After one of the weirdest offseasons imaginable, football is back! We had a great year here last year breaking down different stacks for tournaments on DraftKings using some of the free tools at Sharp Football Stats. The plan this year is to keep those stacks but also include some one-off low-owned plays that could pay dividends for us with the help of the free tools and our new heatmap tool for fantasy subscribers. With the lack of preseason this year, we don’t have as much information as usual. If we pay attention to the structure of how we’re making lineups, though, there are plenty of opportunities to gain an edge.
Sneaky Shootout
When people are making lineups and look at Vegas lines, the natural mindset is to gravitate towards the highest totals. I like to focus on a game with a bit of a lower total and a close spread. The Lions-Bears game fits that bill this week. The spread is a pick ‘em at most shops and both teams were reasonably high-paced. In one-score games, Chicago (13th) and Detroit (fifth) were in the top half of offensive pace in 2019.
Matthew Stafford ($6,200) was playing quite well to start the year last year. This is a classic spot where an offense does something often – and well – against a weakness of their opponent.
In the short right area of the field, nobody on Detroit saw more targets or a higher success rate than Marvin Jones ($5,500).
If you’re trying to get unique with a stack to go along with some of the more chalky Week 1 options, this is a good place to look.
Game Stack
We’ll transition here from sneaky shootouts to very obvious shootouts. The Tampa Bay-New Orleans game features the highest total on the main slate. You might not have heard but this scrappy quarterback from Michigan is now playing for the Buccaneers. Tom something, I forget. A total of 49.5 is enticing from a DFS perspective because that means Vegas thinks there’s plenty of scoring to go around.
Both of these teams in 2019 focused on passing. On early downs in one-score games, both the Bucs and Saints were in the top ten of passing rate. Drew Brees ($6,800) and Michael Thomas ($9,000) will be popular options this week. Last year, Thomas’s floor was seven targets. He excelled regardless of who was under center, but he saw a whopping 32% of the targets with Brees at QB.
He posted the highest success rate across all WRs last year and there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t be targeted early and often once again in 2020.
If we want to stack this game, we can run it back with Chris Godwin ($7,100). Playing whack-a-mole last year with Godwin and Mike Evans ($6,900) was frustrating at times. With news that Evans is dealing with a soft tissue injury at the moment, we can feel a bit more confident about his target floor. With so much ownership projected to go towards Julio Jones ($7,700) and Davante Adams ($7,300), a game stack including Godwin could differentiate your lineup in a GPP.
Fins Up
The return of Ryan Fitzpatrick ($5,300) to the gridiron is one of the highlights of Week 1 for me. DeVante Parker ($6,000) put together a breakout year last season and is looking to build on that success. Unfortunately, he’s dealing with a hamstring issue that should limit his reps on Sunday. Mike Gesicki ($4,500) was the second-most targeted pass catcher by Fitzmagic last year.
If you stack Fitz and Gesicki, you can eat just about all the chalk you want. I can’t imagine this stack being rostered in more than 1% of lineups in large-field GPPs.
Time for an Onslaught?
Stacking less popular options is obviously a good way to get unique in DFS. Sometimes, though, combining multiple popular plays is just as unique. Lamar Jackson ($8,100), Marquise Brown ($5,100), and Mark Andrews ($6,000) make for an interesting stack this week. The sky’s the limit with the Ravens offense. Brown and Andrews accounted for nearly 40% of Lamar’s passing attempts in 2019.
It’s hard to find a worse defensive success chart in the entire heatmap tool. Cleveland’s passing defense was brutal and one of their worst zones is where Brown thrives. To make it a full onslaught, we can even roll Mark Ingram ($5,500). Baltimore is favored by more than a touchdown and is implied for the highest point total on the main slate. It’s well worth it to get all of the exposure you can get to the Ravens O.
