Week 1 NFL DFS Preseason Breakdown

Aug 07, 2018

The task of creating profitable pre-season daily fantasy lineups does not come easy. You’re basically trying to figure out who will get the most playing time amongst a 90-man roster—on both FanDuel and DraftKings, all players are priced equally in preseason, so there's no need to consider value. Often times coaches will elude to who they plan to give the most playing time to, but it can backfire. In this first week of the preseason, you’ll usually see the first unit play only a series, if at all. The second string often finishes out the first half, then the third and fourth string get the second half. There are exceptions but, usually, that’s pretty close to how it will be split up.

This week we don’t want to roster many first-string players because of their limited playing time. Can Alvin Kamara break a 50-yard run on one of the seven snaps he gets? Sure, but our goal is to maximize opportunity here. It’s even possible to cash in tournaments with a zero in your lineup because of the unpredictable nature of these games.

What I’ll be doing in this article is curating all the playing time information that I find from reviewing beat writer articles, twitter, and coach press conferences. Oftentimes, we end up rostering players from teams whose depth charts are thin, forcing only one or two players to take all the snaps at a certain position.

While I plan to update this article often up until about an hour before kickoff, I encourage you to scour through beat reports to find tidbits from beat writers and coaches that indicate who made get high usage in preseason week 1.

John Paulsen’s Twitter list of beat writers is a great resource.

Browns at Giants

Baker Mayfield is rumored to be getting at least two quarters of play. He will likely be working with a mixture of the first and second units. Wide receivers he has worked with in camp include Antonio Callaway (check status), Rashard Higgins, Jeff Janis and C.J. Board. He's also hooked up with preseason favorite TE Seth DeValve often in camp.
Update: Seth DeValve is OUT
Rutgers product Robert Martin should get a good amount of carries as he fights to make the roster. Saquon Barkley and Jonathan Stewart probably won't play much, leaving Wayne Gallman and Martin to take a good portion of the carries