Fantasy football advice, NFL playoffs 2015: In FanDuel, stick with what worked
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Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
My best results in FanDuel all season came in Week 5. On the backs of Peyton Manning, Andre Ellington, Brian Quick, Demaryius Thomas and others, I scored 166.86 points and hauled in $200 on a $5 investment.
This far removed from the time of that game, I either can’t or don’t know how to find what the high score was in that particular tournament. I finished 38th out of 57,471 in that tournament-but when you get up to the highest levels in those tournaments, a few spots in the rankings can mean a lot of points. In other words, the person who finished 30 spots behind me might have been within a point or two of my score, but the person who finished 30 spots ahead might have been above 200. It was my best single-week score -- getting 100 or 120 is easy, but breaking that threshold is a heckuva time.
Like I said, that was 166.86 points, and it was 38th place. In my FanDuel tournament, with 137,931 entries from this past weekend, 166.86 points would have been first place. By almost 16 full points.
I don’t suppose this is a huge surprise -- fewer teams, fewer games means fewer chances for a player to put up a dominant performance. With not many Odell Beckham Jr.- or Jonas Gray-like performances, you just aren’t going to see the crazy-high scores you saw in the regular season.
It might be silly to do with such a small player field - even more than normal, the top performances will be the most-owned players, regardless of salary - but I still ran through the top rosters in my big tournament to see what I could glean.
The answer is, ultimately, not a lot. Terrance Williams and Dan Herron were on all of the top 10 rosters, while Andrew Luck, DeMarco Murray and Antonio Brown were on eight apiece. The identities of the players, then, isn't what stuck out to me. What I noticed, though, is the salaries.
Just like in the regular season, you have a $60,000 salary cap in playoff FanDuel and -- more or less -- guys are as expensive in the playoffs as they and similar players were in the regular season. Even with that, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the basic price points of the best rosters change a bit. Maybe guys go more stars-and-scrubs, particularly with the good games from Williams and Herron.
Instead, the average salaries of each player on the best rosters basically aligned with the average salaries of the same roster spots in the regular season. Across the regular season, the best owners spent $4,839 on their kicker. Last week, they spent $4,820. The top running back went for $8,236 in the season; in the playoffs it was $8,500.
The primary differences were at quarterback and tight end. And both are easily explained. At quarterback, with so many players opting for Luck, the average quarterback salary hit a season high. And that makes sense-in the regular season, with as many as 32 quarterbacks playing every week, there was every reason a Kyle Orton, a Teddy Bridgewater, an Eli Manning might randomly pop with a big game, skewing the results downward. In the playoffs, though, the only non-fantasy-elite quarterbacks last week were Joe Flacco and Ryan Lindley. Flacco was fine, if not a very popular selection, while Lindley was ... well, you know. When the only quarterbacks who are likely available are expensive, the cost will naturally skew higher.
The opposite was true at tight end. With Jimmy Graham's season over, and Rob Gronkowski and Julius Thomas on a bye, the elite tight ends just weren't around last week. Greg Olsen, the closest to elite on the board, had an awful game, meaning whoever used him likely didn't even make the top 10. That meant the average tight end salary over the weekend of $5,200 was the lowest of the season, though Weeks 16 and 17 saw average salaries of less than $5,300, so it wasn't exactly a dramatic decrease.
The takeaway, then, from the weekend that was is that your overall strategy shouldn’t change much in the playoffs. You still have to find the right players, the right mix, sure. But basic roster construction? That’s the same. If you were successful in the regular season, like I was in Week 5, then the same methods and selection styles should make you successful in the playoffs. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
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