AAF DFS - Fanball Week 8 Lineup Review

My favorite fantasy column is Adam Levitan’s Cash Game Review. Adam is so open about his process, even when he has losing weeks, and I really admire that about him. Learning how he constructs lineups is invaluable.

In that same spirit, I will be reviewing my AAF lineups from the upstart DFS site Fanball – currently the only game in town when it comes to DFS for this niche league.

Week 8 - Fanball Lineups

It was a rough week for the AAF as a whole. Amid rumors that Tom Dundon was ready to shutter the league, overlay and lack of interest caused the premiere Fanball tournament to slump down to a 7-max, $500 first prize. It’s really only the most die-hards left at this point.

I’m used to the trail off at the end of the season from my time playing CFL DFS – you need to get your big scores early because the competition gets sharper while prize pools shrink as the year goes on. Injury news was particularly important this week and shaped roster construction.

My Main Slate Exposure

I built seven lineups and ended up with these exposures:

QB Pool

• Wolford - 5/7
• Bercovici - 2/7

Fanball refuses to price Wolford correctly, he is still in the same tier as Woodside, Woodrum, Perez, and (insultingly) below Aaron Murray, who didn’t even start. I’ll just keep plugging and playing…

San Diego and Salt Lake have both been throwing the ball a ton lately and are the two worst teams at receiving production allowed – I expected a potential high-scoring affair and wanted a piece of Bercovici in stacks with Nelson Spruce.

RB Pool

• D Johnson - 6/7
• Richardson - 5/7
• Pressley - 2/7

D’Ernest Johnson was still priced way down, as Fanball opted to boost De’Veon Smith off the back of his flukey three goal-line TD game. Johnson is the most talented back in the league and has a locked in rushing and receiving workload. The touchdowns have not been for Johnson, but I expected Orlando to manhadle Memphis and lean on the run game to milk the clock. Mispriced at less than $4700 ($200 off his cheapest price), he was a lock for me. Johnson has scored double digit fantasy points in five of his past six outings.

Richardson remains close to unfadeable – his floor is basically 40 yards on the ground, a TD, and 5 targets – and he was facing a defense that he bulldozed for three scores earlier in the year.

I wasn’t on Pressley initially (outside of one game stack LU), but I late-swapped him into another lineup when Mekale McKay was a late scratch. Pressley is in a tier below Richardson/Johnson when it comes to workload, but compared to four-way committee back Kenneth Farrow or plodder Joel Bouagnon, he was my prefered mid-priced RB.

WR Pool

• Mullaney - 5/7
• Pierson-El - 4/7
• D Williams - 3/7
• Spruce - 3/7
• C Johnson - 2/7
• Ross - 2/7
• Etta-Tawo - 1/7
• Moore - 1/7

This week I tried attacking WR expected to see an elevated role. Dan Williams was come on strong the past two games for Memphis, had a good game script, and Pig Howard was out making him the clear-cut #2 option for Manziel/Silvers.

Spruce has been elevated to target monster since Dontez Ford went on IR – seeing a massive 14 targets. He already was seeing up-wards of 8 targets before the injury and SL is most vulnerable through the air. I prefered Spruce to Horn due to Orlando’s superior secondary: I imagine Horn would get the Keith Reaser treatment if Memphis posed a threat. In the end, Horn was a surprise inactive so I looked smart for fading, but I did it for a different reason.

Etta-Tawo looked great in his return to action last week, leading the team in receiving yards and making chunk plays. I used him in a stack with Richardson in the hopes that BIR’s offense was rehabilitated.

I shied away from Rashad Ross (injury concerns) and Charles Johnson (game script, price), but you have to have exposure to these two every week.

My Lineups

Mixed bag of results. I nailed the RB spot: Johnson and Richardson finished RB1 and RB2 and I had them both in most lineups. But Garrett Gilbert/Charles Johnson stack just towered over every other combination when the MEM/ORL game turned into a shoot-out.

I went big on the SD/SL game, which ended up being a miserable low-scoring affair.

Despite good fades on so many RBs (Stacy, Bouagnon, Sankey, Watson, Folston), I didn’t land on the right pass-catchers this week. I was holding onto a small profit until the garbage time Greg Ward Jr points bumped by out of the green on the last drive of the weekend.

This was a very winnable week, if you played the good players (Gilbert/Wolford, Johnson/Ross/Spruce, Richardson/Johnson) you probably did well. But I couldn’t manage to piece together the right combinations.

My best lineup was sunk by a zero from Etta-Tawo and my other Johnson/Johnson stack was part of a SD/SL game stack. The top five finishers all had the same Gilbert/Johnson/Johnson pairing.

The Numbers

Entered: $173, Won: $140.50

Better luck next time!

Season Results

• Week 01: +$118.00
• Week 02: +$253.67
• Week 03: -$534.75
• Week 04: +$367.50
• Week 05: +$663.75
• Week 06: -$230.00
• Week 07: -$80.33
• Week 08: -$32.50

Total: +$525.34