Analysis
10/11/23
4 min read
2023 NFL Week 5 DFS Lineup Recap: What We Can Learn From Results
Reflection is an extremely underrated aspect of consistent DFS play. Think about this: How do pitchers, wide receivers or financial analysts remain on top?
They do so by learning, growing, being open to new ideas and practices, tweaking what works and doesn’t and changing with the games themselves.
Reviewing your mistakes can give you staying power in any competition. Most of the top DFS players examine their play the following week — so what edge can we gain over even the most die-hard players?
Let’s examine the Week 5 slate and compare those conclusions with rosters from some of the top players in the game.
Week 5 DFS Lessons Learned
Week 5 Observations
Chalk hit, and it hit hard, in Week 5. The winning roster in the Millionaire Maker on DraftKings was the chalkiest roster to win that prestigious tournament during the previous three seasons.
That said, 106 percent of the composite ownership on the roster was held at the running back position. From a macro perspective, projection systems are improving at picking out the elite on-paper plays at easier-to-project positions.
Running back is the easiest to project, so it makes sense that we’ve seen an extreme hit rate on running back chalk in the 2023 season.
It isn’t like outlier performances won’t happen (De’Von Achane had his breakout game in Week 3 at 0.15 percent ownership). Still, projection systems can provide narrowed ranges of outcomes about high confidence mean projections at a position whose fantasy value is heavily correlated to volume and green zone involvement.
Where does that leave us moving forward? The biggest takeaway is not to follow ownership at the position mindlessly. Rather, we find the best on-paper plays at running back without worrying about ownership because the hit rates at the position are much higher than at the others.
This is not an exact science. There will always be players who underperform expectations at a near-even rate to those who over-perform. Still, the theoretical components of leverage, contrarianism and roster construction tendencies should have greater emphasis on more unstable positions.
Roster Examination
The composite ownership of the three running backs on the winning Millionaire Maker roster was a tick over 106 percent. The winning roster also contained two wide receivers with more than 15 percent ownership, typically the cutoff used to classify “chalk.”
But what is likely to go overlooked is the combined ownership at the two most variant positions in DFS: tight end and defense. Those two positions carry the highest levels of variance. It’s best to embrace uncertainty weekly. That’s because of the state of the tight end position and how defenses accumulate points, the latter of which involves bulk scoring for a low probability occurrence in defensive touchdowns.
Per our offseason study on the correlation between touchdowns and various fantasy football positions, quarterbacks and tight ends rely the most on touchdowns for fantasy production.
This is one of the reasons why correlating a team’s tight end with his quarterback generates a bump in expected value. This was the case again in Week 5, with the optimal quarterback paired with the optimal tight end in Jalen Hurts and Dallas Goedert.
We’ll keep beating the horse until the field starts matching its collective ownership with the rate at which it hits.
Overall, DraftKings user buckeye151 utilized minimal correlation on their roster build. We’ll have to examine that in greater detail because scoring is down across the league and we’ve seen a rush of massive spreads in recent weeks.
We can’t make any sweeping conclusions without diving into the numbers, but it appears evident that the standard DFS practice of forcing correlated bring-backs could be approaching negative returns.
The field appears to be utilizing that practice at a rate higher than recent hit rates — more on this in the coming weeks. For now, it’s a good idea not to force correlated bringbacks on slates with abundant noncompetitive games.
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