DFS Payline Analysis: NFL Week 11 Review

Coming off of a Week 10 slate that had top scores rise 10-percent on average, it was inevitable that scores would regress to the mean in Week 11 and that’s precisely what happened. Week 11 was the first time in the past four weeks of contests that top scores actually regressed, as the average top score on FanDuel was 9-percent less than it was last week. With that being said, Week 11 was certainly a very interesting week for daily fantasy purposes as we had a number of key injuries to high cost players and breakout performances from some unlikely players.

Similar to last week, there were a number of different ways to construct your roster in order to win in a large field GPP tournament. The Redskins unexpected offensive explosion this week was a surefire way to see yourself at the top of the leaderboards, seeing that Kirk Cousins, Robert Kelley, and Jamison Crowder combined for 76.8 Draft Kings points. Week 11 was the third week in a row that a stack featuring a team’s quarterback, running back, and wide receiver was able to win a tournament, so this is something worth noting moving forward.

Outside of using a Redskins stack, using players from the Dallas, Seattle, and Indianapolis offenses was another way to rack up points without using players with terribly high ownership percentages. When there are multiple different ways to take down large tournament GPPs, daily fantasy is at its most competitive, and I personally find those weeks to be the most rewarding to play in.

FanDuel

Without further ado, we’ll dive into the slate of games offered on FanDuel for Week 11. In the lower buy-in portion of the slate, which includes the $1 Dive, $2 Snap, and $5 Sling TV Rush, it took between 180 and 184 points to win the first place prize. This is a significant decrease from last week’s slate where it took 204 points to win the Snap and 208 points to win the Sling TV Rush. This week’s lower buy-in slate was dominated by players who utilized Robert Kelley, Le'Veon Bell, and Dez Bryant as all three winners had these players in their lineups. One interesting point of differentiation was the quarterback spot, as the three winners each used a different quarterback. The winner of the Dive had Cousins, the Snap winner selected Andrew Luck, and the Sling TV Rush winner made a great choice in picking Dak Prescott who was 2.6 percent owned. Quarterback selection very rarely will make or break a team unless the quarterback has a catastrophic game, so there’s normally not a need to break the bank at the position most weeks.

Both the medium and high buy-in portions of Sundays slate were dominated by user mbomb44, who finished second in the Kickoff, fourth in the Sunday Million, and first in the Blitz, Monster, and Gunslinger tournaments (among other top ten finishes). The lineup that won him the most money consisted of a two-man Cowboys stack of Dak Prescott and Dez Bryant who both had sub-seven percent ownership. Mbomb44 then paid up at the running back position, selecting Le'Veon Bell and David Johnson, who despite their $17,400 combined salary put up 61.6 fantasy points as a unit. Sprinkled into the fold was Steve Smith, Julian Edelman, and Eric Ebron who were all priced less than $6,100 dollars. When it was all said and done, mbomb44 won over $300,000 this week, which is fantastic for the slate on FanDuel.

As far as the payline goes for FanDuel this week, you needed to score at least 116 points in order to cash in the $1 Dive. The low payline for this tournament makes sense because of the large amount of entries in the tournament as there were 294,117 entries placed this week. In the other lower and medium buy-in contests you needed to score anywhere from 122 to 126 points in order to cash, which is 11 percent less, on average, than it took to cash in these tournaments last week. In the highest buy-in portion of the slate, it took more than 139.5 points in order to cash due to the amount of sharp players in the fields and the high buy-ins. Moving forward, the scores that it takes to cash in the lower and medium buy-in contests will almost certainly go back up a bit into the 130-140 range where it sits most weeks.

Switching gears for a moment, let’s analyze the Big $5 Double Up on FanDuel, which will give us some information about how cash games went on Sunday. The Big $5 Double Up had 27,586 entries, and the top scorer put up 168.6 points. When dealing with cash games, I often look at the last lineup to finish in the money because it gives us a better idea of what type of roster construction the average player went with. User muller2389 finished just above the payline with a score of 119.98 and utilized a roster that had seven players that were over 18 percent owned. Andrew Luck and A.J. Green were both over 42 percent owned in this tournament, and both players disappointed their owners as Luck finished with less than 20 points with Green not recording a single point due to injury. Players that finished comfortably in the money were able to pivot to better players with low ownership, such as Kirk Cousins, Steve Smith, and David Johnson, and if you were smart enough to try and avoid some of the chalkier plays chances are you fared well this week.

Draft Kings

Moving on to the tournaments offered on Draft Kings for Week 11, we’ll first take a look at the $3 Play Action, the $5 Flea Flicker, and the $9 Slant. The scores that it took to take down the Play Action and the Slant were remarkably similar, with the Play Action winner scoring 221.3 points and the Slant winner posting 221.48 points. The Flea Flicker’s top score was 217.8 and the small gap in top score can be attributed to the fact that the tournament is exclusively for casual players. All three winning lineups in this portion of the slate contained Le'Veon Bell and Robert Kelley, and two of the winners also used David Johnson. Other notable selections that these players made were Rishard Matthews (10.9 percent owned), Dez Bryant (3.7 percent owned), Vance McDonald (1.2 percent owned), Rashad Jennings (2.5 percent owned), and Eric Ebron (5.2 percent owned). Each of these players had very low ownership but put up quality fantasy performances, and if you want to differentiate yourself from other entries and win a low buy-in tournament, you need to search out players like these.

For the medium buy-in portion of the slate, we’ll take a look at the Millionaire Maker, which was won by user Moykiss who posted a score of 223.1, which is the lowest score to win the Millionaire Maker since the start of this column in Week 7. Moykiss was all in on the Redskins yesterday and utilized four Washington players in their lineup, which included Kirk Cousins, Robert Kelley, Jamison Crowder, and Jordan Reed. Out of the Washington group, Jordan Reed was the only one to have a mediocre game, posting a 12.9 point total. Moykiss was able to make up for Reed’s relative dud by cashing in big on David Johnson, Doug Baldwin, and surprisingly enough Malcolm Mitchell who posted a 19.8 point total at the 3,000 minimum salary. Altogether, moykiss used just one player that had over 16 percent ownership, which was Le'Veon Bell. If you want to win a tournament that had over 166,000 entries, you need to be able to sift through the player pool and choose lower-owned options with high upside as there will be too many similarly constructed lineups for you to win otherwise.

In the high buy-in portion of the slate, which includes the $333 Wildcat and the $1,500 Luxury Box, well-known DFS heavyweight papagates absolutely crushed it by winning both tournaments and having six other lineups come in the top 10 in either tournament. Their main lineup consisted of a two-man Redskins stack with Kirk Cousins and Pierre Garcon, and they also had solid performances from Le'Veon Bell, Doug Baldwin, and David Johnson. It’s pretty rare that you see someone place so high with a number of different lineups in the high buy-in tournaments, so kudos to them.

Taking a quick look at the payline data for the slate on Draft Kings, you needed at least 136.8 points in order to cash in the smaller and medium buy-in tournaments. The $9 Slant was the toughest contest to cash in this range, requiring a score of 139.48 in order to finish in the money. As you move into the higher buy-in portion of the slate, it took over 143 points in order to cash. The payline scores should rise in Week 12 to where they normally are on Draft Kings, which is between 143-150.

Finally, we’ll take a gander at the Massive $25 Double Up, which is the tournament that we use to examine the cash game slate on Draft Kings. During last week’s Double Up Midseason Celebration, it took 146.7 points in order to cash in cash games but this week it dropped to 139.34. This doesn’t represent a huge drop like most of the other games on the GPP slate, and Week 11’s score is very consistent with what we saw in Week 9 where it took about 142 points to cash. Despite a tricky week with multiple big-name players failing to impress, the payline in cash games was around where it normally is.

In Review

Week 11, for the most part, was a pretty typical week except for a few highly-owned players that put up lackluster performances. We’re looking at you, Martellus Bennett. As always, it is incredibly important to try and pivot away from players that you expect to have high ownership if there are other options out there that can provide similar upside, as we saw with David Johnson this week as he erupted for 38 Draft Kings points with mostly sub-10 percent ownership. That’ll do it for Week 11. Good luck in Week 12 and let’s cash some tournaments!