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 8 featured a 10-game slate with the standard $20 buy-in Millionaire Maker contest.
We were back to having an MME player take down the top prize, as user Bsgolfer7 won an extremely correlated lineup from their portfolio of 150 entries. Here’s what the winner looked like:
The Lineup
The Stack
The Dolphins came into the week having struggled mightily in their last few games, with talks of benching Tua Tagovailoa and/orfiring members of the coaching staff. They were taking on a Falcons defense that ranked in the top five or so by most defensive metrics heading into the week, in what seemed like a terrible matchup for the Dolphins.
That explains why Tagovailoa came in at less than half of a percent ownership. The nice thing about breaking down winners who maxed out their entries is we can see if they took a stand on a player or just got somewhat lucky that one of their dart throws made it to the top.
The answer here seems to be mostly the latter, with Bsgolfer7 rostering Tagovailoa in just 1.3% of their 150 lineups — so two total rosters. To be fair that’s still roughly three times the field’s exposure, and they were well above the field on Jaylen Waddle (and De’Von Achane though not in this lineup). That part made sense, since the Dolphins offense is highly concentrated without Tyreek Hill.
That put them in a good position to score well if the Dolphins offense overperformed, even in lineups without Tagovailoa, so we’ll give partial credit for taking an extremely bold stand on Miami.
Other Correlations
The most notable thing about this lineup was the extreme amounts of correlation baked in, with eight of the nine spots featuring some kind of connection to another piece in the lineup.
We’ve got the classic RB/DST pairing of James Cook and Buffalo, which typically performs well in blowouts. That wasn’t hard to see coming with the Bills taking on the Panthers (who were also without their starting QB). Most users didn’t want to pay up for the Bills defense, which made them fairly contrarian, and Cook also had reasonably low ownership at around 10% — but effectively lower when you consider what portion of the field paired him with the Bills defense.
They also paired Texans wide receiver Xavier Hutchinson with 49ers tight end George Kittle. I thought mixing and matching cheap Texans wideouts was the sharpest move in Week 8, and Bsgolfer7 agreed, coming in somewhat above the field on Hutchinson, Jaylin Noel, and Jayden Higgins. Pairing any of them with Kittle made sense, considering all the injuries to 49ers wide receivers. Kittle didn’t have a great game but did enough to keep pace when other lineup spots played well.
Finally, they paired Jonathan Taylor and Michael Pittman, both of the Colts, in a soft matchup against the Titans. Taylor was pretty clearly the best raw play on the slate heading into the week, as fantasy’s #1 RB in an ideal matchup and game script. That, of course, led to his 33% ownership. My guess is not too many other lineups paired him with Pittman, since the prevailing wisdom is that backs and receivers need opposite game scripts to have big days. However, if a team builds a lead through the passing game then shifts to run heavy, both players can succeed — which is exactly what happened with the Colts.
Based on the data in our correlations page linked above, running backs have a 0.26 correlation with the WR1 from the same team — roughly double their correlation with their defense, and slightly higher than a popular pairing like opposing WR1s.
The Chalk
Only two players in this lineup has even double-digit ownership percentage, and both were paired with other pieces that limited the effective ownership considerably, making this lineup extremely unique — and explaining how it won by more than 13 points over the second-place entry.
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The Sleepers
The only piece we haven’t’ discussed yet is Breece Hall, who came in at 6.4% ownership. Hall had a great matchup with the Bengals, who came into the week ranking 31st in DVOA against the run. However, the Jets had been so bad, and gamescripts gotten so negative, that Hall hadn’t really produced any standout games so far.
That changed this week, with the Jet’s coming back from two scores to win late in the game with a Breece Hall touchdown pass — something even the most optimistic of projection systems probably wasn’t including.
Bsgolfer7 had more than double the field’s exposure to Hall overall, and wisely went three running backs in this lineup since that’s where the better plays were this week.
Pictured: Jonathan Taylor
Photo Credit: Imagn
