FFPC Playoff Challenge: Team by Team Breakdowns
Sharing my expectations of ownership, my favourite plays and favourite fades in the tournament
Hey folks,
Welcome back to coverage of the FFPC playoff challenge. If you are new to the tournament and want an introduction check out my piece from last week!
Today I want to start by answering a few questions brought up to me by some first-time players, and then going team by team giving you a view of my expectations for ownership, and who my favourite plays and fades are.
To kick off, one of the most common questions is how far off the most popular plays you need to get, and it’s a great question. As we talked about last week, in any large field tournament like this you want to create leverage against the field by picking some strategic fades of popular players: but how do you pick your spots and how do you know how many of these fades to put on one team?
Let’s talk all aspects of fades and leverage plays here quick:
How off the board do your plays need to be?
The first thing I’d say is you never need to venture *too* far off the common path. As I’ll mention later, I expect Ceedee Lamb to be 85-90% owned in this contest. Playing Dallas any way other than Lamb is going to be rare in and of itself, so if you find yourself wanting to do so, you can have your pick of the other options. There’s no need to pick a Michael Gallup for instance when Tony Pollard, Brandin Cooks and Jake Ferguson are all likely to be five-percent owned or less.
Who should you fade?
There is no right or wrong answer to this in terms of an individual player. But generally speaking the highest-EV fade spots are going to be the ones which are most fragile at the highest ownership. Ceedee Lamb is likely going to be the highest-owned player in the tournament, which means if he *does* fail you gain the most from fading him. But he’s not particularly fragile given he is a strong projection for Week 1 in any game script, and on the second most likely team to play multiple games based on Vegas odds.
Amon-Ra St. Brown and Tyreek Hill won’t be as heavily owned as Ceedee Lamb. But they will be heavily owned, and both play on teams much more likely to lose in Round 1 than Lamb. They also each have teammates who project to be more live to outscore them in a one-week scenario than Lamb’s - and in the case they do lose, you can also attempt to beat their score with any of the other players on week 1 losers.
How many unpopular plays do you need?
It depends on how off the board you get. Think about it in terms of combinatorial ownership:
A singe 1% owned play serves the same general purpose as two 10% owned plays. So the more contrarian your contrarian plays are the fewer you need. As a rule of thumb, I would not have more than roughly half my lineup differentiated from the highest projecting plays.
Think about it this way: let’s say you pick two 10% owned players and they’re not correlated with each other such that you’d expect people playing one to be more likely to play the other. In the $200 tournament you are now one of an expected 78 people to play these two plays together, and one of 160 in the $35 tournament, with 12 other lineup spots left.
Generally speaking I prefer to pick at least one stand from a bracket perspective and play that out to its natural conclusion, then adjust the rest of my lineup as needed depending on how off the board this takes me:
For example, if my “stand” is that the Dolphins beat the Chiefs, I probably play Tyreek Hill, I would fade all KC skill players, and I’m may be more inclined to play Josh Allen as my QB than Lamar Jackson since Allen would be getting the “easier” round 2 matchup vs. the HOU/CLE winner instead of their expected opponent: Kansas City.
This isn’t a particularly intrusive way to play the tournament and is the kind of lineup I’m looking for other small shifts in the other side of my bracket such as playing Cooper Kupp over Kyren Williams or Puka Nacua, or playing a Packer skill player as one of my Round 1 loser scores instead of the more commonly played teams.
If I was instead betting on San Francisco to lose their first game, now we’re talking a more intrusive assumption in terms of how it alters my lineup overall.
First off, the way to “action” a San Francisco loss would be to play a non-CMC 49er. Then from there I’d consider making it a Jalen Hurts lineup and playing for the Eagles to make a run, or if I’d prefer to play it as a Rams upset, I’d make sure to have a Ram in my lineup, while potentially fading the Lions entirely.
Just based on Vegas odds, you are more likely to get a 49ers upset if their opponent is the Eagles or Rams than if it’s the Packers or Buccaneers, so I would prefer to play for those scenarios.
Do I think the Eagles are going to beat the 49ers? No. Frankly I’m not particularly confident they even beat Tampa Bay. But if you do play a Hurts-non-CMC lineup you’ve made two high-leverage plays that are correlated to one another, and it allows you to then build the rest of your lineup fairly chalky from there. I don’t think it’s a particularly likely scenario to hit, but I absolutely think that’s a +EV lineup in this tournament overall.
The last strategic points I want to hit on are just two simple rules I think are pretty intuitive if you think it through but sometimes people miss.
The first rule is when you are building your lineup you almost *need* to have a skill player from every team you expect to win a game. I.E. in every round 1 game, you should have a skill player from at least one of the teams, otherwise you are banking on a defense or kicker to outscore a skill player in multiple games which is incredibly thin (*with one possible exception)
The second thing comes down to Quarterback. I’ve seen some folks float taking Dak Prescott, Brock Purdy or Mathew Stafford as a contrarian Quarterback play and here’s why that’s in my view not a strong play:
The most popular QBs in this tournament will be Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen. Not only do they score a lot of raw points, but they have strong odds of making the Super Bowl, and also tend to ‘gap’ their team-mates by more than almost any other QB in the tournament. (Remember: this tournament is all about relative scoring)
So what happens if we say the Cowboys make the Super Bowl?
It’s very possible Dak Prescott is the highest scoring cowboy, and possible he’s the highest scoring Quarterback. But if either Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen play him in the Super Bowl, or in Allen’s case - even if he makes the Conference Championship Game - Prescott would be an underdog to outscore Ceedee Lamb by a wider margin than Allen or Jackson outscore their next-highest scoring teammate.
In order for a Prescott, Purdy or Stafford QB team to be optimal, you need their team to make the Super Bowl, and you probably need a team like Cleveland or Miami where the QB is less likely to outscore their top teammate to be their opponent, just to have any chance of winning. To me the only viable QBs are Jackson, Allen, Mahomes and Hurts.
Ok let’s get into the team by team breakdowns:
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