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 15 featured a 13-game slate with the standard $20 buy-in Millionaire Maker contest.
Mass multi-entry player giantsandwarfs won the contest with one of their 66 rosters. That roster exceeds any of their others by more than 60 points. Let’s see how they did it and what type of overall exposures they had.
The Lineup
The Stack
The clear best DFS spot on the slate was the likely shootout between the Rams and the Lions. That made Jared Goff an obvious leverage spot at very low ownership. His opponent Matthew Stafford saw around three times Goff’s ownership, despite Goff playing for the underdog and likely needing to be more aggressive.
I highlighted Goff + Rams doubles as my favorite building block of the week, but the reason I’m not a millionaire is I picked the wrong double. Puka Nacua performed as expected, but with Rams #2 wide receiver Davante Adams exiting early with an injury, it was tight end Colby Parkinson that picked up the slack for the Rams.
Plus, giantsandwarfs included the Lions’ top-two pass catchers, wide receivers Amon-Ra St. Brown and Jameson Williams, both of whom had big games while accounting for 80% of Goff’s receptions on the day. Detroit is and will continue to be a very concentrated offense down the stretch, so Goff doubles will be in play most weeks.
Other Correlations
With the Lions-Rams game stack taking up five of the spots on this roster, there wasn’t a ton of room left over for other correlated pieces. However, giantsandwarfs also managed to fit a contrarian RB/defense stack, pairing D’Andre Swift with the Bears defense.
Chicago’s defense made a lot of sense against the Browns, considering they were favored by more than a touchdown in one of the lowest-total games on the slate. Swift was extremely contrarian, though, considering he’d been splitting time with Kyle Monangai and it was a difficult perceived matchup.
With the game script and weather both working in favor of the running game, the Bears ran the ball on more than 50% of their snaps, with Swift getting 18 carries. He was somewhat lucky to turn two of those into touchdowns against the league’s second-best run defense by DVOA, but it’s always going to take more than a small amount of luck to bink a GPP.
The Chalk
The only pieces in this roster with double-digit ownership were the wide receivers from Lions-Rams. Given their price tags, I would also guess that the proportion of lineups that had all of St. Brown, Williams, and Nacua was much smaller than their multiplicative ownership would imply, so even that doesn’t really count as chalk.
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The Sleepers
In order to fit that expensive game stack (and a somewhat pricey defense), giantsandwarfs had to punt at the flex spot. They chose to do so with Commanders tight end Ben Sinnott, who scored 4.6 points. Considering giantsandwarfs’ margin of victory in this contest was 4.9 points, they could’ve taken a zero at that spot and still won the contest.
That’s further evidence that you don’t need a big score from every position, even on a 13-game main slate with plenty of strong options. Sometimes, the best thing a player can do for you is save salary for other positions.
Pictured: Jared Goff
Photo Credit: Imagn
