Jeff Mans breaks down everything you need to know to build safe, high-floor lineups for your cash games.
I know that I am starting to get old. There are reminders set up for me every day, whether it is my bones creaking when I get out of the chair, or the fatigue I feel late at night when I write these long-winded articles. The part that bothers me most, however, is forgetting whether it was my Father or my Uncle Ed who first told me that “nothing great will ever come easily.”
I think of those words just about every day of my life, and I think they are very important for all of us as we enter week eight of the DFS season. This has been a tough year for fantasy football. That goes for seasonal, betting and definitely for DFS. I mean, just this past Monday, we witnessed one of the biggest upsets ever in the lowly Chicago Bears beating the snot out of the New England Patriots. It was the first time in 22 years that the Bears beat New England. That game cost me $6 million. Seriously.
If you are like me, it is very likely that you too have suffered an appalling number of injuries to players in your DFS lineups this season. These haven’t been injury-prone players. These haven’t been guys with preexisting injuries or ailments that just flared up during the game. Hell, two of the three core four players we’ve lost (five total players in lineups) didn’t even suffer an injury. Think about THAT for a minute. We’ve lost QB Teddy Bridgewater and WR Amon-Ra St. Brown to first-drive injuries, and neither of them was actually injured at all. If that isn’t bad luck, then bad luck doesn’t exist.
It's hard not to get angry about bad luck. It’s difficult to understand that it isn’t ONLY happening to YOU. It is a constant struggle to realize that we are not doing anything wrong. I know that for me personally, if not for losing five players in my cash game lineups this season, I would be 7-0 in cash games. That is a REAL difficult pill to swallow, and I am sure that I am not alone.
But it is not over. In fact, we have 11 more regular season weeks, including some fantastic slates on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. We are not getting beat by anybody either. In fact, the pay lines have never been lower in the history of DFS. Lineup optimizers have been shitting out downright funny lineups that folks are using every week. This explains how we have been able to win a couple of weeks even after losing players to injury.
That is why it’s important to remember the lesson my Dad taught me all those years ago. If the payoff wasn’t worth this grind, then none of us would be doing it. I mean, who wants this kind of stress and anger in their lives? The fact that hovers over us all is that, when all the dust settles on the 2022 NFL and DFS season, there will be winners, and there will be losers. Those who give up now will seal their fate. Those of us who persevere will be in control of our own trajectory. We will survive, we will thrive, and we will win in the end.
Or maybe it was my Uncle Ed...
