Sunday Morning Update

Check back each Sunday Morning around 10:30 AM EST for any updates to the Primary Cash Lineup or any other thoughts based on injury news.

Week 15 Recap

Just a disastrous second half of the season at this point as a losing week last week takes the Primary Cash Lineup to 8-7 on the season. At this point, in order to have a positive regular season, it is go 3-0 or bust as a 10-8 season is a break-even one in my mind, while 9-9 is a losing year.

Last week, the only player who showed up was Josh Allen who was great with 44.28 points. The problem was that he was about 60% rostered. Not a single player had over 9 FanDuel points on the rest of the roster as both Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley had two of their worst games of the season.

Looking back through the last couple of weeks, there are some key trends that I’ve picked up on that

• The lineups have been fairly Stars/Scrubs instead of balanced lineups. While this can work, the stars need to show up, which just hasn’t happened as Saquon Barkley has struggled the last two weeks, taking Travis Kelce far too often this season, Alvin Kamara was injured in Week 14, just overall paying up for some of the high-end players has not worked as nicely as it did early on in the season.
• There’s some unlucky variance here. For example, last week, Saquon Barkley was injured for a portion of the game after getting their team down to the one-yard line. Picking team defenses is always going to have some randomness, but recently the defenses that I’ve picked have underperformed compared to their expectation, while other defenses in similar price points have overperformed.
• Overall, we’re seeing four or five players who are 50%+ rostered each and every week. Last week, Josh Allen, Derrick Henry, Elijah Moore, Calvin Ridley, Chuba Hubbard, Zach Charbonnet, Hunter Henry, and Baltimore Ravens defense were all 50%+ rostered. What this does, is it makes it harder to win as if the pricing is poor, then everyone is going to be on the same set of players and the variance is going to be based on the filler players. For example, Calvin Ridley, Hunter Henry, and Chuba Hubbard have consistently been popular every week based on their targets and their price continuing to be low. The one thing DraftKings does that is better than FanDuel is take into account what players are rostered highly, and increase their price in their model regardless of production.

Week 16 Slate Thoughts- Key Decision Points And Lack of Value

This week has one of the biggest decision points of any week this season. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you’re comfortable playing Michael Penix Jr. or whether to fade Penix. At $6,000, Penix is going to be a player who is going to be highly rostered because of the players around him, but by no means is he a must start as there is a scenario where the Falcons take a run-heavy approach this week in a favorable matchup against the Giants. More on Penix down in the Player Chart section of this article. For me, I’m playing Penix, but have very low expectations of him. If he can have 225 yards and 2 touchdowns, I’m happy at $6k as that’s 17 points and nearly 3x his salary. While Josh Allen is enticing given his recent explosion of nearly 100 total FanDuel points over the last two games, will he need to do that against the Patriots this week? Or can the Ravens start to dial him back as they prepare for the playoffs.