Every Sunday in the weekly fantasy chats, I get asked about my favorite plays of the week or who is my player pool that weekend for DFS.
This article series covers exactly that.
I will go through the games that I am targeting for stacking purposes as well as the players I am targeting as core plays for all formats and players for tournaments.
The idea is that this will paint a clearer picture of framing lineups.
Week 2 DFS Content:
For any that are new here, one of my favorite ways to play DFS from a tournament stance is small-field, single-to-five-max entry games with 5K or smaller fields.
Both sites even offer these types of games with fewer than 100 entries (albeit at a higher cost of entry) if you want to go after a really small field.
In these contests, my approach is to go with full-game stacks.
You are going to lose a lot of weeks, but if you get the game right, you gain a big advantage. Just cashing in one of these over an 18-week season can make your entire year.
When doing these, I want to aggressively build around games that have a wider range of outcomes.
However, with the reduced number of entries, you can also eat some chalky game stacks because we are going further in the overall game stack than what our opponents likely will.
These are the games I am circling for those tournaments in Week 2, but you can also tie these games into your stacks for other tournaments.
You can dig deeper into why I believe these games present some downside in the Worksheet, but we are solely playing for the upside outcome here in these games.
I will have some analysis on the player selections and game writeups, but check out the Week 2 Worksheet for a fully detailed breakdown of the players and games.
Jaguars vs. Chiefs
This is the highest game total of the week, so no surprises here.
Any game involving Kansas City is always going to be in contention for the highest game total, but the Chiefs are one of the harder teams to stack for DFS purposes because they have one consistent high-level player (Travis Kelce) and play a rotation of players at running back and wide receiver.
Assuming he plays, you can always just pay up for Kelce to pair with Patrick Mahomes, but paying top-dollar at both “onesie” positions does make building out the rest of the roster tough.
Mahomes and Kelce are the highest-priced players in their position, accounting for 31.8% of your cap at DraftKings and 29.2% at FanDuel. If going that route, you are forced to take swings on cheap players with a wider range of outcomes.
If using Mahomes, you are going to have to find a way to get unique outside of just using Kelce.
You could just play him without any of his pass catchers since Kelce is coming into the week questionable and could still be limited. And even if Mahomes throws multiple touchdowns, there is no lock that those players who catch them still pop for fantasy.
If taking swings on any of these low-level Chief wideouts, Kadarius Toney was still regularly open and the one wideout creating space in Week 1, despite his horrendous game. Toney had 12 targets in two games against Jacksonville a year ago.
From a playing time perspective, Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Skyy Moore will be on the field the most.
With Mahomes, you can bring back Christian Kirk for cheap and always use Travis Etienne as a natural correlation.
I believe more value will be with Mahomes in full-game stacks of this game because Trevor Lawrence is easier for gamers to stack.
You can use options such as Calvin Ridley, Zay Jones, and Evan Engram with Lawrence.
That makes Etienne inherent leverage for another week. I feel like we will be saying that a lot this season, but he is another good game theory player this week.
The wild card here for tournaments is Kirk.
Kirk was on the field for just 65.7% of the dropbacks in Week 1. His season-low rate in 2022 was 84.6%.
As a result, Kirk only received three targets, catching one for nine yards.
The Jaguars only used 11 personnel on 61.8% of their passing plays in Week 1, which was 25th in the league. This should be one of those games where that rate spikes.
In two games against the Chiefs a year ago, the Jaguars used 11 personnel on 86.0% of their passing plays, and that was without Ridley on the roster.
