FanDuel lineup tips and advice, Week 13: Let’s play a different kind of game

This week, instead of looking at who the successful FanDuel rosters utilized last weekend, I’m looking ahead.

Most weeks, we have one Thursday game, and I avoid it for weekly leagues. Joining a FanDuel game that starts on Thursday, but goes through the weekend, means you have to commit to a roster early. That leaves you open to risk that players might be a late scratch -- either because a present injury acts up or Friday practice creates a new one. It’s the type of risk I choose to avoid, and as such, I almost never end up putting any FanDuel money toward a Thursday game.

But this week is different. With the holiday Thursday (happy Thanksgiving, y’all), there are as always three games. And that means a special, Thursday-only FanDuel game, using only players from those games.

Picking a roster for such a sparsely populated league is a different beast. The FanDuel price point is set such that, in a full week of games, you can be a discriminate player-chooser. If you fill out a roster and you end up $100 over budget, you can tweak your roster ever-so-slightly. Maybe Percy Harvin gets switched to Reggie Wayne, or vice versa. There are dozens of players available. Last week alone, Tre Mason and Isaiah Crowell were only $100 apart in salary, and both were potentially popular investments without much to separate them. If you grabbed Crowell, paydirt. If you grabbed Mason ... well, he wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t getting you where you needed to be.

But in a tournament with only three games and six teams, sometimes you’re stuck just taking what you can get. Obviously, there are only six defenses available in such a situation. That’s basically true for quarterback as well, and might as well be for tight end. Even at running back, there are realistically 10 or fewer options. Only at receiver can you really play mix and match.

Here’s the roster I’ve settled on:

Tony Romo and Russell Wilson were too expensive for my quarterback. Mark Sanchez and Colin Kaepernick were affordable, but neither has put up any kind of big games of late. That left the middle -- marginally affordable quarterbacks who both have serious downsides, Jay Cutler and Matthew Stafford. I chose Cutler largely on gut; he’s had big games and awful games, meaning he could put up big numbers, while Stafford has fallen in the disappointing middle.

From there, I paired Cutler with his top running back and a receiver. Basically, my tournament this weekend relies on the Bears, which is ... terrifying, frankly. But I found a bargain in Carlos Hyde, who gets enough red-zone carries to help. With no room to maneuver, I literally selected the cheapest defense and kicker, under the thinking that there is rarely so little to separate those units that I could run the risk.

At tight end, Witten was, to me, the only option. Bennett’s productivity has cratered, while the next guys after that were Cooper Helfet and Luke Willson.

Ultimately, there is less division between rosters in a smaller tournament, simply because there are fewer options to play with. It likely means the winning scores in this tournament will also be much lower than normal, for the simple fact that there aren’t as many players who can put up 25-, 30-point games.