“Just draft the best players.” It is a maddening directive season-long fantasy players have heard more often than “I can’t believe I fell for Torrey Smith again.” Being advised to just pick a league-winner in every round is both sound logic and overly simplistic. In DFS, the best players are often the chalk, which isn’t always what we want in tournaments. We’d strive to differentiate ourselves from our competition.
This season, the chalk has been hitting so hard that Roger Goodell is fining it every week. The sharp take is to remain in a contrarian stance while waiting for the inevitable early-game injury to an uber-popular player or some other unforeseeable event. The catch is it’s an uncomfortable approach, and how contrarian is too contrarian? What is outside-the-box to one player can be outside-your-mind to another.
If we asked 10 DFS players to make a chalky lineup, there still would be a decent amount of variation in what they came up with. If we asked them to make their highest upside lineup, the differences would be significant. Even if we us the mega-chalk this week — Devontae Booker — his price tag leaves enough salary to come up with countless unique roster combinations. This isn’t to advocate 100-percent exposure to Booker in large field GPPs, but we can get away with using him due to his position and price.
The season is essentially half over. Before we know it we’ll be grasping at differentiators while humping a two-game conference championship slate and wishing we only had six teams on bye. Let’s enjoy making our highest-upside lineups and running them out there. If we have a pivot or leverage play in mind, great — but let’s rely on our favorite plays rather than out-of-left-field ones. We’ll have more fun, and our rosters will probably wind up more unique than we’d imagine.
Here are some Week 8 FanDuel tournament plays. Good luck everyone.
Quarterbacks
Cam Newton, Carolina Panthers, $8,300
Priced fourth-highest at his position, Newton shapes up as a value in his first home game since Week 3. In what has so far been a turbulent season, we don’t know exactly what we’ll get from him in a less-than-favorable matchup. Still, he makes for a hell of a tournament play. The last time he faced the Cardinals, roughly 10 months ago in the playoffs, Newton threw for 335 yards and two scores, with another 47 yards and two touchdowns on the ground. Of course, now Arizona is allowing the seventh-fewest fantasy points to quarterbacks, a year removed from giving up the 16th-fewest.
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