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FanDuel advice: Don’t chase last week’s big numbers
Drew Brees and Eli Manning were studs last week. They shouldn’t be anywhere near your FanDuel lineup this time.
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I'm not going to do my regular post of good and bad FanDuel situations this week. That's in part because I did a similar piece with this week's start/sit advice. But also, there's a point I want to make that really ought to be made this week, and I've already written the week's other two FanDuel advice pieces, so here's my shot.
You want players who will be successful on your FanDuel roster, obviously. But what you also want is players who are surprisingly successful. If 90 percent of FanDuel-ers think Rob Gronkowski is worth rostering and he does well, that’s all well and good, but it’s not setting you up to win at all. Any time you can find a guy who is good and not-so-popular, you want to go that way.
A little chart as I build to my point. It is our staff rankings for Eli Manning and Drew Brees for last week and this:
| DK | DC | AM | JD | SK | ||
| Drew Brees | Last week | 10 | 9 | 11 | 7 | 9 |
| This week | 5 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 3 | |
| Eli Manning | Last week | 6 | 14 | 12 | 10 | 7 |
| This week | 4 | 9 | 7 | 8 | 6 |
Even though we all knew Brees would be facing the Giants’ defense, Manning would be facing the Saints’, we were low(ish) on both guys entering last week. It’s not a perfect overlap, but you can see from this list that not a lot of us (and related, not a lot of the general public) would have been playing Brees or Manning last week, whereas we’d be pretty excited about both this week.
Of course, that means that everyone doing anything will be excited about these guys this week.
To illustrate this, I went back through the season. There have been 93 players or defenses who have put up 20-plus fantasy points in a week (25 for quarterbacks) and played the next week. I’m using standard scoring for this, because it’s easier and whatever, but the comparisons should overlap. I noted the player’s score in the week in question and the following week, as well as his ownership percentages for the two games.
The results are worth noting, even if they tend to the obvious. The players in question averaged 25.1 fantasy points during their big week, and fell to 10.5 points the following week. Yes, some guys repeated their performances (Devonta Freeman made the list four weeks in a row), but by and large, guys regress. We all know this, but this shows it to a great extent. Literally, the best performers saw their next-week performances drop by almost fifteen fantasy points.
The flip side, though, is ownership. In the week they had their big performances, often without great preamble, these guys averaged ownership of 7.9 percent in FanDuel. (Again, different games have different ownership percentages, but this is close enough for government work.) The week after their big games, that ownership percentage averaged 13.8.
In other words, these were guys putting up scores 60 percent down from the week before, but they were being owned almost 75 percent more often.
Never chase big performances. Very occasionally, you’ll wind up with a Devonta Freeman who goes off multiple weeks in a row, but more often, you’ll find guys who are due to fall off in a big way. And even if you do stumble into the rare performance repeater, he’s going to be so massively owned that you’ll have a hard time reaping any benefit.
Drew Brees had an ownership percentage of 3.9 last week. Eli Manning’s was 7.3. Those numbers will skyrocket this week. And I won’t be using either one.
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