DFS data dive: The highest fantasy football ceilings of Week 1

One of the advantages of being a “data scientist” is that everyone assumes you know what you’re talking about. While that has its privileges, more important to the craft is the ability to leverage statistical programming packages, such as R and Python, and apply them to almost any question that can be answered through data.

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I publish analyses on the single-game DraftKings showdown slates that use the combination of current projections, historical game results and similarity algorithms to simulate an upcoming game by looking back at the most similar historical matchups. In this analysis, I’m taking the same outline and applying it instead to the DFS main slate by projecting the likelihood each individual quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end and D/ST option will be the highest scorer of the slate. In doing this, we can find the unlikely tournament plays who may not have been on your radar.

METHODOLOGY

For each game on the DFS Sunday main slate, I looked through thousands of NFL matchups from 2014-2021 and found the closest analogies according to the following parameters: Betting spread, over/under and average fantasy points scoring for the top-ranked positional players of both rosters (QB1, RB1, WR1, TE1).

Once I find the 75 most similar matchups for each upcoming game, I then simulate the main slate 10,000 times by randomly choosing one of the 75 matchups for each game. Then, I find the highest-scoring quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end and D/ST on the entire slate.

The last step is totaling the number of times a particular team shows up as the top option for the slate at each position and dividing by the total simulations. That number is what I call “highest-scoring %” in the team-labeled bar charts below. Below the charts, I join the highest-projected player on that team for the position, then list their projected fantasy points and salaries for DraftKings and FanDuel.

QUARTERBACKS

Pos	Highest %	Player	Team	DK Fpts	DK Salary	FD Fpts	FD Salary
QB	9.86	Patrick Mahomes	KC	26.3	8,100	24.5	8,800
QB	9.16	Ryan Tannehill	TEN	22.2	6,500	20.7	7,700
QB	7.80	Russell Wilson	SEA	22.9	7,000	21.5	7,800
QB	7.64	Aaron Rodgers	GB	22.4	6,800	20.9	8,000
QB	7.35	Josh Allen	BUF	23.9	7,400	22.3	8,100
QB	5.80	Kyler Murray	ARZ	21.6	7,600	20.4	8,400
QB	5.64	Matt Ryan	ATL	21.8	6,000	20.2	7,300
QB	5.28	Kirk Cousins	MIN	17.1	6,300	16.0	7,200
QB	5.00	Baker Mayfield	CLV	19.2	5,900	17.9	7,100
QB	4.55	Sam Darnold	CAR	18.8	5,000	17.4	6,500
QB	3.84	Zach Wilson	NYJ	17.3	5,000	16.2	6,500
QB	3.33	Ryan Fitzpatrick	WAS	19.4	5,500	18.0	6,600
QB	2.95	Jalen Hurts	PHI	19.4	6,400	18.2	7,600
QB	2.60	Tyrod Taylor	HST	19.7	5,300	18.3	6,800
QB	2.48	Carson Wentz	IND	16.3	5,600	15.3	6,500
QB	2.39	Justin Herbert	LAC	19.3	6,700	18.0	7,600
QB	2.37	Jameis Winston	NO	16.8	5,200	15.7	6,700
QB	2.32	Tua Tagovailoa	MIA	19.1	5,400	17.9	6,600
QB	2.27	Jimmy Garoppolo	SF	16.8	5,500	15.8	6,900
QB	1.95	Daniel Jones	NYG	19.2	5,300	17.8	6,700
QB	1.72	Joe Burrow	CIN	21.1	5,700	19.5	7,200
QB	1.67	Jared Goff	DET	18.9	5,100	17.2	6,500
QB	1.47	Ben Roethlisberger	PIT	15.7	6,100	14.6	7,100
QB	1.17	Trevor Lawrence	JAX	20.4	6,200	19.1	6,800
QB	1.09	Teddy Bridgewater	DEN	17.2	4,800	16.2	6,600
QB	0.55	Mac Jones	NE	17.6	4,400	16.5	6,200

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