NFL DFS Picks: Super Bowl LV NFL DFS Strategy

Super Bowl LV Sunday features massive DraftKings Showdown NFL daily fantasy football prize pools. We’re here to break down the tournament strategy for winning contests and not duplicating lineups with the field. As with all of my NFL DFS picks and Showdown Strategy pieces for DraftKings NFL and FanDuel NFL, you can find the data that backs the takes in this article. All Showdown trend data can be found in this sheet that will be updated after each full NFL week concludes.

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Daily Fantasy Football Advice: Super Bowl LV Showdown Strategy

NFL DFS Picks: Captain

Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady

I love a good quarterback play as much as the next guy, but the usage of either passer at Captain becomes increasingly difficult the larger the contest you’re playing in. Adjusting for salary, both Brady and Mahomes come in as slate values when looking at their ownership versus odds of leading the slate in scoring. However, this does not factor in our need to build lineups that aren’t duplicated. In the DraftKings Millionaire contest, there are 653,000 entries. Playing Mahomes at Captain plus one of his top receivers in the Flex will likely be the chalk construction. Then, with the salary cost to play them, most of these rosters will go to the same group of cheap values. This lineup has already been pigeonholed into an excessive number of duplicates.

In small-field contests where dupes aren’t a major concern, Mahomes is projected for nearly 6 more points than any other player on this slate. A similar argument can be made against Brady, but he costs less and will be lower owned in daily fantasy football.

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Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce

The reason we can get away from Mahomes at Captain despite his undeniable greatness is that his production cleanly funnels to two players. The trio has played in 17 games this year. Mahomes and Kelce have been most likely to lead them in scoring but the split between all three is close:

Mahomes — highest scorer in seven games
Kelce — six games
Hill — four games

The difference between Kelce and Hill is minimal based on our projections. Both players look like the best non-QB options with a slight edge toward Kelce but he is also a few hundred dollars more. The biggest difference between them may be the ownership. We have Hill getting a 3.2% discount at the Captain spot and that could get wider in large-field contests with more casual players. Hill hasn’t led the trio in scoring since Week 12. He still has a 60-point game on his resume and has out-scored his teammates 23.5% of the time. Both he and Kelce are solid pivots off Mahomes and good starts to building a unique lineup.

Chris Godwin and Mike Evans

This is where getting contrarian starts to become interesting. In the playoffs, the split between Godwin and Evans has been tight:

Evans – 33.3% air yards share, 18.9% target share
Godwin – 27.59% air yards share, 25.5% target share

Our advanced stats page has the Buccaneers as having the highest neutral-game-script passing rate in the entire league. They are 3.5-point dogs in this game. That should all but ensure they’ll be passing at an extreme rate, which could even put the Tampa Bay pass-catchers in contention for the optimal Captain spot if their team loses. Using betting trends as another way of looking at ownership, the public is backing the Chiefs with reckless abandon. However, the overall money is coming in closer to 50/50. That means the big bets (and likely the sharper money) have been placed on the Bucs.

If the betting trends reflect the DFS ownership in any way, Chiefs-heavy builds are going to be the chalk. Getting a Buccaneer in at Captain will immediately kick off your lineup in a contrarian way.

NFL DFS Picks: Flex Options

Clyde Edwards-Helaire and Darrel Williams

None of the Kansas City backs look particularly appealing because of how much they favor passing, but they’re also the favorite in this game and have a 29.5 team total. If both of those play out as expected, the Chiefs will be in a position to run and score points often enough to compensate for their pass-heavy approach. That makes both Edwards-Helaire and Williams worth considering.

Despite seeing fewer carries in the AFC Championship, Edwards-Helaire is a particularly interesting tournament option. Last week, Edwards-Helaire started for the Chiefs and out-carried Williams 5-to-2 in the first half. He also out-snapped Williams 23-to-9. Edwards-Helaire opened the second half as the lead-back but was seemingly rested for much of the remaining two quarters. The Chiefs had a multi-score lead after their first drive in the second half and Edwards-Helaire was coming off a month-long hip injury.

The tea leaf reading here is heavy, but the reward for being right could be massive. Edwards-Helaire’s $7,000 tag necessitates that he does take on the starting role, but it will also ensure he’s not an incredibly popular daily fantasy football option.

Leonard Fournette and Ronald Jones

This backfield is a bit easier to decipher. In their two playoff games together, Fournette has dominated the work.

	Carries	Red Zone Carries	Targets
Leonard Fournette	29	8	13
Ronald Jones	23	4	1

Jones projects well because he only costs $2,200, but his role is clearly far off from Fournette where it counts. Because paying up for Chiefs and down for Bucs is going to be a popular strategy, Jones could become exceedingly popular. Using Fournette to leverage that ownership is a sharp tournament approach.

Chiefs Receivers

Sammy Watkins is expected to be available for this game. That could narrow the distribution of snaps and targets for Kansas City. In the weeks he has played this year, Watkins has averaged 35.7 routes and 5.5 targets per game. He ran a route on 73% of the Chiefs’ dropbacks in those games. Demarcus Robinson and Mecole Hardman were role players, with Robinson running more routes but Hardman seeing 18 more targets. Watkins’ role makes him the preferred play of the three.

Antonio Brown

Brown is dealing with a knee injury but is expected to play. If he can’t go, Scotty Miller and Tyler Johnson will likely share the No. 3 receiver role. Both players would be great value plays, and if the news that Brown won’t play breaks late, they aren’t likely to be owned at efficient levels. Assuming he can play, Brown needs a long catch or a score to crack the optimal lineup. He only has two games over 70 yards in 10 games with the Bucs but does have 5 scores.

Cameron Brate and Rob Gronkowski

Despite Brate going off for 149 yards and a score in three playoff games, the number of routes he has run suggests regression is coming. He has only run 51 routes, while Gronkowski is at 60. Over the past two weeks, Gronkowski has run 13 more routes. In the regular season, Gronkowski finished second on the Bucs in red zone targets. Because of his abysmal playoff run, Gronkowski’s ownership could drop significantly. He makes a solid pivot off Brate, who has been out-playing his role in recent weeks.

Kicker and Defense in NFL DFS

Both kickers and defenses get a bad reputation in shootouts because defenses want low-scoring games and kickers have no access to touchdowns. However, the difference between allowing 14 points and 34 points as a defense is worth two DraftKings points. More passing plays means more chances at sacks, fumbles and interceptions, all of which can lead to touchdowns. The high scoring may decrease the floor of defense, but it also cranks up the ceiling.

Kickers may not be putting 6 points in any single play, but looking at the data from the past two seasons of winning Showdown lineups, high-scoring affairs don’t meaningfully change their odds of making the optimal roster. In all winning lineups, there was an average of 0.33 kickers. In lineups for games that featured a total of at least 50 points, that number only drops to 0.29. Both Harrison Butker and Ryan Succop are top-five values on the slate per Awesemo’s projections.

NFL DFS Picks: Punt Plays

With Watkins back, there’s no reason to expect more than a handful of snaps for Byron Pringle. He did run just one fewer route than Hardman in the playoffs, so it’s possible that there is no clear No. 3 wideout for the Chiefs. That puts Pringle in play but nothing more than a punt for the largest contests.

Anthony Sherman is likely the worst play that has a chance of hitting. He has three rush attempts and two targets this year, but one of those targets was in the red zone. His chance of scoring is incredibly low, but he won’t draw any ownership, which could be useful in contests with 650K entries.

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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.