DETERMINING PLAYER SELECTION IN NFL DFS – PART ONE

If you read my “10 Commandments of NFL Daily Fantasy Sports”, you saw that I touched on value as a key to determining which players to select for your line ups. I feel the topic is important enough that I should go into much greater detail into why this is so critical in DFS, how to determine value in cash games and tournaments, and where you can find value. In this article, I’ll limit the discussion to all aspects of value players, where as in Part 2, I’ll go into other aspects of how I select players for my cash and guaranteed prize pool (GPP) line ups. I’m going to limit my discussion and examples to Fan Duel and its scoring system, as that’s my main DFS site, but the concepts in this article pertain to all NFL DFS sites.

CASH GAME VALUE

As a quick review cash games are 50/50s, Double Ups and head to head contests. In order to win money in these games, we don’t have to have the highest score, we just have to beat roughly 50% of the field. In these contests we take a more conservative approach in selecting our players than we do in tournaments (more on them later.) We also tend to look at a player’s “floor” or the minimum number of points he’s likely to produce versus his “ceiling” or the most points he’s reasonably expected to produce.

On FanDuel, 120 fantasy points will guarantee you cashing in the overwhelming majority of cash games. Your salary cap is $60,000, so you have to generate 2 fantasy points for every $1,000 of salary. For example a player costing $8,000 would have to score 16 points on FanDuel to hit cash game value. Now every player is not going to score exactly 2 times their salary and to expect such is ridiculous. Your line up merely needs to hit this average as a group for you to be successful.

So now that we know what cash game value is, how do we find it? We let the players tell us, of course. We look for players who traditionally score at or near 2x value, and then examine their match ups. Let me give you an example. Carson Palmer is not an elite NFL QB at this stage of his career, but he’s an excellent cash game QB. Last season he played in six games before he was injured for the season and averaged 17.8 fantasy points a game. Other than the game where he was injured and a terrible match up against the Rams, his lowest output was 17.12 points. Palmer’s salary in Week 1 is only $7,700, so his average (and minimum) output was well over 2x his salary. Add to the fact his Week 1 opponent the New Orleans Saints were the 27^th rated pass defense by Football Outsiders, Palmer is an amazing cash game value.

Players like Palmer are the type of players you’re looking for in cash games. They might not have the highest upside, but they score consistently and are in good match ups and have a high floor.

At the running back position you’ll want to look for players who get a lot of carries. Volume, and a good match up, will provide us with a player with a higher floor. We don’t have to look for the guys with break away ability, who don’t get as many carries. Rashad Jennings last year with the Giants, before he got injured, was a great cash game running back. He had a lot of carries, but never had the big game or break away ability, so his salary never got very high. At the receiver position, we’re looking for guys like Julian Edelman, players who are heavily targeted but don’t necessarily have the big yards per catch. They’ll get us steady points, but since they don’t have huge upside, their salaries remain stay fair.

Finally, you’ll want to look at the Vegas over/under number. The higher the number, the more likely we’ll target players from that game. This holds true in any NFL DFS contest, whether its cash or GPP. Those big, luxurious hotels in Vegas weren’t built by winners. All things being equal, target players from games with high O/U. They’ll be more likely to score more points.

GPP VALUE

GPPs are tournaments in which only the top 15-20% of players actually cash. Furthermore, to get the big money in these contests, a line-up has to be in roughly the top 2%. For this reason your GPP line-ups have to score a lot more points than your cash game line-ups to be successful, so you’re going to have to take more chances with your player selection. Therefore, when doing research for GPPs, we tend to look for a player’s ceiling, rather than his floor, as we did in cash games. Remember, if only the top 20% get paid finishing in the 21^st percentile is the same as finishing last. You need players who can score a lot of points, GPPs are not the places to be conservative. In GPPS we’re looking for the Martavis Bryants and Michael Floyds of the world, not the safe Julian Edelmans.

On FanDuel, while 120 fantasy points will virtually guarantee you a win in cash games, we’re looking for 180 fantasy points to guarantee us a good result in GPPs. 180 might not win every GPP out there, but on most weeks it will provide a very nice pay out. So while we were looking for players to return 2 fantasy points for every $1,000 of salary in cash games, now your players must average 3 fantasy points for every $1,000 of salary.

Obviously hitting 3 times value is very difficult, so the first thing we have to do is find players who have done it before, so at least we know they’re capable of doing it. An example of the type of player we’re looking for is Julio Jones, who is an elite NFL WR and is priced at $9,000 on FanDuel. Last season, in back to back games, he scored 29.9 and an amazing 37.4 fantasy points, so we know that he’s capable of hitting the kind of value we need from players. Checking his match-up, we find that the Eagles were ranked 18^th against the pass by Football Outsiders, and we know that since Philadelphia plays at a fast pace on offense, Atlanta should get an extra possession or two than they would get from a team playing at a slower pace. Also, Vegas rates this game as the highest scoring game of the week. Therefore, while the match-up isn’t perfect, it’s good enough to make Jones a strong GPP play.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll go beyond past performances and match-ups to find value and give us the edge that we’ll need to make NFL DFS a profitable endeavor.

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