Air Yards Buy Low Week 3
Two Week 2 Buy Low WRs on the $1,000,000 winning lineup
In DFS tournaments there are three slots that have to be filled with a WR. The flex spot is a potential fourth, but ideally you want to put a cheap RB in the flex that’s expected to have lots of volume due to injury to the starter or just because he’s a good value relative to his salary-implied production. This was the case Week 2, where the winning lineup featured just three WR.1
Both Davante Adams and Zay Flowers were Buy Lows Week 2, and their overall low ownership helped to differentiate csears175’s lineup among a field over over 300,000 entrants.
Both Davante Adams and Zay Flowers were on the winning lineup from a field over over 300,000 entrants.
Don’t get it twisted, Kamara is the main reason this lineup won the big bucks. But it is undeniable that having 2/3 of the lineup rostered with low-owned, Buy Low WRs impacted csears175’s win probability and ROI in large ways. The shit still works, as it should.
Before I get to the Buy Low, a quick note on the optimizer I’ve been teasing. It’s based on a game sim I’ve built and added to for a few years, and my hope has been to leverage the game simulations to help Buy Low readers get a sense of the types of lineups they can fit recommended players into.
The problem I've run into is that the sim is really just a reflection of all my assumptions. The assumptions propagate from the play level on up through each sim run and ultimately, despite there being a range of outcomes, the recommended lineups are mirrors of those initial starting assumptions.
There’s a large benefit to this, don’t get me wrong. Being able to test assumptions and then see how they play out in every possible game script and get solid range of outcomes along with upsides is very valuable. But the value lies in the testing of assumptions — on varying the inputs — and it’s just not viable to let everyone run 30,000 sims to test their leans over and over. Not even companies whose entire product is based on play-level game sims allow for this, it’s so computationally expensive2. So sadly I’m not going to ship the optimizer. Instead I’ll try and work any insights I get from my sims into the write ups, and also try and caveat my assumptions when I do.
Week 3 Buy Low
I’ve once again culled3 names from the list that have high consensus ranks as of the time of publishing. That means Amon-Ra St. Brown and Trey McBride are off the list. Chis Olave at WR 11 just missed, as did Garrett Wilson at WR 12. But if you are looking to either pay up at WR or TE, these are solid bets.
Michael Pittman
7/15 for 52 yards and no TDs
Pittman is a Buy Low player I talked about on the Unexpected Points pod on Tuesday, so if you caught that you probably know the main thesis here: Anthony Richardson is one of the few QBs in the NFL right now that has both the arm talent and the willingness to use it downfield — at least in the early goings of the season. Since that’s true and he has a clear affinity for Pittman, I’m bullish on Pittman’s near-term prospects.
This is part of a broader pattern that I believe is important and real. I’ve seen more than a few examples of WRs giving up or just not expecting targets on deep routes (Amari Cooper Week 1, Darnell Mooney on Monday Night Football are two examples), but I think this is extending to Safetys a bit as well.
I think as the game wears on they can get complacent. I also think they can be overly influenced by the intermediate and short passes that teams are attempting with higher frequency.
This clip of Pittman might be an example of both these WR and S tendencies at once:
Pittman is the receiver at the bottom. In the clip Xavier McKinney, the S for Green Bay to the short side of the field, sees TE Kylen Granson come open underneath and bites on the route. Meanwhile Richardson has already decided to uncork one down the sideline to Pittman who is being covered by Carrington Vallentine.
The pass ends up being a one-on-one matchup with plenty of room to the sideline, and if Richardson was better with the ball placement it could have been a long completion and probably a TD. But the throw wasn’t perfect and it seems like Pittman kind of slows down at the top of his route, like he doesn’t really expect to be targeted.
Maybe I’m misreading the tape tea-leaves here. It’s a real danger drawing firm conclusions from this stuff. But vibes based edges can also be actionable, and this is one I personally believe in: teams are scared to throw into the teeth of 2-safety looks right now, and the defense counts on this.
This means defenders are surprised when a QB will actually challenge them deep, and that is a distinct advantage for the offense. QBs who have the “arm arrogance” to keep attempting these throws deep will eventually succeed, and probably at a higher rate than we would otherwise expect given the target depth because the defense isn’t expecting to be challenged.