My goal for this article has always been to provide a tournament guide that's useful for everyone, whether you're building one lineup or 150. That said, my personal approach to FanDuel GPP tournaments inevitably influences my thought process—and since much of this article revolves around how I'm approaching the slate, I think it's helpful to provide some context. Before diving into the Week 15 slate, I want to explain how my tournament selection and strategy have evolved throughout the season, as this background may help you better interpret the article, depending on how many lineups you're entering.

Early in the season, as I mentioned in prior articles about game selection, I was entering 150 lineups each week in the big $3 tournament. That tournament had an incredible payout structure with guaranteed overlay and relatively flat payouts. At that time, my primary focus was dialing in my percent-rostered exposures versus the field, and I naturally viewed each slate from a zoomed-out, big-picture perspective.

Midway through the season, however, FanDuel stopped offering that tournament in its ideal format. Since then, I've shifted to playing 7–10 lineups each week, typically in tournaments with entry fees ranging from $30 to $55. This naturally changed my focus, as I moved from worrying about percent-rostered discrepancies to hand-building a tighter, more refined player pool of around 30 players, mixing and matching them across my limited lineups.

Now, as the season winds down, I've further reduced the number of lineups I'm entering. For Week 15, I'll be entering a handful of lineups into smaller tournaments, but my main focus is a single entry into the $250 World Fantasy Football Championship tournament. My goal is to build the absolute best possible lineup for this high-stakes event.

My player pool is smaller than usual, and throughout this article, I'll focus on how I'm analyzing this condensed pool and thinking through the process of putting all my chips into a single lineup. This approach differs from earlier in the season when I might've allocated 7–8% of my exposure to a low-rostered player, meaning he would land in 10–12 lineups. Those types of players are not in my personal pool this week.

Given this context, I'm taking a slightly different approach to this week's write-up. I'll still provide my core plays and others to consider, but I'll frame them from the perspective of building a single lineup. For each position, I'll outline the short list of players I'm considering for my main lineup. While I won't finalize my entry until Sunday morning, I'll share my thought process as of Saturday morning—highlighting the players I'm leaning toward and explaining why each is in consideration.

I'll also dive deeper into specific decisions I'm agonizing over. For example, if Justin Herbert and Ladd McConkey are part of my primary stack, I'll compare potential pivots, like downgrading to Drake Maye at quarterback to free up $600. How could that savings improve other areas of my lineup? Walking through these 2v2 decisions should give you insight into my approach and help you, whether you're playing one lineup, 150, or somewhere in between.

With that, let's dive into the Week 15 slate!

Updated Slate Overview

Before diving into specific player picks on a position-by-position basis, let's start out with a big-picture view of the Week 15 FanDuel Main Slate. I focus on three big-picture items each week:

1. Overall implied team totals and spreads.
2. How these implied team totals compare to each team's season-to-date average and which teams are projected to score more than normal.
3. Percent-rostered projections at the team level within the context of implied team totals.

Implied Team Totals

In the visualization below, you'll see each team's implied team total along with how much they are favored by. Lines connecting opponents help illustrate the matchups. The higher the line, the higher the game total. The length of the lines also visualizes the size of the spread between the two teams. This week, the Ravens are such massive favorites that fitting them onto the visualization made everything else too small. So I took that game off of the list. Just know that were they included, they'd be way up there to in the upper-right corner of your monitor. 

The Bills-Lions game stands out as by far the highest-scoring projected game of the week. Interestingly, the second-highest projected total on the slate comes from the Arizona vs. New England matchup, which is intriguing since neither team is especially high-scoring. We'll circle back to this below when we dive into the best Week 15 matchups.

It's also worth noting that Washington is the second-biggest favorite on the slate, behind only Baltimore. Don't overlook Brian Robinson Jr. this week. With Austin Ekeler out, Robinson doesn't stand out in the points-per-dollar projections, but he's a sneaky play and one of the backs at least on my radar for my single lineup.

Best Matchups

Season-to-date averages provide valuable context for identifying teams projected to exceed their usual performance. The table below compares each team's implied total ("Total") to their season average points per game ("PPG") and highlights the expected scoring boost for Week 15 ("Week 15 Boost"). Here are the top matchups:

Percent Rostered by Team

The table below ranks each team on the main slate by their implied team total. Generally, focusing on players from high-scoring teams is a strong strategy, as it often correlates with higher upside. However, high implied team totals should also correlate with high percent-rostered projections. It is when the percent-rostered projections by team deviate from the typical expectations that is especially interesting and may potentially indicate an edge we can exploit in tournaments. That's the purpose of the table below.

No clear opportunities stand out when comparing projected percent rostered to implied team totals. The market appears pretty rational this week. However, one interesting spot is the Ravens, who have a middling 30% cumulative percent rostered despite boasting the highest implied team total on the slate. While Derrick Henry is expected to be relatively popular, the Baltimore passing game is projected for very low ownership. This game is expected to be run-heavy, with the Ravens dominating their opponent. That said, if Drew Lock, Malik Nabers, and the Giants' passing game can generate anything against Baltimore's vulnerable secondary, we might see a Lamar Jackson ceiling game in a spot where very few people will roster him.