NFL Week 1 DFS Picks 2026

Updated Sunday, September 13, 10 a.m. ET, three hours before lock. Every projection and ownership number below is the Stokastic Sims run that finished Saturday at 7:43 p.m. ET, the salaries, injury tags and lines are DraftKings' own this morning, and the news that broke since the last update, Kamara not expected to play, Bowers out, the Packers going to a committee and every other Questionable tag on this page clearing, is folded into each read.

Week 1 is the blindest slate of the NFL DFS season, and that is exactly why it is beatable. Nobody had a snap count, a target share or an ownership number worth trusting in August, so most of the field defaulted to two things: last year's box scores and the most obvious salary savings on the board. The board itself was the counter. DraftKings posted Week 1 pricing on July 31, we re-pulled the full main slate from the live DraftKings board again this morning, and the salaries still have not moved a dollar. Everything around them has. Alvin Kamara sprained his MCL in an August 18 joint practice, practiced fully on Friday, and is not expected to play today anyway, per NFL Network's Ian Rapoport on Sunday morning. Josh Jacobs went on the commissioner's exempt list on August 31. Brock Bowers had his meniscus trimmed on Tuesday and is out. And the Stokastic Sims, which first priced this slate on September 5, re-ran Saturday night with the final practice reports baked in, which means the blueprint this article laid out in August has now been tested twice against live projections and ownership: which games to stack, which cheap players fund the stars, and where the field piles up. By the end of this piece we will spend all $50,000 of the cap on one build that uses every read in it, with Saturday night's ownership number next to each slot.

The market's read on every game, all 16 spreads and win prices, is on the Week 1 predictions board; the stacks below start from those prices.

The Quick Answer

Stack TB@CIN. DraftKings priced it as the slate's richest game in July, $40,200 across its six most expensive skill players, and the market has kept it the highest total on the 12-game main slate at 50.5 with Cincinnati laying 3.5. The Sims put Ja'Marr Chase at 32% projected ownership but Joe Burrow at 8% and Baker Mayfield at 5%, so the stack around the chalk piece is still cheap. Fund it from the frozen tags whose roles moved: Travis Etienne Jr. ($5,900) is the Saints' lead back now that Kamara is not expected to play, and the Sims have him at 15.3 points and 10% owned, up from 13.6 and 5% a week ago; MarShawn Lloyd ($4,800) heads a Green Bay committee with Jacobs on the exempt list and has fallen to 4.8% owned because of it; and Mark Andrews ($3,900) projects at only 6.5% owned, which turns August's chalk trap into September's leverage. The real chalk lives in NO@DET, where Jahmyr Gibbs projects at 47% owned and Chris Olave at 25%, and in a $2,900 tight end, Michael Mayer, who inherits Bowers' role and 25% of the field with it. The full stack table with totals and ownership, the updated value board and a legal $50,000 lineup built from these exact salaries are below.

Week 2 offer. Every projection and ownership number in this article comes from the Stokastic NFL Sims, and code NFLWEEK2 takes 10% off your first payment on any weekly or monthly Stokastic NFL or All Access package through Monday, September 21. Get 10% off NFL Sims with code NFLWEEK2.

Why Week 1 Rewards Structure Over Projections

Every other week of the season, you build lineups from live data; for most of August that data did not exist, and the structure of the board had to carry the read. It still frames every number below: a 12-game Sunday main slate with Jahmyr Gibbs at $8,000 on top, a quarterback board compressed so tightly that Josh Allen leads it at just $7,000, a tight end position that collapses after Brock Bowers ($6,900) and Trey McBride ($6,800) with only Colston Loveland ($5,300) between the elites and the bargain bin, and 576 of the 747 players on the Sims' board priced at $4,000 or less. The three frozen-salary cases this article is built on now come with the Sims' own arithmetic: Mayer projects 10.7 points at $2,900, 3.7 points per $1,000 of salary; Etienne 15.3 at $5,900, 2.6 per $1,000; Lloyd 11.8 at $4,800, 2.5 per $1,000; Gibbs, the slate's top projection, returns 3.0. We broke down that whole board row by row in our DraftKings Week 1 pricing first look; this article is the next step, what to actually do with it.

The reason structure matters more in Week 1 than any other week: salaries were set six weeks before kickoff, which makes them the softest of the season. DraftKings priced rookies and new-team veterans on projection alone, and every camp battle and every injury between July 31 and September 13 moves real value onto specific rows without moving the salary attached to them. Frozen salaries against moving roles: the whole Week 1 edge in one sentence, and since this article first ran, that sentence stopped being theory three times. Kamara's Week 1 workload opened up on August 18; 26 days later his $4,900 has not moved, and neither has the $5,900 on Etienne, the back who steps into it. Jacobs' $6,300 sits on the board with an OUT tag while Lloyd at $4,800 walks into the Green Bay backfield. Bowers' $6,900 carries the same OUT tag this morning, and Mayer at $2,900 inherits the Raiders' tight end snaps at a near-minimum salary. That is the reason every read below starts from the board, and now that the Sims have priced those roles twice, we can see how much of the August read survived contact with the data. Start with the games, because DraftKings told us in July which ones it believed in and the market has since weighed in.

The Game Stacks To Build Around, Ranked By The Board

A game stack matters more in Week 1 than in any other week, because the one thing a frozen July board did price with real information is which games DraftKings expected to score, and the market has now put totals next to that guess. A quarterback plus his pass-catcher captures the correlated upside; the bring-back from the other side is the piece that pays when the total is right for the wrong reasons. Our guide on how to build NFL DFS lineups covers the general theory; here we only care about which Week 1 games earn the treatment. In August we ranked all 12 games by the one concrete signal available, how much salary DraftKings concentrated in each game's six most expensive skill players. That ranking has not changed, because the salaries have not. What has changed is that we can now put the market's Sunday-morning total and the Sims' Saturday-night ownership next to it.

Combined ownership adds the Sims' projected ownership of every quarterback, running back, receiver and tight end in the game, defenses excluded; across the whole slate, defenses included, ownership sums to 900% because a lineup has nine slots.

The first row still sets up everything else in this article, and it now has two confirmations plus a week of movement behind it. The market has held TB@CIN at 50.5, the highest total on the main slate, with Cincinnati laying 3.5, which works out to implied team totals of roughly 27 for the Bengals and 23.5 for the Buccaneers: both offenses expected to score, exactly what the July salaries implied, and the forecast in Cincinnati is 85 degrees with gusts around 7 mph, so nothing in the air is going to argue with the total. And the Sims still agree on the one piece the field will buy while leaving most of the game alone. Chase projects at 32% owned, the highest number at receiver on the slate, but Burrow sits at 8%, Tee Higgins at 10%, Emeka Egbuka at 8%, Mayfield at 5% and Bucky Irving at 8%. The game's combined ownership climbed from 70% a week ago to 92% as the field caught up, but that is still the second-most-popular game on the slate holding less than 60% of what the most popular one carries, and the shape that matters, a chalk receiver inside a game the field is not otherwise stacking, is intact.

NO@DET is the opposite shape. Detroit's implied total of roughly 28 as a 7-point home favorite trails only the Chargers' 28.5 on the slate, and the Sims respond with 157% combined ownership, led by Gibbs at 47%, Olave at 25%, Amon-Ra St. Brown ($7,500) at 21%, Juwan Johnson ($3,700) at 13%, Sam LaPorta ($4,400) at 9%, Jared Goff at 8%, Tyler Shough ($5,600) at 8% and Etienne at 10%. That is the slate's most-stacked game from both sides, and the leverage inside it moved this week: Devaughn Vele ($3,500) fell from 18.5% to 7% and Shough from 13% to 8%, while Jameson Williams ($6,000) at 8% is the Detroit piece the field still skips. BAL@IND lost a point off its total, now 47.5, and Jonathan Taylor at 16%, Derrick Henry at 13% and Zay Flowers at 13%, off the injury report after a hamstring scare, carry the ownership while Lamar Jackson sits at 6%. BUF@HOU is the coldest of the five at 40%, Allen at 3% and Khalil Shakir at 2%; the 44.5 total explains the cold shoulder, but the salary structure that makes an Allen double stack cheap is unchanged, and 3% on the slate's top-priced quarterback is a number worth remembering when we get to the leverage section.

Two honest caveats, because pricing and projections are signals, not verdicts. First, a salary total measures what DraftKings believed in July and a projection measures what the Sims believe on a given night; both move with news, and this run predates the 11:30 a.m. ET inactives. Second, the injury tags that hung over the top game all week are gone. Chase's hyperextended knee and Higgins' foot are off the Bengals' final report, Egbuka's toe never made the Buccaneers' report, and DraftKings carries no designation on any of the three this morning, and Egbuka's ownership climbed from 5% to 8%; if you want the same-side swap anyway, Chris Godwin Jr. ($5,200, 6%) still frees $1,000 and keeps the bring-back intact. Whatever the inactives say at 11:30, a $40,200 game does not fit in a lineup unless the rest of the roster gets cheap, and the cheap part of this board is where the news did the most damage to the August read.

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The Week 1 Value Board: Salary Relief Under $5,000

Stars-and-scrubs is wide open in Week 1, with 576 of the 747 players priced at $4,000 or less. But most of that bottom is dart throws, and the difference between a punt and a value is a projectable role; our DFS punt plays guide draws that line in detail. In August the only way to spot a role was to reason from the depth chart. Now the Sims project it, so this is the sub-$5,000 board this article has tracked since August, quarterbacks excluded because none of its builds punt the position, plus the names the news made impossible to leave off, with Saturday night's number next to each.

One more input before the punts: the market's own fantasy WR rankings for 2026, re-priced this week, say which receivers the money still believes in.

The important correction first, and it got a Sunday-morning confirmation. Kendre Miller is not the Kamara replacement. The August 31 version of this article sent the Kamara touches to Miller at $4,000, and that was a misread of the New Orleans depth chart that the Sims put in numbers: Miller projects at 3.1 points with a projected ownership that rounds to zero. The Saints signed Travis Etienne Jr. in March, he is the lead back with Kamara sidelined, and his $5,900 tag, set before anyone knew Kamara would miss the opener, now carries a 15.3-point projection at 10% ownership, up from 13.6 and 5% a week ago. He is over the $5,000 line, so he is not in this table, but he is the cleanest version of the frozen-salary edge on the whole board and he is in the lineup below. Kamara himself is still Questionable on DraftKings at $4,900 and still projects at zero: the Saints kept the Questionable tag on him despite a full Friday practice, and Rapoport reported Sunday morning that he is not expected to play, 26 days out from the sprain. Devin Neal is listed out.

The row that did not exist on August 31 is the second frozen-salary case, and it is the one the week treated worst. The NFL placed Josh Jacobs on the commissioner's exempt list on August 31, which keeps him out of practice and games until the league removes him, and DraftKings carries his $6,300 with an OUT tag. MarShawn Lloyd inherits the top of the Green Bay depth chart at $4,800 with one NFL game in two seasons behind him, but offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich said this week the Packers will run a committee "for a little bit" with Chris Brooks ($4,500) and Kaleb Johnson ($4,400) behind him, and the Sims heard it: Lloyd's projection slipped from 13.4 to 11.8 and his ownership collapsed from 15% to 4.8%, with Brooks at 5.3 points and Johnson at 2.2. That flips the read from a week ago. Lloyd was a volume play you accepted at his price when the field was on him at 15%; at 4.8% he is a low-owned bet on a back the depth chart still lists first, though the Sims' optimal lineups use him no more often than the field does, in a GB@MIN game the market has at 46.5 with Minnesota laying 1.5, flipped from Green Bay laying the same number a week ago, still a neutral script that neither adds nor subtracts carries.

Shakir at $4,800 is the same frozen-tag idea one tier up the stack map, and his row keeps the lowest ownership in the table even though the reason for it is gone: he had not practiced since his August 15 preseason appearance, he was a full participant on Wednesday, he carries no designation on the Bills' final report or on DraftKings, and the Sims still project him for 9.3 points at 2.4% owned. An Allen double stack at 3% and 2% ownership is the cheapest entry into a $38,000 game on the slate, and the discount survived the news that was supposed to remove it. And notice what still dominates the rest of the table: nine of its 14 rows are tight ends, and that is not a quirk of our selection, because eight of the Sims' 15 highest-projected players under $5,000 are tight ends too: Warren, LaPorta, Kraft, Johnson, Mayer, Andrews, Goedert and Pitts. Quentin Johnston ($4,700, 11.4 at 8%), Wan'Dale Robinson ($4,800, 11.2 at 3%) and Michael Pittman Jr. ($4,900, 10.9 at 4%) out-project most of this table and belong on your own list; they are absent here only because none was on the August board this refresh is grading. Tre Tucker ($4,000) and Mayer are here for the opposite reason: Bowers' surgery should hand both of them a bigger share of the Raiders' passing game, and by Saturday night the field had made Mayer, at a near-minimum tight end salary, the single most-owned tight end on the slate at 25%. The position's pricing collapses so hard after the two elites that the sub-$5,000 bin is where almost everyone shops for a tight end, which is exactly the August read. What the August read got wrong was the name, twice now, and that is the single most useful thing the Sims added to this article.

Where The Field Will Over-Cluster

In August we reasoned about where chalk forms, because chalk always forms the same way: wherever the board makes a decision feel obvious. Now the Sims project it, so this section is a scorecard. The main slate is where the biggest tournaments live, and in a Millionaire-Maker-sized field, being right with the field wins you almost nothing, so each of the three August reads gets graded on the one question that matters: did the field actually go there?

First, Gibbs at $8,000. Confirmed, and then some: he projects at 47% owned, the highest number on the slate by a wide margin, in a game whose implied team total trails only the Chargers' on the slate, and a week of practice reports did not move him. Popularity is still not a reason to avoid him, but the leverage math is now explicit: Bijan Robinson ($7,700) projects at 23%, Ashton Jeanty ($6,600) at 17%, Jonathan Taylor ($7,300) at 16%, De'Von Achane ($7,000) at 15% and Derrick Henry ($6,700) at 13%, every one of them a lower projection, by two to six points, at roughly half the ownership or less. Second, Mark Andrews at $3,900. Overruled, and the week made the overrule louder. The August read said no profile on the board screamed highest-owned player louder; the Sims project him at 6.5%, lower than Kraft and LaPorta, the two tags we suggested as pivots off him. The cheap-bin tight end chalk went somewhere August could not have predicted: Mayer at $2,900, who was a backup until Bowers' knee was scoped on Tuesday, signed a three-year, $45 million extension on Saturday, and now projects at 25% owned, more than the next two tight ends combined, with Juwan Johnson ($3,700) at 13% the only other cheap name in double digits. Dalton Schultz and Brenton Strange, the cheap chalk a week ago at 13% and 11%, fell to 5% each as the field left for Las Vegas. The structure held, everyone is shopping under $5,000, but the field picked a different name for the second week running, which keeps Andrews on the pivot side of the trade, and his projection climbed from 8.8 to 10.2 while he sat there. Third, the compressed quarterback board. The August read said paying up costs so little that the field would concentrate on the famous names at the top. The direction was wrong. The Sims have the field spread flat instead: no quarterback tops 10%, and every starter from Kyler Murray ($5,500) and Justin Herbert ($6,100) at 10% through Trevor Lawrence ($5,800), Goff, Shough and Burrow at 8% and Lamar Jackson at 6% sits in the same narrow band. The most striking outlier is the most expensive name, Allen at $7,000 and 3%. The compressed board did produce a discount, just on the one name it was supposed to make popular.

The callback still lands, and now it has a number on it. The cheapest entry into the slate's most expensive game is the side of it the field is least likely to build, and Mayfield at 5% is the confirmation: a $5,900 quarterback in a 50.5-total game, projected for 18.7 points, that fewer than one lineup in 20 is rostering. Ownership and leverage are the engine of tournament equity, and if that framing is new, our breakdown of how to win DFS tournaments is the 101; the NFL DFS primer covers the fundamentals underneath it. Here, it is enough to say that the field's clustering in Week 1 turned out to be predictable in shape and surprising in detail, which is exactly the gap a projection set exists to close. Time to cash all of these reads in on one roster.

A Worked Example: One $50,000 Build That Uses Every Read

Here is the payoff of the whole piece, a legal DraftKings roster (QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, TE, FLEX, DST) built only from salaries on this board, spending the cap to the dollar, with Saturday night's projected ownership next to each slot. It is an illustrative construction that shows the blueprint holding together, not an optimal lineup; the Sims will produce hundreds of better-optimized versions of it between now and lock.

Five of the nine slots come from TB@CIN, the game the board priced highest and the market still totals highest: Burrow double-stacked with Chase and Higgins, with Egbuka and Bucky Irving ($5,700) as the two-piece bring-back. Size that aggressive game-stack shape to your tournament, because it is not a cash-game build; cash and GPPs want opposite constructions, and this one is all ceiling. It is also a low-owned build, not an optimal-weighted one: the Sims' own leverage column prefers Chase Brown ($7,100) to Irving as the TB@CIN running back, and he costs $1,400 more, which is the swap to make if you would rather follow the optimals than the ownership. The funding is where the refresh shows. The August build carried Kendre Miller at $4,000, Garrett Wilson at $5,800 in the flex and the Jaguars at $3,400. Miller's slot goes to Etienne, $1,900 more, and the flex pays for it by moving from Wilson to Lloyd, $1,000 less, with the defense dropping from the Jaguars to the Jets, $900 less, landing on the same exact $50,000. The two backs who fund the stack are the two frozen tags whose roles moved most since July, which is this article's thesis wearing a jersey, and the week treated them in opposite directions: Etienne's role firmed up and his ownership doubled, Lloyd's role got shared and his ownership fell by two-thirds, and the roster keeps both because a $5,900 lead back at 10% and a $4,800 depth-chart starter at 5% are both cheap for what the Sims project. Andrews stays at $3,900, and the Sims turned him from the slot we were most nervous about into the roster's second-lowest-owned slot at 6.5%, behind only Lloyd, with the cost stated plainly: he projects 10.2 points against Juwan Johnson's 11.1 at 13% for $200 less, and against Mayer's 10.7 at 25% for $1,000 less, so you are buying almost the same projection at half of Johnson's ownership and a quarter of Mayer's, and paying up to $1,000 for the privilege. The Jets at $2,500 are the most-owned defense on the slate at 9%, and the reason they are here is cap math, not preference: the Jaguars are the better standalone defense, a 7.8-point projection at 9% owned against the Jets' 7.2 at 9%, but the Etienne upgrade costs $1,900 and $900 of it had to come from somewhere. If you would rather keep the Jaguars, that $900 comes out of the Higgins or Egbuka slot, which changes the shape of the stack. The nine slots project to 130 Sims points, up from 122 a week ago with the same nine names, and Chase alone carries a third of the roster's 96 cumulative ownership points, which is a deliberate shape: pay the chalk where the projection earns it and stay low-owned everywhere else.

Two practical notes before you copy anything. First, this build, like every Week 1 build, has a shelf life measured in news cycles, and the Kamara and Jacobs swaps above are the proof: one injury or one roster move can vacate the touches behind any of these tags. The tags thinned out this week. DraftKings now carries no designation on Chase, Higgins, Egbuka, Flowers, Shakir, Tyler Warren, Kraft, LaPorta, Pittman or Miller, the Questionable list from a week ago; among this article's names only Kamara is still Questionable, with Jacobs, Neal and Bowers out and Jordyn Tyson on injured reserve. The official inactives for the early games land at 11:30 a.m. ET, and Lloyd's, in the 4:25 p.m. window, at about 2:55 p.m. ET, so re-check every row against them before lock and keep our NFL DFS late swap guide handy once the early games start. Second, if DraftKings adjusts the board before lock, re-check every salary here, and the same names will carry different tags on FanDuel; our DraftKings vs. FanDuel NFL DFS comparison covers how the two boards differ structurally.

What The Sims Say Now That The Data Is Live

Everything above is what this article looked like once the Week 1 data arrived, and the data is the reason we built the Sims. The Stokastic Sims published projections and ownership for the DraftKings main slate on September 5 and re-ran them Saturday at 7:43 p.m. ET with the final practice reports in, the same set that feeds NFL DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub, and every projection and ownership number in this article comes straight from it. The full set carries floor, ceiling and a leverage score for every player, and the leverage column is where the reads this article has no room for live. Two of them from Saturday night: Chase Brown ($7,100) is the back priced $7,000 or more with the widest gap between the Sims' optimal lineups and the field, 11% of optimal lineups against 7.5% projected ownership, which makes him the leverage answer to Gibbs at the top of the running back board. And Mayer, the new cheap chalk, carries the worst leverage score on the entire tight end board, 25% owned against 17% of optimal lineups, which is the number that turns Andrews from the slot we were nervous about into a real pivot. Check the DataHub after the inactives for the latest run; what this article can do is hand you the reads the Sims have already graded, so that the next time a projection moves you know which structural argument it just confirmed or broke. If Sims workflows are new to you, how to use NFL DFS Sims is the walkthrough, and the NFL DFS hub carries the daily output all season.

Code NFLWEEK2 takes 10% off your first payment on any weekly or monthly Stokastic NFL or All Access package, and it runs through Monday, September 21, so it covers all of Week 2. The Week 2 projections and ownership are already live, which means the Sims are in your workflow before the inactives move a single one of these numbers.

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The Blueprint Held Where It Mattered

The thesis of this whole piece is that Week 1's blindness is an asset if you let the board do the talking, and the Kamara injury, the Jacobs roster move and the Bowers surgery tested it in real time: the touches moved to Etienne, Lloyd and Mayer, and the salaries stayed where they were. The one read I keep coming back to is the smallest number in the piece, Mayfield at 5% in the slate's highest-total game, which is where a five-piece TB@CIN build gets its leverage without touching the chalk. What is left is the inactives. Kamara is still officially Questionable, so confirm at 11:30 a.m. ET that Rapoport's report held before you lock Etienne; if it did not, Kamara at $4,900 with a full Friday practice becomes the question the Sims have not priced yet. Lloyd's window does not close until the 4:25 games, so a Green Bay inactive list that surprises at about 2:55 p.m. ET still leaves the flex open to a late swap. The frozen salaries will not tell you about any of it.

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