By the Numbers: Impact of Team Totals in DFS

We have all done it. Each week you checked the winner of the Sunday Million at FanDuel or the Millionaire Maker at DraftKings. You said to yourself time and time again, “I could have made that lineup.”

You could have, but you didn’t.

It’s possible you even asked yourself, “Why didn’t I make that lineup?” after seeing a lot of players you were high on for the week make it into the winning lineup. The difference between the winning lineup and yours probably came down to either slightly different lineup construction than you had or a slightly different combination of players you were targeting.

Many look to Vegas when constructing their tournament lineups, but it is important to know at which positions they hold the most relevance.

In this study, I have compiled data from each winning Millionaire Maker and Sunday Million lineup from Weeks 1-17. These are FanDuel’s and  DraftKings’ largest GPPs.

I was able to break down by position how often players appeared in these lineups from specific Vegas team total categories. These categories include: top 5, top 6- 10, middle, bottom 10-6 and bottom 5 team totals. The reason for the middle category is to keep the study as consistent as possible through the bye weeks when 32 teams were not always in play.

Examining both platforms each week left me with a total sample size of 34 Quarterbacks (two per week), 68 Running Backs (four per week), 102 Wide Receivers (six per week), 17 Flex players (one per week), 34 Tight Ends (two per week), 34 Team Defenses (two per week) and 17 Kickers (one per week). In instances where the same player appeared on both platforms, they were counted both times towards their respective category.

The goal of this study is to provide data highlighting which positions Vegas team totals should hold the most weight in your decision making for large GPPs.

Quarterback

In winning lineups, 50% of Quarterbacks come from teams with top-five team totals, by far the most of any position. Meanwhile, only 23.52% of QBs in winning lineups came from teams outside of the top 10.

The same QB appeared in both the DraftKings and FanDuel lineup 35.29% of the time.

Running Back

Charting Running Back and Wide Receiver was a bit more difficult as there is more than one usable slot for each position. Another difficulty to consider is the ability to slot players in any order, regardless of salary. For example, the highest priced RB in a lineup can go in the FLEX position if you schoose. For the purpose of this study, the top priced RB in a lineup is considered the RB1 and the lowest priced is considered the RB2 or FLEX on DraftKings.

RBs from the top-5 Vegas team totals represented 25% of the 68 RBs from winning lineups in these two tournaments. This was the lowest of all the skill positions outside of the FLEX slot on DraftKings.

Over three times as many RBs came from the top-5 team totals than the bottom- 5 this season.

In winning lineups, RB1s came from the top-5 just 11.76% of the time. There were zero RB1s that came from the bottom-5 this season. It is important to keep in mind that lower ownership could be due to the fact that users are reluctant to select RBs from teams with low totals.

Wide Receiver

In winning lineups, the Wide Receiver position came from a top-5 Vegas team total 30.39% of the time, over five times as often as the bottom-5.

Again, I categorized the highest priced WR on the roster as the WR1, the next highest as the WR2, and so forth.

There were zero WR1s that came from the bottom-10 (last two categories combined) this season.

With a sample size of 102 players, WR joins both RB and FLEX with the largest percentage of their position coming from the middle team total category.

WR1s came from the Top 6-10 most often this season where WR2s appeared in the middle category most frequently.

WR3s were the only segment of the WR position where the top-5 Vegas team total had the highest percentage of appearances on winning lineups.

Flex

On DraftKings, RBs were used in the FLEX 52.94% of the time in Millionaire Maker winning lineups.

If you ignore the Thomas Rawls late-swap outlier in Week 11, the FLEX position only had one RB from the top-5 Vegas team total category (LeGarrette Blount in Week 3).

Winning Millionaire Maker lineups saw WRs appear in the FLEX 47.06% of the time this season. The lower WR ownership at the top-5 and top-10 categories is likely due to users looking for a low-priced and contrarian options to put them over the top.

Oftentimes WRs from lower Vegas team totals will be lower-owned so they can be attractive fliers in large GPPs. For example, in Week 6, Steve Smith scored 29.7 DK points from the FLEX position in the winning Millionaire Maker Lineup. Smith was only 1.5% owned, as the Baltimore Ravens were outside the top-10 Vegas team totals. With that said, not one FLEX WR in winning lineups came from the bottom-5 category this year.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.