Week 4 DraftKings Thursday Night Football Showdown: Cincinnati Bengals vs. Miami Dolphins

These projections assume Tua Tagovailoa will play and not be materially limited.
Tyreek Hill has the most positive leverage for the CPT spot, with Joe Mixon looking like the best value in the FLEX position among the highest salaried players.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

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The biggest wrinkle of the Showdown format is the ability to choose one captain (CPT), who costs and is scored at 1.5 times the standard values. The CPT designation opens up another layer of strategy while exponentially increasing the number of possible lineup combinations, which is important for reducing duplicate winners and split prizes. I wrote a primer on playing this format, with details on historical positional trends and salary usage.

This season, I’m going to analyze all of the NFL’s “island” games (TNF, SNF and MNF) and playoff matchups, utilizing PFF’s weekly projections, current betting lines and millions of simulated historical combinations to identify the best and worst values for an upcoming matchup.

There are five main components to this Showdown slate analysis that you’ll find below:

A breakdown of methodology and the most similar historical matchup to this game: 2014 Week 7: Baltimore Ravens–Atlanta Falcons, with Joe Flacco as Joe Burrow and Matt Ryan playing the role of Tua Tagovailoa.
Optimal lineup allocations (CPT and total roster) for both teams based on the results of similar historical matchups.
Comparison of player ownership projections for FLEX and CPT produced by a model trained on 2018-2022 Showdown contest results to optimal allocations.
Recent CPT ownership trends illustrated for both starting lineups.
A table showing the most common players on optimal lineups for each player. This allows you to see which other players are commonly found on the same optimal lineups as a player you’re interested in rostering.

THE OPTIMAL ROSTER

To analyze this specific Showdown slate, I looked through thousands of NFL matchups from 2014 to 2022 and found the closest analogies to this contest 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).

I won’t detail every matchup that falls into the top 100 for this game, but for illustration purposes, let’s look at the most similar matchup:

Historical			Current
Player	Pos	Team	Player	Pos	Team
Joe Flacco	QB	BLT	Joe Burrow	QB	CIN
Justin Forsett	RB	BLT	Joe Mixon	RB	CIN
Steve Smith	WR	BLT	Ja'Marr Chase	WR	CIN
Owen Daniels	TE	BLT	Hayden Hurst	TE	CIN
Matt Ryan	QB	ATL	Tua Tagovailoa	QB	MIA
Antone Smith	RB	ATL	Chase Edmonds	RB	MIA
Julio Jones	WR	ATL	Tyreek Hill	WR	MIA
Levine Toilolo	TE	ATL	Mike Gesicki	TE	MIA

The spread and over/under are similar in these matchups (Ravens -6.5, 49.5 O/U versus this matchup at Bengals -3.5, 47 O/U). All the players aren’t perfect matches, but that’s why we use 100 similar matchups and not just the single most similar.

The optimal roster for that historical matchup, assuming positional salaries equaled what they are for this showdown slate, would have been:

Player	Team	Position	Roster Position	Fantasy Pts
Roddy White	ATL	WR	CPT	28.0
Owen Daniels	BLT	TE	FLEX	17.8
Torrey Smith	BLT	WR	FLEX	17.1
Joe Flacco	BLT	QB	FLEX	16.7
Matt Ryan	ATL	QB	FLEX	13.8
Devonta Freeman	ATL	RB	FLEX	8.7

For this game and 99 other similar matchups, I calculated every possible combination that fits with Showdown rules (one CPT, at least one offensive player from each team) and would fall under the $50K salary threshold, assuming the salaries for the historical similar matchups are the same as those for this contest.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT CAPTAIN

The most unique part of the format, and therefore the biggest opportunity for a competitive advantage, is choosing your CPT. Should you always choose a QB who typically has the highest absolute fantasy scoring? Are defenses and kickers viable options? RB versus WR?

I went through the millions of possible lineup combinations for the 100 most similar matchups and found who the CPT selections were on the top five scoring lineups for each matchup. Here are the 500 CPT choices from those matchups by position rank according to salary.

BREAKING DOWN TOTAL OPTIMAL ROSTERS

This graph illustrates the full range of allocations for the different positions to measure how many of the 500 optimal rosters had exactly zero, one or two of the given positions.

HISTORICAL OWNERSHIP

The boxplot above shows the ranges for CPT ownership for each starting player in contests since 2019.

Projected ownership versus optimal

This is where the analysis comes together and becomes actionable. What’s most important when viewing these numbers is to contrast them to the optimal numbers taken from the analysis above for different positions. Then we see where the leverage may exist.

The two tables below compare the optimal allocations above, with adjustments for the personnel of this particular matchup, to our ownership projections for CPT and FLEX.