Fantasy Football: Ownership report and pivot plays from the highest-owned DFS targets in Week 3

We are now hitting the sweet spot of the DFS season with more usage understood but not fully captured by the market. This creates opportunity, as expectations often don’t align with reality in both directions.

Week 2 once again saw disappointing performances from some of the top-owned players. Derrick Henry and Davante Adams dragged down lineups as the two most owned players on DraftKings. It was difficult to find pivots off Henry or Ezekiel Elliott. Our article correctly identified Adams as a player to fade, with our pivot to Tyreek Hill paying off in a perceived tough matchup.

The real pivot was Aaron Jones, a must-have for a successful GPP lineup. Jonathan Taylor turned into a free square play, while Diontae Johnson didn’t reach lofty ownership projections. Taylor saw a massive bump in salary due to his usage, but he should still be one of the top-owned running backs. Johnson received a $900 salary increase, which probably isn’t enough to cause DFS players to look elsewhere.

Only one lineup in the top 10 of the $20 Millionaire Maker contest on DraftKings didn’t have a player at or below 5% ownership. The average ownership for these lineups was between 8%-12%. This was one of the lower weeks for total ownership, with the winning lineup at 92%. The average ownership among lineups in the top 10 was 103%. Fading all of the chalk isn’t an effective strategy. Finding one under-the-radar option and correctly identifying the right chalk to play or avoid is.

Week 3 could have more spread-out ownership than usual. The initial writeups don’t come with a hard avoidance stance — they're better served as guidance on how to think through various DFS decisions. There are some injury situations still in flux, but enough of these situations have occurred to spread out the ownership among the available options.

The sites have also done much better at pricing backup players who are suddenly seeing an increase in expected volume. A couple of these plays could be viable given the increased usage, but as we see on a weekly basis, chasing these situations often leads to disappointment. Let’s dive into the highest-owned players at each position to determine which ones to play or fade, as well as provide thoughts on other viable options.