Looking back at Week 10
It wasn't pretty for me, but it was a split between my own choices - sometimes counterintuitive to what I wrote before the slate - and some unlikely occurrences (and bad luck) that caused my downfall. A primary, simplistic example of the choices: I knew going in that Davante Adams and Alvin Kamara were the preferred duo rather than Aaron Jones and Michael Thomas. Yet, as I was building lineups, I went to Jones and Thomas more often for the salary savings, essentially meaning I prioritized other spots than those, and it was the wrong process to take (I ended up without a single share of Kamara and only one of Davante).
My GPP lineups
My three stacks this week were:
A Saints 3-1 stack (Drew Brees + Michael Thomas + Jared Cook with a Brandon Aiyuk runback). This was my highest performing lineup, and my QB only played in the first half.
A Dolphins 3-1 stack (Tua Tagovailoa + DeVante Parker + Mike Gesicki with a Keenan Allen runback). I had the wrong receivers.
A Seahawks 3-1 stack (Russell Wilson + DK Metcalf + Greg Olsen with a Cooper Kupp runback). I wasn't expecting this game to dive way under the way it did, and especially not on the Seahawks side.
Here was the full lineup from the Saints stack:
QB: Drew Brees ($6400 - 2.57% owned - 6.94 points - left the game with fractured ribs and a collapsed lung)
RB: Josh Jacobs ($6500 - 4.65% owned - 32.6 points)
RB: Mike Davis ($4000 - 39.71% owned - 8.4 points)
WR: Michael Thomas ($7400 - 11.22% owned - 4.7 points)
WR: Brandon Aiyuk ($5700 - 4.57% owned - 19.7 points)
WR: Davante Adams ($9000, 20.61% owned - 19.6 points)
WR - Flex: Josh Reynolds ($3500 - 10.03% owned - 17.4 points)
TE: Jared Cook ($4600 - 2.09% owned - 0 points)
DEF: Browns ($2900 - 2.79% owned - 6 points)
Does the outcome of this lineup change if Brees doesn't come out of the game, even playing hurt? Probably. I had two great calls as one-offs with a low-owned Josh Jacobs and an underpriced Josh Reynolds, with none of the others having "bad" games, but the stack for obvious reasons didn't come through. That's bad luck, really, so it is what it is.
Total points: 115.34
Cashing line: 133.9
My Cash lineup
QB: Kyler Murray ($8000 - 40.73% owned - 30.9 points)
RB: Aaron Jones ($7100 - 64.92% owned - 14.5 points)
RB: Mike Davis (66.42% owned)
WR: Keenan Allen ($7100 - 45.39% owned - 12.9 points)
WR: Terry McLaurin ($6800 - 14.24% owned - 18.2 points)
WR: Josh Reynolds (12.14% owned)
WR - Flex: Michael Thomas (14.71% owned)
TE: Dawson Knox ($2900 - 0.99% owned - 3.6 points)
DEF: Giants ($2700 - 9.73% owned - 4 points)
This is kind of the spot where I look at being a mixture of my decision-making than luck, although this lineup easily cashes if the Saints offense involved Michael Thomas and Brees doesn't get hurt + if Keenan Allen did anything near his normal output. The Dawson Knox play was a bit of a last-minute cheap addition with the news that his main competition for snaps that matter to us was put on the COVID list. I think the process of prioritizing Thomas over Kamara was the decision part (I should've played three RBs here), and if I did that, Keenan probably would've been the one to come off, but overall I'm not sure the larger process was fully wrong - a bit unlucky, sure, and could've been sharper on my end, but this wasn't a fall-off-the-cliff, what-was-I-doing lineup even with that.
Total points: 114.6
Cashing line: 118.5
Players from last week's picks that didn't end up in my lineups
Justin Herbert, Alex Smith, Josh Allen, Jared Goff, Drew Lock: Two of these are pretty simple. With Herbert and Goff, I ended up playing the QB opposite of them, primarily because I believed they might have been lower owned in GPPs. Given that, I knew I could still have exposure to the game without the QB (Kupp and Reynolds for the Rams side, Keenan Allen for the Chargers side), and I was okay with that. On Smith and Lock, I just didn't really see the upside in doing that compared to the other chances I took, and I kind of knew I was paying up at QB in cash this week. Allen was actually my toss-up in cash between him and Kyler, and I considered playing him in a GPP lineup despite him being popular, but ultimately decided to take some shots on lower-owned guys.
Alvin Kamara, Duke Johnson, Miles Sanders: I've touched on Kamara already, which, ugh. On Duke, I really didn't have a necessity to play all three of Davis, Gio and Duke that cheap, as we had some cheap options elsewhere, so I took a stand on two of them and mixed those two into lineups. Sanders ended up chalk, and I wasn't convinced his upside matched his chalk, and that was the Josh Jacobs pivot that I made in the Saints stack lineup.
Curtis Samuel, Stefon Diggs, Christian Kirk, Tee Higgins: I had Mike Davis nearly everywhere, so that pushed me off Samuel (I actually had a Robby Anderson share in the one lineup that didn't have Davis, based on the salary I had left). On the others - they were mainly about taking stands in places and not having too much exposure given the limited amounts of lineups I was playing. I didn't play any of the correlated QBs in a GPP lineup, so I didn't end up with any of them.
Dallas Goedert: Ended up as mega chalk, so I stayed away.
Logan Thomas, Noah Fant: On Thomas, this was the Dawson Knox situation mentioned above - I could go 400 cheaper for probably the same or similar outcome, so I went that route. On Fant, I primarily ended up stacking my tight ends in GPPs with the QB and a WR, so I didn't end up prioritizing here. He was a bit expensive for my taste, too, although I understand what DK put him there with the limited TE options this week.
Beer of the Week
I'm enjoying a Purple Haze from Abita Brewing Company as a pick-me-up this week.
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