday on both sites. In this article I’ll break down how those showdown/single game slates are scored, differences between the sites in terms of scoring and roster construction, and strategy for how to attack these games for GPP and Cash. I’ll also provide my anticipated exposure percentages for players that are mass multi entering.

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How Does Showdown/Single Game work?

Each site runs their contests a bit different but for the most part, they are very similar. You pick 6 players from the game (5 on Fanduel) and choose one to be your Captain (MVP on Fanduel) and that person scores 1.5x points than everyone else.

On Draftkings you can play QB, RB, WR, TE, K, and DEF while on Fanduel you can play QB, RB, WR, TE, K but no Defense.

Scoring is the same as normal NFL DFS contests. On DraftKings there is a full point for PPR and that makes pass catchers more valuable while you only get a half point on FanDuel.

You need at least one player from each team on your roster. So you can’t just load on say the  Patriots  even though you might think they dominate, you need to run it back with at least one Rams play. Optimally I like to build with 4 of one team and 2 of the other on DraftKings and 3 of one team and 2 of the other on Fanduel, though 4-1 seems to be pretty solid there as well.

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Slate Breakdown:

It’s Super Bowl Sunday Baby! Commercials, wings, beer, nachos, hangovers, and Tom Brady. Every. Single. Year.

The bookies are expecting a pretty high scoring affair here with a game total of 58 and that makes for a FANTASTIC showdown slate. Anytime we can get lots of points, it makes for a fun showdown slate with big swings on each pass.

The Patriots are 2.5 point favorites here, and with the majority of the money being on the Pats if you feel like betting the Rams, I’d wait, because that number for the Rams is going to go to +3 by Sunday.

Let’s get to it! Before we start I want to touch on lineup construction. Remember that with every lineup you build you need to tell a story of the game flow. The key with showdowns is not necessarily just getting the best players in your lineup, or the optimal construction in terms of FP points, but hitting the right game script with your lineup. While Tom Brady and Jared Goff can both go off and likely are two of the highest scorers on the slate is there a chance that the optimal lineup doesn’t have them both in it? Yes, more often than not actually.

Even if you are MME’n you can build for certain game scripts. It may mean that you can’t just hit ‘optimize’ and have it kick out 150 lineups. It may mean that you have to build certain rules for say 20% of your lineups. Download. Set up new rules for 20 more. Download, add them together. And do that for your lineups.

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the player pool. Are you going to play Tom Brady and Jared Goff in a 58 point total game? The answer is an obvious yes, but the question is how much of each are you going to play, and who are you going to pair them with?

Let’s answer the first question, how much of each are you going to play?

Neither team gives up a ton to opposing QB’s and are pretty similar as each give up about 260 yards through the air and just under 2 TD’s per game. While I believe that Belichick is going to game plan to confuse Goff, if we look at their stats for the entire year, it’s pretty even between Brady and Goff and maybe a little bit tilted towards Goff. In fact, Brady has 3 less TD’s and averages 19 yards less per game. What I like about Goff this week is that he’s likely going to be playing from behind. The Patriots can get it done through the air or on the ground and if the Rams get down they are going to have to air it out to their receivers, and Gurley.

That leads me to want a bit more Goff in terms of overall ownership, what I’m concerned with though is that this becomes a shoot out. In a shoot out I want TB12. Pats down a TD with 3 minutes left? They ain’t running it in (I know they did last week…). TB12 is hucking that thing up. Overall, I’ll likely have a bit more Goff just assuming he has to air it as they are down and I can run it back with White or Michel. White and Michel aren’t necessarily tied to Brady having a big day to hit value.

The second question is who to pair them with. If I had to rank each QB’s weapons in terms of how much exposure I want to each and stackability with the QB as MVP/Captain, it would like this:

Tom Brady as Captain/MVP:

1. Julian Edelman
2. James White 
3. Rob Gronkowski (I think he gets a TD here, in what is possibly his last game).
4. Phillip Dorsett
5. Chris Hogan 
6. Sony Michel (I love Michel this week, but if Brady is Captain, I want no Michel)
7. Cordarrelle Patterson 

Jared Goff as Captain/MVP

1. Todd Gurley (seems contrarian but I just see them getting down and having to dump it off to Gurley)
2. Robert Woods (PPR machine)
3. Brandin Cooks 
4. Josh Reynolds 
5. Gerald Everett 
6. Tyler Higbee
7. C.J. Anderson 

After the QB’s, the question becomes what do we do with the running backs as both teams have a sort of committee approach. I haven’t believed in CJ Anderson all playoffs and I’m still not buying into it. What if, and hear me out here…McVay is so smart that he didn’t want to wear down Gurley in the playoffs, or give Belichick an idea of how he wants to use him, and saw that he could still win with CJ. That’s maybe a bit out there, and I’m really just trying to convince myself that Gurley is going to smash, but I wouldn’t put it past McVay. For CJ to really hit value here the Rams need to get up early and stay up. If you think that’s possible, load up. If not, I think you need to get more shares of Gurley.

If you couldn’t tell I’m all in on Gurley this week. He’s going to smash. It’s likely the Rams are down and they need to move the ball through the air which is Gurley’s specialty. The Pats run D has been solid this year but they have been gashed by pass-catching backs in the past. Most notably Kareem Hunt during the season and Damien Williams last week.

On the other side of the ball, I think you can roster both and still crush. One going off doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. That is more of a Draftkings strategy though where PPR comes into play for James White. White can move the ball all the way down the field, Sony Michel can pump it in and they have about the same score. I lean James White by quite a bit here just because of how strong the interior of the Rams D Line is, but I’ll have my fair share of Sony too. Also should note that Rex Burkhead could have a small role as well. If you are building 150 you should have one or two James Develin lineups as well as he can vulture near the goal line, especially on a screen pass.

At the receiver position, it’s pretty clear cut. You want to get Julian Edelman in as much as possible on DK with the PPR and pair him with Tom Brady. He’s the go-to receiver for the Pats and can rack up 11-12 receptions no problem. He doesn’t have a ton of touchdown equity though. If you want to get that with the Pats you need to look at Phillip Dorsett and Chris Hogan. I lean Dorsett here because of the increase in targets recently, but this is a big game and we know Hogan shows up in big games.

On the other side of the ball, we are looking at Robert Woods in that Edelman role and another Brandin Cooks revenge game. Both are solid, I lean Woods based on volume, but Cooks can have a huge game. Josh Reynolds has some value here as well and it seems at times that Goff looks to him over and over. He has a lot of trust there and finds him across the middle quite often. He’s a cheap option.

At TE, I love Rob Gronkowski in what could be his last game. The Rams give up around 11 DK points a game to opposing receivers and I loved how involved Gronk was last week in the game plan. I would imagine he gets a decent workload again in this game.

Tyler Higbee and Gerald Everett both have been involved recently, with Higbee getting the touchdown. Both had four targets in the conference championship and while Higbee had the TD, Everett had double the yards. Flip a coin.

Kickers are fantastic plays in showdowns, but double kicker is usually a poor play unless its a low scoring game with basically only field goals. Greg the Leg Zuerlein is a lock button for me again. He gets tons of opportunities and doesn’t miss. Lock it in. Stephen Gostkowski is a stud as well and I’ll likely run him out in lineups that are more Rams heavy with a game script of the Pats being unable to move the ball effectively. Again, its all about telling a story with your lineup.

Final Prediction: Patriots 34 – Rams 27 

Showdown/Single Game Roster Construction:

We are now 19 weeks into the 2018 NFL Season and have enough showdown/single game slates that we can take a look at the GPP winning rosters and see how those rosters were built and whether there is any sort of trend that we can see to help us build GPP winning rosters ourselves.

This year, I’ve broken down all the GPP winning lineups to that point on both FanDuel and Draftkings and I’ve updated that data for this week with all the games from week 17. As always we have to answer four questions when building our Single Game/Showdown rosters and this data can give us a huge edge when answering them. Those questions are:

1. Who is going to be your captain?
2. How many players from each team to do you want?
3. What positions should you play from each team?
4. Are you playing both, one, or no quarterback

Let’s take a look at each of these questions

Who is going to be your captain?

Previously, the thought was that you need to have the following positions your captain.

1. WR1 for the Favorite
2. WR1 for the Underdog
3. TE1 for the Favorite
4. TE2 for the Underdog

But after looking at the GPP winning rosters through 14 weeks on both sites what we found was this:

As you can see here that is not the case. On Fanduel its actually the opposite and we have another week of data that shows that QB or Running Back is clearly the play on Fanduel. All of the GPP winning running backs in that spot have been ELITE RB’s (Alvin Kamara, Todd Gurley, Saquon Barkley) so it’s worth noting that unless you have a situation like that, you might want to just stick with QB. Typically the QB will have the safest floor and even in situations like the Titans/Cowboys game where you have an ELITE player in Ezekiel Elliott in a smash spot against a weak defense and he underperforms and actually scores less than both QB’s.

We continue to expand our so we continue to expand the pool of players that are viable to be captains, at least on DK. During week 9 we had a WR 4 (Adam Humphries) be the optimal player in the captain spot. We have still not seen a Kicker in the captain spot yet this season.

There is a large spread on DK while its a little more tightly concentrated on FD. Typically you just want a RB/QB on FD while anything and everything besides Kicker is in play on DK.

The reason that Draftkings is more spread out is due to the 1.5x salary increase for the Captain position. There have been times when the highest scoring player on the slate wasn’t in the optimal captain slot because having another high scoring player there at a cheaper salary allowed the user to build a better lineup.

The average salary on Draftkings for the captain spot was $11,113 which is typically right around the 7th or 8th highest priced player. That lower priced player in the captain spot allowed those users to build better overall rosters. You obviously need to find the right lower priced player here, but it’s a strategy that should be utilized on Draftkings when possible.

Salary typically isn’t as big of a deal on Fanduel where you really just need the highest scoring player, regardless of salary. The only player that wasn’t in the top 4-5 of pricing that was in the optimal lineup as MVP was  Carlos Hyde, against the Jets.

Another interesting piece I found when looking at the rosters was how often the captain or MVP was on the winning team. Early on in the season, we saw that this chart was almost 50% of each, but lately, it’s been trending in the direction of about 2/3 of the MVP/Captain slot players were on the winning team. While we shouldn’t be afraid to roster someone who is a dog in the game in this spot, particularly QB’s who have to air it out in a comeback, it is important to note that as we get more data, its becoming clearer that playing a player who is likely to win in this spot is optimal.

Surprisingly, the captain’s spot containing the winner of the game was about equal on both sites at 70ish % of the time. As we saw above you want to pay down at the captain spot on DK, and for those cheaper WR’s to pay off they likely need to score a TD and be heavily involved. This number actually increased over the weekend, so when making decisions on the Captain spot on DK you may want to target a player from the team that is the favorite.

While the sample size is small, I think its very telling and should help us to build more optimal lineups, especially when doing MME. Given this information here is how I would break down my Captain/MVP exposure on both sites.

Draftkings: UPDATED 11/14/18 

WR: 30%

RB: 30% 

QB: 25% 

TE: 15%

DEF:  Rarely and only if the game total is very low or we have a QB prone to turnovers

Fanduel: UPDATED 11/14/18 

QB: 45% 

RB: 45% 

WR: 10% 

I’m not typically even going to mess with TE on Fanduel. You don’t need to save salary and its VERY rare that a TE is the highest scoring player in the game and I can only foresee one or two situations where this could even happen, though one is this week with Travis Kelce and the Chiefs.

How many players from each team do you want?

This was something that was really interesting to look at among the optimal lineups, at least on Draftkings where there are three options, but still good to know for Fanduel as well.

With only two options on Fanduel for how you want to construct your roster, a more balanced 3-2 roster was the optimal 70% of the time. The 4-1 rosters were games that were blowouts (For example, last week we had one 4-1 roster with the Saints/Eagles game a blowout.) and one game that had an insane comeback  So unless we have a game that looks to be a massive blowout, it appears that best way to approach roster construction on Fanduel would be a 3-2 split.

On Draftkings though, its a bit of a different story.  A 3-3 split or balanced lineup was dead even with 4-2. Both are viable in GPP and what I would tend to target the most. The 5-1 lineups were reserved for blowouts and interestingly enough they tend to roster Kickers which allows them to load up on studs elsewhere in their lineup. If you are expecting a blow out this looks to be a good strategy.

In the majority of game situations you are going to want to target a balanced lineup unless we see a blow out happening, and if that’s the case then looking at a kicker is an important piece to consider.

What positions/players should you play from each team?

What I found in my breakdown of all the winning gpp lineups was that no winner had the exact same roster construction in terms of position players. Obviously, we have a smaller sample size and at some point this year we may see a duplicate, but right now we haven’t had the exact same roster construction on either site.

Draftkings: 

Let’s look at the roster construction on Draftkings. Check out that QB number first…close to 100%. There was only one instance where a QB wasn’t used in the winning GPP lineup and that was in the very first game Thursday game of the year with the Falcons vs. Eagles. Other than that there has been at least one QB in a lineup if not two in every single game. QB’s are the easiest way to get points, but as we looked at earlier, for the most part, we want to roster them in the flex position as opposed the Captain spot. Its cost prohibitive to roster them there, but if you instill the strategy of using a lower priced player in that spot you can often roster two QB’s, or a QB and a high priced skill player.

Also, in every roster that had a QB there was a correlation play, with a WR, TE, or pass catching RB. Even when there were two QBs in a lineup there was at least one correlation play for each QB. No Naked QB strategy has worked to this point and while I don’t think we can say it never will, it’s a solid strategy to correlate your QB with a pass catcher just like in regular lineups.

RB1’s continue to be used at a high clip on Draftkings in the flex spot. They are typically priced below the WR’s unless you have a Todd Gurley or Ezekiel Elliott and they give you some roster flexibility. Of the running backs used in flex position on Draftkings they had some interesting splits. While one would think that majority of your RB’s taken are bell cows, but we see over 25% of the rosters containing an RB2 who is typically only a third down or change of pace back.

So what does that mean? The way I interpret it is that you shouldn’t be afraid to play a running back just because he isn’t necessarily a bell cow back, especially if he can catch passes. PPR is king on DraftKings and often those Non-Bellcow backs are ones that do catch passes and they are MUCH cheaper than their counterparts. That’s a prime situation to take advantage of. A non-bellcow back who catches 3-4 passes and is at a huge discount can make the rest of your lineup work by allowing you to target those higher priced players for the remaining spots. What we’ve really seen in the last two weeks is that these ‘non-bellcow’ backs are starting become featured either because of injury or game flow and are becoming viable captain plays based on the game script.

I was surprised to see that Defenses were used in these GPP winning lineups on Draftkings MUCH more than Kickers originally but now Kickers are starting to make a comeback and actually pulled ahead in Week 8. They are priced the same usually and while we consider the Kickers to have a bit safer floor, the defenses do have that GPP winning upside if they can get over 15ish points. Twice now a defense has been used in the Captain slot in a GPP winner. Don’t be afraid to play your defense against your captain though as that has been the GPP winner four times already this season (Most recently in Week 8 with the Saints against the Vikings). Defensive scoring is all about sacks and picks or defensive touchdown so a WR/TE scoring high doesn’t necessarily mean that defense will score low. What I wouldn’t do is play a defense in a lineup with a QB as the Captain.

Fanduel:

As we move over to Fanduel we now have an entirely different strategy. What I found over there was that contrary to what we think might be the best play, double QB has only been in the winning lineup a few times.  This is mostly because it is cost prohibitive to do with often the two QB’s being the most expensive players on the board, but also because we don’t often see two Qb’s go off unless its a shootout.

QB’s when in winning lineups have had at least one correlation play as well on Fanduel similar to DK, and naked QB has not been in the winner yet.

Without the ability to play defenses on Fanduel we have seen kickers take a more prominent role in the roster construction and in fact they are now the highest played position in the flex spot. We haven’t had a double kicker GPP winner this past week. TE’s are priced down as well over here and we see them in the winning lineups at over 60% of the time.

The graph above shows how many points players scored relative to their salary for week 2 on Fanduel. What we find here is that paying down at the MVP spot rarely makes sense when there is no salary increase that comes with it like on DK.

A higher salary doesn’t always indicate that a player will score more points, but as you can see above it typically does mean that a player with a higher salary will outscore those lower than them, at least those significantly lower.

Another interesting thing from this graph was that while Andy Dalton, had a heck of a night in that game against Baltimore, he wasn’t in the optimal lineup at the Captain Slot because of AJ Green just barely squeaked by him. It should be noted though that AJ Green caught three touchdown passes to barely squeak by and had he not, Dalton would have been the clear MVP. Further solidifying my take that QB should be your main MVP play on Fanduel.

Are you going to play one, both, or no Qb’s?

As we saw above I think you should have a QB in every single lineup. On Draftkings a lineup without a QB has been the optimal only one time in 16 slates. On Fanduel its happened twice, but I still think there you are better off with one than without one. If you are making 150 lineups I think I would allocate about 5% of my lineups to having no QB but the odds are that the nuts will have a QB in it.

As far as both QB’s go, I think its site dependent. On Draftkings I’m ok with going double QB, as long as they are both in the flex spots and not in the MVP as we have shown that that is not optimal construction.

On Fanduel, because of the way the QB’s are priced, double QB has only been in the optimal lineup MUCH less than DK, and it happened in shootouts. If the Vegas total is over 50 then I’m going to be more apt to try to get double QB lineups in. Obviously, it’s an extreme case but the Chiefs/Rams game is a perfect example of a double QB game.

With the DS now set up for Single Game slates, what I would do is say I was making 100 lineups, I would make 60 lineups with a rule saying that the QB’s couldn’t be in the same lineup. I would then run 40 with both QB’s locked in. This gives you a good mix of lineups.

Summary:

Here are a couple key points that you should remember:

1. For the Captain Slot of Draftkings don’t be afraid to pay down. WR on the favorite is my first play to look at, followed by RB and then a much lower percentage of QB.
2. The exact opposite is true on Fanduel. I want the majority of my lineups to have QB in the MVP slot, followed by RB and then WR last.
3. Always Correlate your QB with a pass catcher. Never Naked QB.
4. Defense is a better punt on DK, Kickers on Fanduel
5. TEs are great salary savings on FD and have been in the optimal lineup over 60% of the time.
6. Pass catching RB’s even if they aren’t the bell cow back are great plays on DK when you can get them at a salary savings.
7. The captain salary on Draftkings for GPP winners has been $11,113

Showdown Player Pool

In this section, I’ll show you my player pool and my anticipated exposure to each player. In some cases, I’ll provide short notes about why I like a player. I’ll break down who my captains are for DK and who my MVP’s are for Fanduel as they are different, and then the rest of the player pool I’ll be using.

Captain – Draftkings:

Todd Gurley – RB Rams: 25%

James White – RB Patriots: 20% 

Tom Brady – QB Patriots: 15% 

Jared Goff – QB Rams: 10% 

Robert Woods – WR Rams: 10%

Julian Edelman – WR Patriots: 10% 

Sony Michel – RB Patriots: 5% 

CJ Anderson – RB Rams: 5% 

Flex – Draftkings:

Rob Gronkowski – TE Patriots: Great matchup, just hasn’t really been involved.

Brandin Cooks – WR Rams: Revenge game, deep ball threat.

Josh Reynolds – WR Rams: Seems like Goff trusts him but has seen a big fluctuation in target share.

Phillip Dorsett – WR Patriots: Dorsett has had 5 targets in back to back games now and looks to be a bigger part of this offense than Chris Hogan.

Chris Hogan – WR Patriots: While not too far removed from that 11 target performance against the Jets, he wasn’t involved much last week. He does show up in big games though so get some exposure.

Gerald Everett/Tyler Higbee – TE Rams: Flip a coin and take one. Don’t put both in the same lineup

Greg Zuerlein – K Rams 

Stephen Gostkowski – K Patriots

Patriots D/Rams D: I don’t really want exposure to either of these defenses, but it’s possible that one score and gets in the optimal lineup. I lean Rams but again, its not something I’m super comfortable with.

Rex Burkhead – RB Patriots: Likely has some sort of role in this game.

James Develin – RB Patriots: My super punt special. He gets involved enough to warrant some roster consideration, crazy to think that he has 4 TD’s this year! Likely a guy that I roster in Chiefs heavy lineups for salary savings. Fully capable of a zero.

Cordarrelle Patterson – WR/RB Patriots: Maybe ol’ CP will have a game here. I doubt it but in 150 lineups get some exposure.

MVP – Fanduel 

I like to keep my MVP core really tight over here and typically we look at about 45% of QB’s and 45% RB’s in this spot for the optimal lineup.

Tom Brady – QB Patriots: 25% 

Jared Goff – QB Rams: 25% 

Todd Gurley – RB Rams: 20%

James White – RB Patriots: 20% 

Sony Michel – RB Patriots: 10% 

Flex – Fanduel

Robert Woods – WR Rams:

Julian Edelman – WR Patriots: 

CJ Anderson – RB Rams: Don’t love him, but there’s a chance he gets in the end zone again.

Rob Gronkowski – TE Patriots: Great matchup, just hasn’t really been involved.

Brandin Cooks – WR Rams: Revenge game, deep ball threat.

Josh Reynolds – WR Rams: Seems like Goff trusts him but has seen a big fluctuation in target share.

Phillip Dorsett – WR Patriots: Dorsett has had 5 targets in back to back games now and looks to be a bigger part of this offense than Chris Hogan.

Chris Hogan – WR Patriots: While not too far removed from that 11 target performance against the Jets, he wasn’t involved much last week. He does show up in big games though so get some exposure.

Gerald Everett/Tyler Higbee – TE Rams: Flip a coin and take one. Don’t put both in the same lineup

Greg Zuerlein – K Rams 

Stephen Gostkowski – K Patriots

Patriots D/Rams D: I don’t really want exposure to either of these defenses, but it’s possible that one score and gets in the optimal lineup. I lean Rams but again, its not something I’m super comfortable with.

Rex Burkhead – RB Patriots: Likely has some sort of role in this game.

James Develin – RB Patriots: My super punt special. He gets involved enough to warrant some roster consideration, crazy to think that he has 4 TD’s this year! Likely a guy that I roster in Chiefs heavy lineups for salary savings. Fully capable of a zero.

Cordarrelle Patterson – WR/RB Patriots: Maybe ol’ CP will have a game here. I doubt it but in 150 lineups get some exposure.

Showdown Cash Game Strategy: 

In cash games, you want the safest floor possible. I think its really easy to build cash game lineups on DK for this game and not so much on FD. You don’t need to crush, you just need to cross that cash line. For me, that means sometimes rostering both QB’s and both defenses if it’s going to be low scoring. On DK I think that we don’t get cute and just play Brady in Captain, Edelman or James White in flex, Kickers, a Rams WR or Gurley if you can afford him and whoever else you can fit as the core pieces give you a nice floor. On Fanduel, I’m going Brady in MVP, James White, Kickers, and whoever else I can afford.

Final Thoughts: