Week 11 DraftKings & FanDuel Showdown Strategy: Sunday Night NFL DFS for Lions at Eagles

The Sunday Night Football level-up is here. Sure, recent weeks have featured a few mildly interesting matchups between teams on the precipice of playoff contention, but this week we get an absolute gauntlet between, arguably, the NFC’s two best teams as the Detroit Lions travel to face the Philadelphia Eagles. There are plenty of fantasy options on both sides of the ball, and Sunday night’s showdown slate will be a test of finding ways to eke out value in a game packed with talent.

How I Plan to Beat the Field This Week

For showdown daily fantasy football slates, it’s crucial to find ways to differentiate your lineup portfolio from the overall contest field. Minimizing duplication and correlation with the field’s lineups is key. Diversification is also an important factor in smoothing out what is an exceptionally high-variance format. These are my first considerations when I build lineups, and I try to use these levers as I manage my overall entry portfolio.

This week’s SNF game has an average Vegas total and features two offenses with upside at every position. There are going to be a lot of relatively obvious lineup builds on this slate, especially because rostering point-per-dollar value players who see a projection boost due to Sam LaPorta’s injury will make it easy to build lineups with five studs.

The crucial consideration this week is finding ways to challenge the prototypical, value-optimized constructions. It’s going to be difficult to build highly contrarian lineups by focusing only on the main players who are sure to see high ownership. Instead, we should look for ways to leverage those spots as well as build lineups around low-owned players, and be willing to trade off some median projection or salary-cap efficiency (leaving salary on the table) in exchange for leverage on the field. That’s likely a smart way to build +EV lineups when accounting for decorrelation from the field and lineup duplication risk.

Captain Candidates

Jalen Hurts ($15,600 CPT)
First, Hurts has the obvious upside in his favor: he’s a quarterback, is always on the field, and has multiple ways to put up points. In his case specifically, he can make things happen both on the ground and through the air. The real key for Hurts in this game is his touchdown equity. On a single-game slate, not only do we factor in that he’s used so often in the red zone and in short-yardage situations (see: the Tush Push), but this also siphons red-zone equity away from other Eagles players you’d be rostering in his place if you chose another captain. Hurts is simply the best option in the Eagles offense for scoring, and he isn’t cost-prohibitive on this slate relative to the other captain options.

A.J. Brown ($12,000 CPT)
There has been quite a bit of negative sentiment surrounding A.J. Brown all season. He’s contributed to some of it himself by, for example, telling fantasy managers earlier this week to effectively get rid of him. There seems to be a general level of frustration with Brown’s role in the offense, how the offense functions overall (run-heavy and slower-paced), and what that means for pass-catching volume and scoring opportunities.

Negative sentiment like this can impact daily fantasy by depressing ownership below what might be projected by sophisticated public ownership models — it’s a qualitative factor that’s somewhat hard to capture. However, Brown is incredibly talented and a dynamic playmaker who has still flashed high-output performances this season. He’s worth rostering, betting that his ownership will be depressed relative to his chances of a spike-week outcome that pushes him into the optimal lineup at this captain salary.

Value Plays

Ross Dwelley ($200) or Brock Wright ($1,600)
The opportunity for the Lions’ tight ends is obvious: these players will have outsized roles relative to their salaries, which were set before Sam LaPorta was ruled out. Brock Wright is likely to be the primary option with Dwelley as the secondary, but both have considerable point-per-dollar value at their salaries. That makes them appealing and means they should be sprinkled into a lot of lineups.

What will be crucial, however, is ensuring the lineups you build around them have other factors (total salary used, positional leverage, other low-ownership options, etc.) that make them less likely to be duplicated, because both of these tight ends figure to be part of a host of very chalky, highly duplicated constructions on Sunday night.

Jahan Dotson ($2,400 FLEX)
Jahan Dotson’s Week 8 performance was solid with A.J. Brown sidelined, but he returned to a much more normal role in Week 10 when the Eagles came back from their bye. Even so, Dotson continued to see snaps and targets, even if they were modest on all counts.

As mentioned above, identifying low-owned options with genuine upside is going to be crucial on this slate, and Dotson is one of the few players with enough of a role to have even a small chance to deliver a slate-breaking performance even at relatively modest volume.

Lineup Rules to Consider

Onslaught Lineups

Most of the public is expecting a close matchup between two of the league’s elite teams. Both are competitive on both sides of the ball. Building lineups around one-sided game outcomes feels like a strong way to create solid, contrarian builds without having to jam in too many extremely low-projection players. I think either team is viable as the basis for an onslaught lineup this week.

Rostering More Than One Kicker and/or Defense

I’m often not a huge fan of playing kickers or defenses at all in my builds. That hasn’t been the most advantageous stance this season for showdowns, as kickers have been kicking more, attempting longer field goals, and scoring fantasy points at a higher rate.

Historically, the issue with rostering kickers or defenses is that their optimal rates tend to lag their ownership, and lineups built with them often have higher duplication risk than lineups built with low-owned, low-salary skill-position players. However, this week, there is a considerable lack of low-salary options with any sort of legitimate role in either offense. That will not only thin out the realistic options, but also push ownership up on the few viable cheap plays (making them worse from an EV perspective).

Moreover, I think it’s possible you may fade the public by going heavier on kickers/defenses, as many players are likelier to build for high-scoring outcomes than slower-paced environments where defenses and kickers tend to perform better.

A Look at the Prop Market

Here are some notable player props that may inform how the game could unfold. (Not betting advice, but useful for DFS lineup construction.)

• Jake Elliott – O/U 6.5 Kicking Points
  • DraftKings: $4,800 ($7,200 CPT)
• Dallas Goedert – O/U 37.5 Receiving Yards, +160 Anytime TD
  • DraftKings: $5,600 ($8,400 CPT)
• Brock Wright – O/U 16.5 Receiving Yards, +310 Anytime TD
  • DraftKings: $1,600 ($2,400 CPT)