One of my favorite pieces of content to make is my weekly review of the winning Millionaire Maker — or occasionally other large prize pool — lineup. While we (rightfully) spend most of our time looking forward to the next slate, reverse-engineering what works in GPPs is a valuable exercise to make us better DFS players.
Week 5 featured a 10-game slate with the standard $20 buy-in Millionaire Maker contest.
We finally had a small-portfolio player take down the Milly Maker this week, with user brwntwn4 taking the million on one of their eight lineups. The winner had just a three-point margin of victory; let’s take a look.
The Lineup
The Stack
Drake Maye was a reasonably popular option at QB this week, coming in with 20+ point performances in three of the first five games of his second NFL season. The former #3 pick has been athletically comped to Josh Allen and contributes with both his arm and his legs to the box score. Plus, he got a matchup with a Saints defense that ranks 25th in points allowed.
What made the stack unique was the inclusion of Kayshon Boutte, who hadn’t seen more than three targets in a game since Week 1. While he saw just five this week, he turned them into 93 yards and two touchdowns. Most of the field was on Stefon Diggs or tight end Hunter Henry, but it was Boutte that was the better DFS option.
Which serves as a reminder that players with high aDOTs, like Boutte’s 15.6, don’t need a ton of volume to post massive scores. Anytime we can get them at cheap price tags, they’re worth a GPP flier — even if their median outcome/projection isn’t all that great.
This stack also didn’t feature any bring-backs from the Saints side, which probably made it slightly more unique, as Chris Olave likely featured on most rosters that stacked Maye.
Other Correlations
The other correlated piece from this lineup was a classic RB/WR stack, George Pickens and Rico Dowdle. The Panthers/Cowboys game was pretty obviously the best DFS spot, so it made sense to get some exposure to it. The stack of Dowdle and Pickens paired well with a positive Panthers game script, which would increase the Panthers run rate and the Cowboys pass rate.
Both players also were seeing huge increases in their workload due to injuries around them — starting running back Chuba Hubbard for the Panthers and top wide receiver CeeDee Lamb for the Cowboys. Pairing them was a way to get solid values, build in some correlation, and leave room to stack a higher-upside QB.
That’s a few times this season we’ve seen the opposing RB/WR stack win tournaments without a QB from that game, and it’s probably worth investing in going forward.
The Chalk
As projection systems continue to get better, we’ve seen more and more chalky pieces come through in GPP-winning lineups. To frame that another way, we’ve seen the field correctly identify the best plays at a higher rate — particularly at running back.
That was the case here with Josh Jacobs and Kyren Williams, two backs who were the highest-rated players at the position in our Tournament Model heading into Week 6. Both were big favorites likely to see a heavy workload against struggling defenses, which is exactly how it played out.
While Jacobs was technically the worst offensive performer in this lineup, his 16 DraftKings points were enough to not lose a tournament even if he didn’t win it for brwntwn4. Sometimes that’s enough, as you typically don’t need the best possible play in every spot even in massive contests—there are just too many possible permutations for the perfect lineup to be found.
This is a good reminder that projecting running back production is much easier than projecting pass catchers, so if you’re going to eat some chalk, that’s the position to do it.
Wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and the Colts defense were both also fairly popular, though their ended up being much better plays at defense. Team defense is the hardest position to project accurately, so the lesson there is the opposite — don’t roster the chalk defenses. It worked out here, but the Raiders at $100 less scored 12 more points, so it nearly cost brwntwn4 in a big way.
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The Sleepers
Outside of Boutte and Pickens, the only piece of this lineup rostered in the single digits was tight end Michael Mayer. I’m somewhat surprised Mayer didn’t catch more steam, since starting tight end Brock Bowers was ruled out, leaving Mayer to take over his role. Mayer ended up with the second-highest Pts/Sal projection in our models after the Bowers news.
As always, with cheap tight ends you’re mostly betting on touchdowns, which are fairly hard to predict relative to things like catches and yards. Mayer happened to catch one this week, which was the difference between first and third place for brwntwn4, a $950,000 swing.
Much like team defense, tight end is a position where you should take some chances, at best mixing and matching a few options, and at worst avoiding the chalkiest options.
Pictured: Drake Maye
Photo Credit: Imagn
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