Most of my FanDuel stuff has been geared toward large-field games. At the least, 1 p.m. Sunday games, and usually all-Sunday-all-Monday games. In such games, you can be discerning, find someone you particularly want, not settle for anything until you get down to the last few roster slots.
Fantasy football advice, Week 16: The world’s saddest FanDuel player pool
Three Thursday/Saturday games this week, and they all could be awful. What do you do?Click here to use FanDuel promo code SBNATION9, get 100% deposit bonus
Mitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports
But FanDuel has much narrower games. I watch football most Sundays with my brother, and almost every week, he jumps on the site around 1:15 and fills out his late-afternoon rosters. There are usually three, four late-afternoon Sunday games, meaning the rosters are often smaller. It’s a different setup, a different strategy.
(Only semi-related: I mentioned this on Twitter a few days ago, but I would absolutely love for the NFL, just once, some random week, to have four 1 p.m. games and, like, nine 4 p.m. ones. For no real reason - it wouldn’t change my schedule -- but it would be interesting to see. I like change.)
Anyway, I touched on this sort of strategy when I discussed picking a Thanksgiving roster. On Thanksgiving, though, there were three games: Chicago-Detroit, Philadelphia-Dallas and Seattle-San Francisco. This was before Chicago's implosion. Those were six teams who all had potent or semi-potent offenses, plenty of players who were at least theoretical fantasy contributors.
This week is not that.
There are three games on Thursday and Saturday combined, and those come together to make a different sort of weekend game. The six teams: Tennessee, Jacksonville, Philadelphia, Washington, San Diego and San Francisco. That’s two teams that have had basically no fantasy contributors all season (Tennessee and Jacksonville), two that have fallen apart as the season has gone on (Washington and San Francisco), one that might be without its top running back and receiver (San Diego) and a Philadelphia team that has fallen on hard times.
There's a quirk to FanDuel's rules -- one that I haven't mentioned before, and one that I don't really understand. But it says that you can't use more than four players from one team on your FanDuel roster. I don't get it. If you give me the at-their-peak Broncos against the at-their-nadir Jaguars, I still wouldn't load up on every Denver player. Almost 100 percent of the time, you're so much better off diversifying than you are loading up on one team that I think the game would encourage lumping a team in together.
But oh well. This week's Thursday-Saturday game is basically the one time ever I'd want to go all in on one roster, because on my first pass through my roster for this game, I had five Eagles.
I’ll get back to the strategy after you can look at this sad, sad roster.
That's four players from Thursday's Tennessee-Jacksonville game. That's a wide receiver who, two weeks ago, was the No. 5 offensive weapon on the Titans offense. That's four members of a Philadelphia offense, including the quarterback, that hasn't been a fraction as potent as it was a few weeks ago.
And beyond all that, that’s a roster with four thousand dollars left on the table.
I'm on record as saying I don't leaving a couple hundred dollars behind here or there as needed in these games. Sometimes, you just like the $6,200 guy more than the $6,400 guy. But this week ... the only quarterback more expensive than Mark Sanchez is Philip Rivers, who I'm terrified of trusting. I could have gone with a banged-up Ryan Mathews, or a banged-up Alfred Morris, or a banged-up Frank Gore at running back, but they all are, you know, banged up. I couldn't double down on any more Eagles, so Jordan Matthews was out, and Keenan Allen's hurt, as is Kendall Wright. I wanted Cody Parkey, but I was out of Eagles to use.
In a typical, big game, leaving $4,000 on the table is a disaster. In this game ... honestly, I couldn’t justify spending that money if I tried.
That's the thing with a tournament with a tiny, sad player pool. You find players you can live with, not ones you're excited about. I'm not happy I'm putting real live money on Toby Gerhart and Nate Washington. I'm just happy they're playing. In a tiny pool, that can be enough.
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