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Throughout the first half of last season, I found myself in a most unfortunate and unfamiliar position:
I stunk at fantasy football.
Don’t get me wrong. I was still killing my friends in my longest running leagues, and I was even doing well in several “expert” leagues I’d joined with other fantasy writers. But when I tried my hand at Daily Fantasy Football - the super-addictive, instantly gratifying version of the game that’s taken the industry by storm - I was the sucker at the table.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” - Albert Einstein
In retrospect, it’s painfully easy to see why I was failing. I jumped into the daily format armed with a great deal of fantasy football knowledge, but a complete lack of understanding when it came to winning strategy in high variance games. It was resourceful idiocy at its finest.
I paid no mind to the types of games I chose, or what percentage of my cash to lay on each contest - my only concern was chasing the biggest payout. Even when I was good (or lucky) enough to have a profitable week, I’d inevitably give it all back within a week or two.
If I’m being totally honest, even my lineups were lacking. I failed to make strategic changes to my rosters based on the type of game I was playing, and I came to find out my projections weren’t accounting for some of the most reliable predictors of team and player performance.
It took me about two months, but I finally stopped doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Einstein would be proud). I took to Google and sponged up every article I could find on protecting against variance, daily fantasy bankroll management, and understanding the different types of leagues. I even went about it the old fashioned way and bought books, like this excellent one written by Jonathan Bales (a must read if you’re serious about jumping into daily fantasy).
The end result of all my research was enough profit to buy myself a tank of gas at the end of the 2013 postseason. Filling up my Dodge on Fanduel’s dime hardly qualifies me as successful enough to dispense daily fantasy advice, but it’s not my success I want to focus on. Smart people learn much more from failure than success - I know I did, and my hope is you can too.
If you’re a already a profitable daily player, you’ll probably want to skip this article all together - there’s a low likelihood anything I write here will come as a revelation to you. But if you plan to deposit on a site like Fanduel for the first time this season, take it from a loser - these are mistakes you’ll want to avoid:
Mistake Number One: Ignoring Vegas
I’m going to start here for two reasons:
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It’s personal. I love betting on sports, especially football. In fact, I was already dedicating hours every week to researching point spreads and game totals. So when I read I should be factoring in Vegas betting lines when creating player projections for my daily teams, I felt like a real dummy for not figuring it out on my own.
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More importantly, if you can’t pick the right players, you’re going to fail at DFS no matter how well you choose your games and manage your bankroll. Using Vegas to inform your research, as it turns out, is a great way to improve the accuracy of your projections.
I won’t drum up any impressive statistics to prove just how good the Vegas linemakers are at their jobs. The bright lights and fancy hotels in the middle of the Nevada desert speak for themselves. Just know that Vegas’ monstrous algorithms are much better than you and I at predicting game spreads and point totals, and you should be using the information they provide to help you identify games with the most potential for fantasy points.
Each team’s projected point total and the game total (over/under) are the most fantasy relevant betting lines. Just like in regular fantasy football, the goal in daily fantasy football is to score the most points (duh), so targeting players on teams (or in games) Vegas projects to score a bunch of points is pretty clearly a smart decision.
Point spreads can be used to your advantage also. As an example, if Vegas tabs a team as a heavy favorite, it stands to reason there will be an increased opportunity for that team’s running back to rack up carries late in the game as they try to salt away a big lead.
You can even use Vegas player prop betting lines to provide you with a starting point for yardage projections. While the bookmakers’ accuracy setting lines on individual passing, rushing, or receiving stats is certain to vary more than with game lines (there’s obviously a lot more players and stat categories than teams), you can trust that when Vegas lands on a number, it is the result of incredibly sophisticated research.
Mistake Number Two: Using the Wrong Statistics
Like most successful fantasy footballers, I devoted hours every week to researching statistics. But poring through game logs and soaking in traditional stats - yards per carry for example - did not translate to daily fantasy success.
I learned the most important statistics, for sustained daily fantasy profitability, are the ones that relate directly to a player’s opportunity. How much of a team’s offense runs through the player in question? What happens to that player’s usage when their team gets in the redzone? How about at the goal line? I began using the answers to these questions, in conjunction with Vegas lines and the player’s cost on the site I was playing on, to project weekly stats and assign player values.
To illustrate exactly how my approach changed, here’s what my inner dialogue would have sounded like early last season if I were deciding how to value LeSean McCoy in week one:
“LeSean McCoy is priced at $9,600 on Fanduel in a plus matchup against the Jaguars. I don’t even have to look at his stats. He’s awesome, but I’m passing. I’ll just find a less expensive RB with an equally tasty matchup so I can put together a more balanced lineup.”
Jump to the second half of last season, and here’s how I would have projected McCoy’s TDs:
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Vegas projects the Eagles to score 31.5 points - a very high total.
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The Eagles Team Stats page helps me determine about 27% of their scoring last year came via the kicker. 31.5 points less 27% comes to 23, which leaves about four TDs for the Eagles in this game.
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The Team Stats page also helps me determine McCoy accounted for 20.75% of the Eagles total TDs last year. That would make him responsible for 0.83 of the four TDs the Eagles should score in this game.
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However, players don’t always score an equal number of TDs in each game, and the Eagles figure to be in scoring position pretty frequently given the high point total. A quick query on the Data Dominator tells me when the Eagles get in the red zone, McCoy rushes the ball 51.28% of the time. When they get inside the five, the ball is in his hands 35% of the time. Given this data, I would feel safe in bumping his TD projection from 0.83 to slightly over 1.0.
To project McCoy’s yardage totals, I would begin with his Vegas player prop lines and decide how likely he is to hit those projections based on the following factors:
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Quality of opponent - In this case, the Jaguars gave up the fourth most rushing yards and TDs last season.
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Workload - Again, a visit to the team stats page tells me McCoy saw 78.5% of the RB rushing attempts and 81.25% of the RB receptions for the Eagles last season. No worries on this front (even if Darren Sproles does steal some passing game looks this year).
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Game spread - The Eagles are favored by a whopping 11.5 points. As I mentioned earlier, McCoy should have plenty of opportunity to grind out the game for the Eagles in the second half.
Let’s suppose Vegas had McCoy pegged for 100 rushing yards, 30 receiving yards, and three receptions. Based on what I learned using the Footballguys tools, I’d feel justified in projecting him to meet those numbers in this game. Along with the TD, I now have McCoy projected for 20.5 points on Fanduel.
The last piece of the puzzle is deciding whether or not 20.5 fantasy points is worth 16% of my salary cap. To do so, I would need to assign McCoy a value by dividing his salary ($9,600) by his projected fantasy points (20.5). McCoy’s $/point value works out to about $468.
For context, if each point your team scores costs you $468, you would end up with 128 points for the week, placing you well out of contention in most big tournaments. However, since I feel McCoy is very likely to at least meet his projected point total, his high floor might still be preferable in cash games, provided I’ve identified a few value plays to surround him with.
Mistake Number Three: Thinking You’re on Your Own
Always remember that fantasy football is supposed to be fun. If the process I just described seems more like math homework than playing your favorite game, don’t let it scare you off from giving the daily format a try.
Joe Bryant may have said it best in his most recent Principles of Value Based Drafting article:
“We know (creating projections) is hard. And it's REALLY hard to do this with accuracy. The good news is we've done all this for you at Footballguys.com.”
If you’ve used Footballguys during the season before, you’re already aware our prognosticators are not just throwing darts. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Last season FantasyPros.com ranked our own Kyle Wachtel and David Dodds inside the Top 10 of their in-season accuracy contest out of over 120 fantasy football professionals.
Not only is there no shame in copying off guys like Kyle and David - it’s a perfectly sound strategy. It's not like Fanduel takes back your winnings if they find out you used someone else’s projections. And even if you do decide to tackle your own projections each week, seeing how your thoughts align with the experts is still a great way to validate (or discredit) your hunches.
There were too many times in the first half of the season where I relied too heavily on my own lazy analysis instead of hard work - whether my own, or the aggregate of the greatest minds in the industry. When I started comparing my projections to the ones created by the most accurate experts, I knew I better feel really strongly about my process before using a player the experts were down on.
Coming in Part II
Bankroll Management, Choosing the Right Games, Constructing Lineups