FanDuel advice: Saving at quarterback

Editor’s Note: FanDuel is running a $1,500,000 fantasy football league in Week 10. The top 66,000 teams win cash with $100,000 paid to first place on Sunday. Join now!

There’s a reason we, by and large, splurge on quarterbacks in FanDuel. It’s top-end production. Sort the FanDuel player pool by points per game in FanDuel’s own system, and you’ll see.

Below, I’ve listed the top two in per-week production at each position from this week’s players (so no one on a bye, no one who played Thursday). I’m ignoring salaries here, just looking at fantasy points:

This isn’t really news, but quarterbacks are crazy valuable in almost any format. The No. 8 quarterback this week, Derek Carr, has outperformed every position player on a per-game basis except Hopkins.

In a season-long league, in a regular draft, this isn’t the same situation. With so many quarterbacks productive, and so (relatively) few running backs and such, you want the theoretical sure thing, and if that means you’re settling for a second-tier quarterback, well, he still puts up numbers in the long run.

In weekly, though, the situation is different. You can spring for a top-end quarterback and a top guy at another position. In a one-week situation, quarterbacks are generally more predictable, more reliable. Most weeks, I’ll have Brady, Philip Rivers, Aaron Rodgers in my FanDuel roster, and I’ll need a really good reason to go far below.

Which is why it’s so damn weird that my quarterback this week is Kirk Cousins. Kirk &^$&ing Cousins.

Okay, first things first. This is a tournament lineup (as are most of my advice lineups, unless I specify otherwise). For 50/50 or similar leagues, where you need reliable production and not necessarily lottery tickets, I wouldn’t go near Cousins; his downside is just like his upside. But in a tournament, Cousins showed just a couple games ago that there is at least some production in him.

On top of that, he’s facing the Saints. Not to put too fine a point on it, but give me some competent receivers and any kind of offensive line, and I could be a reasonable FanDuel investment against the Saints. (Of course, my salary would be in the negative, giving you a huge advantage elsewhere, but whatever.)

The chart that follows shows the fantasy production of quarterbacks in games against the Saints and games against the not-Saints.

Like I said at the top, you need a good reason to not use a top end quarterback in a FanDuel tournament. Saving money is great, but that alone isn’t enough of a reason. But this week, Kirk Cousins is crazy cheap, plays a super-generous defense, and saves me enough that I can splurge on DeAndre Hopkins, Odell Beckham Jr. and Adrian Peterson.

Here’s my lineup. More on Joique Bell on Saturday.