Levitan’s DFS Cash Lineup Review: Week 6

I play around 60% of my action each week in “cash games.” Cash games refer to any contest in which roughly 50% of the field gets paid out, such as head-to-head, double up or 50/50. I try to get as much head-to-head action as I can every week and then supplement that with other cash games. I make one cash lineup for DraftKings and one for FanDuel. 

Each week, I’ll review my cash-game lineups in this space. Sometimes I’ll lose, but hopefully I’ll win more often. Either way, I’ll post it here and give you my thought process.

FANDUEL: Will add screenshot asap, having trouble accessing my account right now. But here’s the team I played:
QB: Trevor Lawrence
RB: Rico Dowdle
RB: Javonte Williams
WR: Puka Nacua
WR: Ladd McConkey
WR: Stefon Diggs
TE: Michael Mayer
FLEX: Josh Jacobs
D/ST: Raiders

This was a similar slate to many we’ve had already this season. There were a slew of incredible running back plays, picking the right three would be a key. There were also viable punts available at QB, TE, and D.

Note: Unless stated otherwise, the discussion below is about DraftKings.

MY MUST PLAYS
* Puka Nacua was up to $8700 here, his highest price of the season. But that was still far too cheap relative to the 2021 Cooper Kupp role Puka is playing. The concerns were some wind in Baltimore and the return of Marlon Humphrey plus Kyle Hamilton. But those were mild docks at most in a cash setting, where Puka’s floor/ceiling combo is outrageous.

* Jaxon Smith-Njigba was easily our No. 2 WR in salary-adjusted value. He’s having one of the most insane starts to a season ever on a per-route basis, yet was still just $7600 on full-PPR DraftKings. JSN is Puka-lite, I’ve played him almost every cash slate this season.  

MY WANT PLAYS
* I only considered two QBs: Trevor Lawrence ($5100) and Drake Maye ($5900). I preferred Maye by a decent margin, but did not see viable ways to get to him without punting a WR spot – something I did not want to do. So I was fine to just punt QB at this borderline free price on Lawrence, who was facing the Seahawks without three of their top-four secondary pieces.

* I thought there were six RBs in play: Rico Dowdle, Rachaad White, Javonte Wiliams, Josh Jacobs, Christian McCaffrey, Jonathan Taylor. I knew I’d be playing three, as usual. Given that I considered Puka and JSN musts (see above), the three cheap values were the easy call.

It also made it easy that all three had huge workload projections that included pass-down work. Rico Dowdle was staring at 90%+ of the RB touches against the lowly Cowboys defense. Same for Javonte Williams with Miles Sanders done. And Rachaad White projected to dominate the high-value touches (targets and goal-line) against a very young and leaky 49ers defense.

* As usual, I was looking to spend as little as possible at D/ST. The Dolphins were facing the Chargers injury-decimated offensive line at home at just $2200. The Titans against mistake-prone Geno Smith and the Raiders’ brutal offensive line was also an option at $2400, but didn’t fit this team.

* The last 2v2 I looked at was Chris Olave and Michael Mayer vs. Ladd McConkey and Hunter Long. We had this very tight in projection, with the Olave/Mayer side a hair ahead. In the end, I simply did not want to play Hunter Long. I wasn’t certain he’d be ahead of Johnny Mundt, and thought a zero was in play for Long. So even though I loved Ladd, I took the Olave volume and was happy to play Mayer with Brock Bowers (knee) out again.

It’s worth noting that I went off the board a little to play Ladd McConkey on FanDuel (see team above). If I hadn’t done that, I likely would’ve jammed Ladd in on DK. With Quentin Johnston (hamstring) out and a matchup against the Dolphins, I wanted some Ladd in cash. So hedging across sites (one Ladd, one Olave) made sense to me.

Week 6 Results
Certainly got unlucky that Puka Nacua (ankle) went down, that’s a huge salary to eat an injury at. So I was thrilled to escape with another solidly winning week. Really happy with the way I handled tight end. And given the way the usage went, think some version of the DK team I played was right. Note that this team was our optimal (based on our projections pre-lock). You can always find our optimals if you have an ETR In-Season Product subscription and The Solver add-on.