Daily NFL Fantasy Football Thoughts for FanDuel and DraftKings Heading into Week 5

Well, there you have it. Week 4 began with Mike Tomlin's coaching blunder and ended with a batted ball in Seattle. There was plenty of stuff in between on a low-scoring, but otherwise eventful Sunday. We are already busy thinking about Week 5, but here are a couple of thoughts on the week that was.

It Was a Bad Week to be an Expensive Wide Receiver

If you paid up for receivers (or if you're like me and you paid up for two of them) then you most likely came away disappointed. Here's a table of the top WR salaries (FanDuel) for Week 4.

[table id=192 /]

Now each of these guys isn't necessarily created equally. I doubt, outside of the short evening slates, you were considering Megatron against the Seahawks. And some of these guys were more chalk-y starts than others. But getting one total touchdown from the top ten receivers simply won't happen again in any week. It was nuts. This is surely an anomaly and there were a couple of contextual factors behind the lack of production. The Falcons boat-raced Houston rendering Jones useless early. And Hopkins picked up some garbage time yards in the same game. But overall, this is about as bad as you'll see from the top group of receivers.

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Devontae Freeman - Fantasy God

Wow. What a game. I was a little surprised when Freeman was such a small cash game start on Sunday. At only 16% in the bigger FD $5 50/50 contest, Freeman was by far the play of the day. I think Freeman's under ownership highlights an interesting idea about value in DFS. It was easy to look at him as being over priced now that he was no longer at punt play prices from last week. He of course saw a big time price increase from Week 3 to Week 4, and with good reason. Entering that higher middle tier of salaries scared a lot of people off even though his situation was very much the same against the Texans. And that situation was a good one. He projected as the primary back in a game the Falcons were a -4 favorite with a high over/under. Playing him made a lot of sense. And at the risk of getting all results-based (he won't recreate this game the rest of the year) Freeman's lack of ownership on a relatively small main slate was surprising to me.

And for the record, I also played Karlos Williams who was bailed out with a late receiving TD. Playing him made a ton of sense as well even if his performance was relatively disappointing.

Sam Bradford - Highly Inaccurate

Through four weeks, there aren't many QBs throwing less efficiently than Bradford. He ranks 22nd in the league with a 62.4% completion percentage. That's garbage and apparently just the kind of quarterback Chip Kelly likes. Since Kelly took over in 2013, the Eagles QBs haven't had a completion percentage higher than 64%. Maybe that's part of the plan. Running the ball while mixing in high variance long throws to keep the defense honest. Or maybe he just hasn't found the right guy. It's probably a mix of the two, but the results for the Eagles this year tell a story. When the passes aren't connecting, and you can't run the ball, well you get a game like they played on Sunday. Garcon's miracle TD catch aside, the only reason this was even a game is because the Redskins offense is so bad the Eagles were able to keep it close. Bradford, at this point, is a completely unreliable fantasy option. Next week they play at home against a suspect Saints defense which will really test some projection systems (including ours).

Daily Fantasy Makes Headlines for all the Wrong Reasons

With major news outlets reporting on the story of DraftKing's Ethan Haskell tweeting ownership rates in the Sunday Milly, and then subsequently winning large sums on FanDuel, the DFS industry was brought into the public eye more than just the seemingly never-ending crush of commercials during sporting events (something I don't begrudge, because it pays the bills and all, but I get why some would start to think "arrgghh, not again.")

DraftKings and FanDuel have subsequently enforced a rule about their employees playing DFS, which from a PR perspective is definitely the right play. I'm not going to get too far down the rabbit hole here of the advantage one has with "inside" information when playing games. Other outlets have covered that. In the DFS landscape, there are already a large sub section of folks working hard to gain serious edges whenever possible. Heck, we are doing it here. I tend to think the best of people and want to believe everything is on the up and up in the industry. And for the most part, I think that's the case. And while generally any press is good press, it is concerning to think about large scale regulations over the industry coming down because of incidents like this. It's something to monitor. But alas, on to Week 5!