Every week, some lucky person takes home $1 million by winning the DraftKings DFS Millionaire Maker contest, aka The Milly Maker. The contest is $20 to enter with a maximum of 150 entries per person. I looked at a few key trends from two years of winners this summer and pulled some key trends that can be found here: Five Key Trends from Million Dollar DraftKings NFL DFS Lineups. In this series, we’ll look at what the winning lineup did each week with its DraftKings picks for the Millionaire Maker and see if it aligns with prior trends or if there are new ways and DraftKings lineup advice we need to take down the contest. Here is the Week 12 breakdown.
DraftKings NFL DFS: Week 12 Millionaire Maker Review
The Winning DraftKings DFS Lineup Picks
The Week 12 Milly Maker was won by IRFULSHER with a Patrick Mahomes and Tyreek Hill stack. Hill broke the slate with 60.9 DraftKings points, and Mahomes added another 32.3 points. Hill’s 60-point outing was only the second time a player has topped 60 points in the history of DraftKings. Jamaal Charles‘ 62.5 DraftKings points in Week 15 of 2013 is the most ever since DraftKings was founded.
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The lineup also featured a secondary stack of Austin Ekeler and Gabriel Davis. Lastly, it featured a third stack of two running backs in the same game with Nyheim Hines and Derrick Henry. After Hines, the chalkiest play of this lineup was the Saints defense. They faced a practice squad wide receiver at quarterback and were priced at $3,800. It was likely the greatest matchup for a defense in the modern history of football.
No. 1 Daily Fantasy Football Rule: Play The Big Dog at Low Ownership
Henry was arguably an obvious play this week, and it had nothing to do with matchup, game total, him being due for a big game or anything else. He was rostered by 6.4% of teams. That is all we needed to know. Henry historically has one of the most barbell shaped distributions among the elite running backs. He led his team in carries for the first time in 2018. Ezekiel Elliott has led his team in carries in every season since 2016. The game-by-game scoring distribution if the two is night and day.
| Derrick Henry | Ezekiel Elliott | |
| 40+ Points | 8.9% | 2.9% |
| 30+ Points | 20.0% | 15.7% |
| Fewer than 10 Points | 28.9% | 10.0% |
Elliott busts at a massively lower rate than Henry, who dips below 10 DraftKings points at nearly three times the rate. On the other hand, Henry’s big games come at a higher rate as well. He tops 40 points at three times the rate of Elliott. Henry’s big games come on long runs and multi-touchdown games. He accomplishes those things more often than most other running backs but because that is his route to a ceiling game, his range of outcomes is bifurcated. He relies on producing outlier events, and when those things don’t occur, his day is going to be ugly. With no receiving value to be heard of, his floor games are going to be even more frequent.
Ranges Versus Ownership
Playing Henry at low ownership isn’t actually the most important rule in NFL DFS. Understanding the range of outcomes for given players and leveraging that against ownership might be.
In Week 9, he carried 21 times for 68 yards, did not catch a pass, and did not score. That type of game is going to be more common for Henry than it will be for someone like Elliott. Because of that, Henry at 30% ownership has a higher likelihood of killing all of the lineups that use him than Alvin Kamara or Dalvin Cook at 30% ownership. Conversely, Henry at 6.4% has a greater chance of breaking the slate than most other backs. Henry deserves strong consideration anytime he is below 10%.
Negative Correlation in DraftKings DFS
Increasing correlation is one of the fastest ways to skew your results toward ceiling performances and hilarious flops. In tournaments, the difference between one place out of simply cashing a lineup and 50,000 places out of cashing a lineup is precisely $0. The difference between 100th and first can be nearly $1 million. Correlation gets your lineups’ distribution to match up the distribution of tournament payout structures. So negative correlation would be bad … right?
Maybe not. Running backs in the same game aren’t negatively correlated, but if one back is getting 30 carries and breaking off chunk runs at will, they are likely capping the carry volume of the opposing running back. Their ceiling can be negatively correlated. Correlation is just one of the tools at our disposal. Playing players who project well also matters (that’s rule No. 3). Hines was the No. 2 value at running back on a point-per-dollar basis entering the slate based on Awesemo’s projections. His value was worth the potential negative correlation. He also scores a majority of his fantasy points as a pass catcher, which reduces the ability of Henry to cap his ceiling. It likely even flips their ceiling outcomes to correlated. Taking the risk of potential negative correlation between the two was worth the upside-versus-ownership advantage on Henry and the value proposition on Hines.
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Great insights Kyle, but I have a question: when you say, “ Henry deserves strong consideration anytime he is below 10%.” What do you mean by this. You’re insinuating that we could see what Henry’s ownership would be before the slate kicked off. How can we consider a player based on his ownership when we don’t have that information pre-slate? I understand we have projections, but I’ve found those to be wildly in accurate.