Welcome to the Week 3-4 Monday-Thursday Slate NFL FanDuel edition of Picks and Pivots, a fantasy football column focused on helping you find the best core lineup for this week’s Slate of DFS action!
For those of you finding us for the first time, the concept behind NFL FanDuel Picks and Pivots is to first identify key building blocks that can be used for any roster construction and then identify pivot points to help differentiate your lineup in hopes of a big payday!
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With Week 3 essentially all but wrapped up we have one more game to go as the Cowboys and Cardinals square off and we can get some weekday football DFS fix by pairing it with the Thursday night battle between the Packers and Bears.
Picks and Pivots is not a simple “best plays” column but rather it focuses on slate strategy and roster construction to help give you insight into how I will look to play this slate! The goal of this article is to dig through the slate, highlight our top plays and give you a sample line-up as an example of what our core roster build could look like using the analysis we lay out in the coming pages!
As always, we will look to update our picks and final lineup thought prior to lock on our twitter account @FantasyCPR so make sure to give us a follow for all the late breaking lineup news.
Without further ado, let’s get into this week’s slate!
NFL FanDuel – Week 3/4 Monday-Thursday Slate Overview:
Pick a Game to Stack: On a short two game NFL DFS slate, my goal is to identify the game stack I want to build my core around – essentially taking the approach of a coin flip that the game I pick to build around will be the one that shoots out and we strategically fade the other contest available to us.
From a pure Vegas perspective, the Arizona/Dallas game has a total of 47 points and a spread of only 3 while the game in Green Bay has opened with a 45.5 total and the Packers not surprisingly a 7 point favorite. Looking strictly at the Vegas data it would stand to reason that stacking the Monday Night game with the higher total and closer spread would give us the potential shoot-out we are looking for when stacking!
Cowboys Passing Attack: My gut feeling on this slate is that people will shy away from the Dallas passing attack due to the perceived difficulty in the Arizona defense and will opt instead for the safety of Aaron Rodgers and the Packers passing game. We only need to look back to Week 1 however to when Matthew Stafford dropped 292 yards and four touchdowns as the QB found on the Million Dollar Winning FanDuel tournament to see that the Arizona passing attack may not exactly be the unit we need to avoid!
Dak Prescott ($8,200) is the second most expensive quarterback on the slate but I expect he will be the third highest owned of the options due to the match-up but looking back at Week 1 and 2 there is enough intrigue here to make me want to load up on the Cowboys signal caller. Over the first two weeks, Prescott has thrown 39 and 50 pass attempts which while still mixing in a handful of rushing attempts to help pad his point total for fantasy purposes.
Dez Bryant ($8,400) and Jason Witten ($5,500) have been target monsters for Prescott with 25 and 22 targets a piece, put another way they account for 47 of the 89 pass attempts this season which would mean that 52% of the pass attempts are to a small core group of receivers which makes identifying the stack here much easier than offenses like Green Bay with more options and more injury concerns! Over the first two weeks, Arizona gave up 107 yards to Golden Tate 79 yards to Jack Doyle which shows that kind of success WR’s and TE’s can have against this defense!
Arizona has a correlation: If you are stacking the Dallas passing game then I believe you need to run it back the other way with the Arizona wide-outs, specifically Larry Fitzgerald ($7,400) and J.J. Nelson ($6,300), in the event this game because a shoot out. Fitz has disappointed so far this season but still has 19 targets over the first two games and Nelson is coming off a 120 yard game and has 2 TD’s to start the year, flashing the kind of big play upside we want on a two game slate.
How to play Green Bay/Chicago: The first half of the Green Bay game on Sunday we saw a banged up offensive line, a disjointed passing game and a team that looked ready to pack it in. Rodgers as he usually does managed to make adjustments, move around in the pocket and get Green Bay the win on the back of a pass heavy second half attack.
My concern here with stacking Green Bay is as such – that game was HOT AND HUMID and we saw tons of players head to the sidelines with cramping and on top of that they had to play into overtime and get the short week to recover! The second part of my concern is the opponent – as the Bears will need to continue to rely on their running attack if they want ANY shot of winning this game. Joe Mixon was routinely used by the Bengals to eat up chunks of yards so I could see the Bears leaning on Jordan Howard ($6,700) here to make this a run-heavy, slow-paced game. If we want to play that narrative, and honestly on a two game slate that is really all we can do, then pairing Howard with Ty Montgomery ($8,100) and hoping this is a sloppy Thursday Night game with two teams on short rest, relying on their talented backs!
NFL FanDuel – Sample Line-Up and Slate Overview
Please Note: This is NOT an optimized line-up, it is simply illustrative to show the type of roster build we can have using the logic previously laid out in Picks and Pivots. My actual line-up may differ from the line-up shown here.
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QB: Dak Prescott ($8,200)
RB: Ty Montgomery ($8,100)
RB: Jordan Howard ($6,700)
WR: Dez Bryant ($8,400)
WR: Larry Fitzgerald ($7,400)
WR: J.J. Nelson ($6,300)
TE: Jason Witten ($5,500)
K: Phil Dawson ($4,400)
DEF: Green Bay ($4,800)
Next: PlayLine Enters the Fantasy Sports Ring
Best of luck in your NFL FanDuel contests and we will see you back here for Week 4 Picks and Pivots!