NFL DFS Week 3 DraftKings Millionaire Maker Lineup Review and Strategy

Every week, some lucky person takes home $1 million by winning the DraftKings 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 on DraftKings and see if it aligns with prior trends or if there are new ways to take down the contest.

NFL DFS Week 3 DraftKings Millionaire Maker Lineup Review and Strategy

The Winning Lineup

NFL DFS

The winners of the Week 1 and Week 2 Milly Maker contests won with fairly normal lineups compared to the data from every winner in the previous two seasons. The same can’t be said for the Week 3 winner. Their lineup still featured a quarterback double-stacked with two receivers and a bring-back from the opposing team. This week it was Russell Wilson with his top two receivers and Michael Gallup on the other side. That has been the winning strategy in all three weeks: Play a quarterback, two of their wide receivers and an opposing receiver. All winning stacks have exclusively featured receivers so far. The stacking aspect of the lineup was par for the Milly course, but how it used the cap and where it chose to get contrarian was not.

Cheap Running Backs

Someone began their Sunday thinking “I need to get Rex Burkhead plus Jeff Wilson in my lineups” and was $1 million richer by 8 p.m. Neither Burkhead nor Wilson were officially listed as a starter, and both gave up carries and receptions to other backs (Sony Michel and Jerick McKinnon, respectively). They also don’t follow the trends of previous Milly Maker winners who generally spent up at running back and played low-owned receivers. Does that mean this was a “bad” lineup that lucked into $1 million? The immense amount of luck for any lineup to finish first in a tournament aside, that was probably not the case. Both backs were playing on favored. The Patriots closed as touchdown favorites, while the 49ers were given a field goal edge. Both coaches also have historically had high run rates on a reasonable sample of seasons with their current teams. Lastly, and most importantly, both running backs came in below 2.5% ownership despite being minimum price ($4,000) with solid roles due to injuries ahead of them. They weren’t quite free square backs, but the Fantasy Cruncher Rewind Tool shows that both were in great spots because of their prices:

Burkhead – 2.9 PTS/1k$ – B Awesemo Value Grade
Wilson – 3.1 PTS/1k$ – A Awesemo Value Grade

There’s no good reason that these backs didn’t manage to top 5% ownership, but they were projected for low ownership heading into the week, and that ultimately was the case. Recognizing that market inefficiency was a great way to exploit this slate.

The State of Chalk Backs in NFL DFS

Could be an overreaction, but an interesting short term trend is the chalk RBs being quite a bit worse than chalk WRs thus far

Not saying we just jam the chalk WRs in GPPs, but I think the state of RBs in the NFL right now + some of these pass games at least makes it noteworthy

— Erik Beimfohr 🙌 (@erikbeimfohr) September 28, 2020

This is the biggest question looking ahead at NFL DFS. Both passing and rushing output are through the roof this year.

Rushing:

2019 – 26.1 attempts/team/game – 112.9 yards – 0.9 touchdowns
2020 – 27.5 attempts – 121.3 yards – 1.1 touchdowns

Passing:

2019 – 22.1 completions – 235 yards – 1.6 touchdowns
2020- 23.5 completions – 247.8 yards – 1.8 touchdowns

Both parts of offense have seen an uptick in productions, but passing games have been more predictable. Russell Wilson and Josh Allen hit as chalk last week. Dak Prescott and Matt Ryan were popular plays in the week before and combined for eight total touchdowns. Among a myriad of other possible reasons, the onward march of the NFL toward more pass-friendly offenses with innovative concepts has made calling your shot on stacking an offense fairly easy. One or more of the Cowboys receivers will bust on a given week but on the whole; they’ve produced seven games of 15 DraftKings points from their pass catchers and four games over 20 points. Building multiple lineups with different combinations of Cowboys, Falcons or Seahawks has been a successful strategy through three weeks because their passing games have been so reliable.

Running backs, on the other hand, have experienced a rash of injuries. However, the are still producing more yards per game than in any season since the ’80s. They are mostly a product of the situation they are put in, but we’ve also seen less three-down backs this year, in part because of the injuries. That means there are more fantasy points up for grabs, but those points are spread to multiple backs. Jeff Wilson scored twice with Raheem Mostert and Tevin Coleman out, but his ownership was tampered because of the presence of McKinnon, who also found the end zone.

What to Make of These Points

This could all just be a blip on the radar, so let’s not overreact to three weeks of data. Week 3 had a particularly strange set of circumstances with multiple injuries to leading backs. This could have spread out the ownership among multiple backs who were good values at low prices.

However, one point seems obvious: If you’re paying up for a running back, you better be certain that they are going to command the entirety of the touches. This Week, Mike Davis is $1,300 cheaper than Nick Chubb. Davis has been one of the exceptions to the trend of backfield committees. He has received 93.3% of the running back carries and 94.1% of the running back targets since Christian McCaffrey went down. Chubb’s respective marks sit at 56% and 23.1% on the year. Chubb is one of the most talented rushers in the league. He somehow has the same role as practice squad back Jeff Wilson. Joe Mixon gives up receiving work to Giovani Bernard. Chase Edmonds has more than double the targets of Kenyan Drake. The list goes on.

Pay up for certainty at running back or take the price and ownership discount on ambiguous situations. Don’t split the difference.

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Author

Kyle Dvorchak

If you like fantasy football and care about data, there's a 50/50 chance I've written for your favorite site. In a few short years I've covered, season-long, dynasty, best ball, and DFS for football. I used to be watching games and pretend to know what I was talking about but now I just spew numbers that forecast outcomes better than any scout. Come for the numbers, stay for the bad jokes and Zach Zenner references. RIP XFL.