Cowboys-Titans DFS Showdown: Ezekiel Elliott In Smash Spot

For nearly a year now, I’ve been hosting the High Stakes podcast for Stokastic, interviewing DFS pros on a range of topics. There have been a lot of recurring themes on the show, but the most relevant for this article: DFS pros love NFL DFS Showdown. For the single game NFL DFS slates, there are many factors to consider. Let’s dive into what Showdown contests are, and some Cowboys-Titans DFS picks for TNF.

Lots of casual NFL fans enter the Showdown fray to have some action on island games. As a result, DraftKings and FanDuel offer enormous contests with generous prize pools. The contests become more difficult to win, too, when there are hundreds of thousands of entrants. However, since such a large portion of the new players are casual, the increase in difficulty pales in comparison to the increase in prize pools. It’s a tradeoff DFS pros gladly make.

My goal with these Showdown articles — which I’ll be writing for each Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football NFL DFS slate this season — is to help you attack the largest-field DraftKings GPP like a pro. There are three main components to discuss when it comes to Showdown that I’ll break down accordingly: Projection, Correlation and Differentiation.

Before reading this article, you may find it helpful to read my evergreen piece about how to attack NFL Showdown GPPs more generally.

NFL DFS Showdown Picks: Cowboys-Titans DFS Picks

Projection

The goal in DFS is to make the lineup that puts up the most points, so a natural starting point is looking at individual players who are likely to put up high scores or high point-per-dollar scores. Some pros run simulations or create their own projections to achieve this. Many others, like myself, rely on the Stokastic projections and tools to determine which players should be core pieces of our lineups. I primarily look at the base projections and the Top Showdown Plays Tool, which publishes results of 10,000 advanced simulations run by the Stokastic team.

Studs

These are simply the top-projected players on the slate according to the Stokastic projections. I’d recommend having at least two of these players in almost every lineup you build tonight, either as captain or in a flex spot.

Dak Prescott ($10,600) is the top projected player on the slate against the Titans’ pass funnel defense.
CeeDee Lamb ($11,400) is the second highest projected player on the slate.
Ezekiel Elliott ($8,800) is the third highest projected player on the slate with Tony Pollard ruled out, despite a tough matchup with a Titans defense ranked second in Rush DVOA, per Football Outsiders.
Hassan Haskins ($3,000) is the fourth highest projected player on the slate with Derrick Henry out, despite a tough matchup with a Cowboys defense ranked fifth in Rush DVOA.
Joshua Dobbs ($6,000) is the fifth highest projected player on the slate, despite a tough matchup with a Cowboys defense ranked second in Pass DVOA.
Dalton Schultz ($6,600) is the sixth highest projected player on the slate.

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Top Point-Per-Dollar Titans-Cowboys Picks

These are a few players who will be featured throughout my lineups due to their high-projected points per dollar. At the same time, because I’ll typically have at least two studs in each lineup, the top point-per-dollar plays are often players I’ll be pivoting away from in some spots in favor of players who project a bit worse but will also garner lower ownership. I’m also excluding any player with a projection below three fantasy points from this list.

Malik Davis ($200) is expected to work as the number two running back option for the Cowboys, and projects very well for his salary.
Julius Chestnut ($1,400) is expected to work as the number two running back option for the Titans.
Chris Conley ($1,200) projects well for the Titans in a game they may give their starters less than full run.
Noah Brown ($5,200) and Michael Gallup ($7,000) both project as solid values for their price tags.
As usual, kickers and defenses are among the top value options. Brett Maher ($4,200) and Cowboys Defense ($5,800) project better than their counterparts on the Titans.

Correlation

In NFL DFS, correlations are endless, both positive and negative ones. Most correlations are minor enough that they don’t necessarily need to be factored into lineups. If you want to give a boost to your running back’s defense, for example, that’s great; but running backs will frequently be optimal without the defense also being optimal, even in Showdown.

The only correlations that are almost mandatory to consider on Showdown slates involve quarterbacks. Particularly, non-rushing quarterbacks. That’s because of the scoring dynamics on DraftKings. On each passing play, the pass catcher scores more fantasy points than the quarterback. For example, if a quarterback throws a pass for 5 yards, he’ll get 0.2 fantasy points — 1 fantasy point per 25 yards passing, divided by five. The receiver will get 1.5 fantasy points — 1 point per reception, plus half a point for 5 yards receiving. The quarterback also only gets 4 points per passing touchdown, while the receiver gets 6 points for a receiving touchdown.

The quarterback is also generally one of the most expensive players on his team. Thus, often he will need to be his team’s highest fantasy point scorer to be the optimal captain. Outside of extremely rare occasions where the quarterback scores fantasy points by passing to a player who is not in the DraftKings player pool or gets points as a receiver on a trick play, there are essentially just two ways for the quarterback to be the highest-scoring player on his team: adding fantasy points via rushing or spreading the ball around to multiple pass catchers.

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Some General Thoughts:

If you play a quarterback at captain, and he does not have rushing upside, and he is the most expensive player on his team, you will almost always want to have multiple of his team’s pass catchers in the flex. This is also largely true if the quarterback is only slightly less expensive than the most expensive pass catcher on his team.
If you play a quarterback at captain, and he has moderate rushing upside, you can consider playing just one of his pass catchers in the flex — but multiple may still be preferred, depending on the extent of that rushing upside. The quarterback’s price may also come into play here; the more expensive he is, the more likely you’ll need to have multiple pass catchers in the flex.
If you play a quarterback at captain, and he has major rushing upside, you don’t necessarily need to play any pass catchers in the flex. This is relatively uncommon, and only applies to a few quarterbacks.
If you play a quarterback in the flex, and he does not have rushing upside, you will generally want to have at least one of his pass catchers elsewhere in the lineup, either at captain or in another flex spot.
If you play a quarterback in the flex, and he has moderate to high rushing upside, you don’t necessarily need to include one of his pass catchers elsewhere in the lineup. But there will always be positive correlation there between a quarterback and his pass catchers.

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Some Cowboys-Titans Game-Specific Thoughts:

If you play Prescott: Prescott has decent, but not elite, rushing upside. He should always be paired with at least one pass catcher, and preferably multiple if played at captain. Although Elliott is not typically very involved in the passing game, he may be more so with Pollard out, and can be included as a pass catcher to pair with Prescott.
If you play Dobbs: Dobbs has not played much in the NFL, but he was an elite rushing quarterback in college. He can be played without any pass catchers, though generally it is still preferable to pair him with at least one if played at captain. Haskins can be included as a pass catcher to pair with Dobbs.

Differentiation

Making highly projected lineups with smart correlations will separate you from the lowest level Showdown players, but there are many very smart casual players as well. Differentiation is the last step to separating pros from Joes.

In just about any NFL DFS GPP, finding low-owned gems is key because lower ownership reduces the field of lineups you’re competing against when the player has a 99th-percentile outcome. Taking it to the extreme, just as a thought exercise, let’s say that Elliott scores 100 fantasy points tonight. You’re not just going to need him; you’ll need him in the captain spot (150 fantasy points). If 20,000 lineups in your contest have Elliott in the captain spot, you’ve essentially reduced the field of lineups you’re competing with to 20,000. If only 200 lineups have Elliott at captain, now we’re talking.

On NFL Showdown slates there is an additional factor for large-field GPPs. We don’t just want to find seldomly used players; we want to find seldomly used LINEUPS. Why? Well, I’ll give you two examples from last year:

On Sept. 20, 2021, DraftKings had a Milly Maker for the Packers vs. Lions tilt, but the top lineup was duplicated 231 times. Rather than winning a million dollars, the users who entered those 231 lineups had to split the top 231 prizes, for just a bit over $6,000 each. That’s despite having everything go their way, which requires an extreme amount of luck.
On Oct. 11, 2021, we saw the other end of the spectrum: user rcoho1984 played a unique lineup in the Ravens vs. Colts Milly Maker, taking home not just a million dollars but a ticket to the Tournament of Champions.

If you’re going to win — which takes a lot of luck, regardless of how well your lineup projects — I’d suggest making it count. I’m not necessarily concerned with making an entirely unique lineup like rcoho1984 did every single time, but I aim to be a lot closer to their unique lineup than those that were duplicated 231 times.

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Low-owned players. Yup, even if you’re using other tricks to get unique, it’s still a good idea to play a few players in your set of lineups who won’t be getting much ownership. Some low-owned DFS picks to consider:

Robert Woods ($5,000), Treylon Burks ($5,400) and Nick Westbrook ($4,600) are all projected for single digit ownership, due to the assumption that the Titans will not give their starters full run. But all have low enough salaries that they could theoretically pay them off in a half, and there is some possibility the Titans choose to keep their starting receivers on the field for more reps with Dobbs.
T.Y. Hilton ($4,400) ran just five routes in week 16, but insists that he is ready for a full workload and could see more reps this week.
Qadree Ollison ($200) was called up from the Cowboys practice squad and could see some run if the Cowboys put the Titans away early.

Embrace lineups missing some correlation pieces or even with some negative correlation. Generally, highly correlated lineups will be over-owned, whereas the field will avoid negative correlation at all costs. If you want to read my reasoning, check out the evergreen piece I linked near the top of this page. In some of my lineups, I like to see the following:

Quarterback against opposing Defense.
Pass Catcher at Captain without including the QB at Flex.
Multiple Running Backs from the same team in a lineup.

Leave salary on the table. This is the easiest way to lower your duplicates. Casual players assume that if they have salary left over, they should upgrade. The problem with this approach is that it almost inevitably leads to highly duplicated lineups. How much salary should you leave on the table? That’s up to you. If it’s less than $600 on this slate and you haven’t gotten extremely unique with player selections and weird correlations, it’s likely you’ll have to split any winnings with many other entries.

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Author

Neil Orfield

Neil Orfield has been playing DFS regularly since 2013, but his success really started taking off in 2019 when he had a six figure payday with a hand built NFL lineup. The next day, he signed up for a Stokastic+ subscription with FantasyCruncher. Since then he has won an NFL milly and added six figure wins in XFL, MLB, and NBA. He has recently excelled at NFL Showdown, with many five- and six-figure wins since 2021.