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.
As is their Week 1 custom, DraftKings offered a special $5 Milly Maker, with the lower buy-in necessitating a more top-heavy payout structure and more total entries. Despite that, we had a solo winner — who lapped the field with an easy nine-point win.
Our winner this week was rotomwash, who had lineups finish first, fifth, and 15th in the contest with nearly a million total entries.
The Lineup
Let’s see how they did it.
The Stack
One of my recurring notes on Week 1 was that we know less than we think. Week 1 gave us a tight grouping of games with similar totals across the board, with the notable outlier being Steelers-Jets, where the 37.5-point total was five points lower than any other game.
Surprisingly, that turned into the best fantasy game of the day, producing a total of 66 points. rotomwash leaned into this uncertainty, featuring Justin Fields in all four of his top-100 finishing lineups. Interestingly, Fields wasn’t stacked with any of his pass catchers, but with two touchdowns coming on the ground, he didn’t need to be.
In fact, nowhere on this lineup are two teammates featured. That feels “wrong” from a standard DFS game-theory standpoint, but it made sense here for two reasons. One, rushing QBs like Fields often score well without bringing a teammate along with them. Less mobile QBs should almost always be stacked with at least one receiver, but not players like Fields.
Two, in a field with just under 900,000 entrants, you need the best scorer at every position. With just one football to go around in each game, it’s fairly unlikely that the best RB and WR will be on the same team, or the two best receivers, etc. I wouldn’t suggest this strategy in most contests, since it’s equivalent to hitting a nine-leg parlay of the best price-considered player at each spot, but in fields of this size it might actually be optimal.
Other Correlations
Of course, rotomwash didn’t totally ignore correlation in his lineup. This entry featured two spots of opposing players from the same game, both nicely paired with each other.
The first was top running back Bijan Robinson paired with underpriced Bucs WR2 Emeka Egbuka. This was a combination I mentioned as well, since both players would benefit from the same game script. A Falcons lead means more work for both Robinson and the Bucs passing attack. Robinson scoring the first touchdown of the game on a 50-yard pass was about as perfect a start as one could hope for if rostering that combination.
The next pairing was Ricky Pearsall and Jaxon Smith-Njigba from the 49ers-Seahawks NFC West matchup. They cost just $10,300 combined despite both serving as de facto top options in their team’s passing game. Pearsall got a huge boost from both Jauan Jennings and George Kittle leaving with injuries, but those are the type of breaks one needs to top contests this massive.
The Chalk
Outside of Egbuka, the heaviest-owned piece of this lineup was the defense. Denver was a fairly obvious choice, coming into the game as the heaviest favorite and facing the team with the lowest implied total on the slate.
While typically we recommend avoiding chalk defenses, this lineup was contrarian enough elsewhere that it made sense to lean in to the best on-paper play. Additionally, Week 1’s loose salary structure made spending up for defense more viable, and the Broncos came through with six sacks and two forced fumbles.
Those factors combined made this the rare case where taking the most expensive and most popular defense was a good idea, especially considering the structure around it.
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The Sleepers
The most contrarian piece in the lineup was tight end Juwan Johnson of the Saints. I both wrote up and personally stacked Cardinals-Saints this weekend but didn’t think to click on Johnson, instead going for big names like Chris Olave and Alvin Kamara from the Saints side. I’m a fan of sprinkling in cheap tight ends in general, though, as it doesn’t take much from them to win a slate. Johnson caught eight passes for 76 yards, good for 15.6 points, the lowest offensive score on the team, but it was plenty at $3,300. I wish I had a better takeaway than “mix and match cheap tight ends,” but sometimes that’s all there is.
We already discussed the inclusion of Justin Fields, who also came in extremely contrarian at 1.8%. The other sub-10% owned piece was Rams WR1 Puka Nacua. His 10/130/0 line actually wasn’t all that impressive, especially by his lofty standards, but with other receivers on the slate posting even more disappointing lines (looking at you, Ja’Marr Chase), Nacua stood out.
Nacua and the somewhat-chalky De’Von Achane are both the type of players that are fantasy-relevant on a weekly basis. I didn’t see anything that made them especially valuable in Week 1, but it’s never a bad time to play either. Especially at the relatively low ownership Nacua projected for and ultimately had.
Pictured: Puka Nacua
Photo Credit: Imagn
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