NFL's New Injury Policy: The Effect on DFS

In case you didn’t notice, on Saturday we released our brand new NFL DFS suite of tools including full projections, optimal NFL lineups and Player Lab which includes filters to help you create NFL lineups for FanDuel and DraftKings. It’s a robust set of tools; well beyond anything we’ve ever had and something we feel will help our users *ahem* tackle the NFL season.

Using tools like these for the NFL season is crucial and you can grab a free 2 WEEK trial to test out yourself.

In the first run of our projections this is the optimal lineup our system is spitting out:

This week the NFL released new rules concerning injury notifications for teams. The league’s done away with the “Probable” tag that used to accompany Tom Brady every week (and a bunch of other guys as well). A player listed as Probable was a comforting reassurance dude would suit up and take the field Sunday (or Monday or Thursday). But since so many Probable players were playing (95%+) the NFL in their infinite wisdom said, “Screw it, we don’t need that label anymore. Let’s just do ‘Questionable’ and ‘Probable’.” All well and good right? Wrong.

The Questionable tag means a player is 50-50 to play the game and the Doubtful tag means he’s 90% to sit it out. The NFL keeps track of these percentages for teams to make sure they’re playing on the up and up with their injury designations.

But here’s the thing: teams only need to have a 50-50 conversion on Questionable players in the aggregate. The NFL (I believe) isn’t looking at individual test cases. All of those guys who were probable (or a lot of them) will likely get a Q tag to even out the numbers with the Doubtfuls. More Doubtfuls will become Questionables. See where I'm going with this? I could see this easily becoming some numbers game among the teams as they look to withhold as much injury information as possible from the opponent. And sure, maybe I'm channeling my inner Chicken Little here, but it's just in each team's best interest to be open with information.

So where does that leave us DFS’ers? In the dark. In the (almost) pitch black dark. The one thing we could (sort of) count on with the NFL, as opposed to say the NBA, was how forthright teams were concerning injuries. For the most part (though not completely) we headed into at least Sunday lineup lock all on an even information plane. We essentially knew who was playing and who was sitting. It’s what made setting NFL lineups, from an injury and clarity perspective, much easier than some other sports.

I’m very worried that’s no longer the case. Because teams don’t need to submit their final Actives list until 90 minutes before game time, we are likely staring at a situation where only 1 PM EST games are safe.

We will likely see many more Questionable players who are actually Doubtful so that the numbers look good in the end. I don’t think this lends more honesty and clarity to the situation. And Thursday Night Football? Forget it. It’s likely we are just simply guessing at things.

Is it the end of the world? No, we will rely more on beat writers who are following practices to know if a player is taking part and how active they are in schemes. But that’s going to require a great amount of attention especially on FanDuel where lineups are locked for good. DraftKings is less of an issue with late swap, though that’s not always an exact science with one lineup move typically cascading to other slots.

This is all to say we’ve added a new element of uncertainty to NFL DFS this season. We’ll have to have contingency plans in place for the unknown.

Be sure to get a copy of our free eBook on setting Weekly DFS NFL lineups for FanDuel and DraftKings!

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