Twelve (12) main slate DraftKings games this week and your lowest totals on the board are Rutgers/Wisconsin at 44 and Purdue/Iowa at 38.5. It’s a pretty decent top heavy week with some high scoring games between UCF/Kansas, LSU/Mizzou and of course Oklahoma/Texas.
The undercard from those three is very good as well, featuring Syracuse/UNC, Washington St/UCLA and Maryland/Ohio State.
We round it out with VT/Florida State, Wake Forest/Clemson, Vandy/Bama and Alabama/Texas A&M.
LSU vs Missouri (+5.5)
Once a school with a decent defensive reputation, the Tigers have not played a lick of team defense this year & things really aren’t trending towards getting any better. The Luther Burden show should look good for Missouri in the passing game, but I really like the idea of going Cook-Burden AND Theo Wease here. At home, Missouri will hit their secondary WR’s just as much bringing Wease and Mookie Cooper into play.
- LSU: Jayden Daniels, Malik Nabers
- Missouri: Brady Cook, Theo Wease, Luther Burden
SYRACUSE vs UNC
Drake Maye. Drake Maye. Drake Maye. He’s going to do it with his legs and should have a min priced top WR (Walker) who is now available here to correlate with. A total near 60 and I am taking the over, so that tells you all you need to know…
UCF vs Kansas (-1.5)
Just monitor the status of John Rhys Plumlee here. If it looks like he is full go then we should be smart with looking at the UCF passing attack. Kansas will ride the ground game through Devin Neal, so this game offers a nice RB-WR correlation option
I’m going to go through the QB landscape a little bit differently this week because the games dictate building into a 2QB lineup setup. There are three specific games where I believe the majority of lineups are going to try and build their QB exposure around.
I would rank those three games as follows:
- Syracuse/UNC (Shrader/Maye – $16,700 combined salary) … This one has the most to offer from a naked QB game stack scenario and I don’t mean some X rated Quarterbacks of the ACC magazine either. Shrader had a tough time on the ground last week vs Clemson, but should do much better vs the UNC defense, but the guy I love here is Drake Maye. UNC is playing extremely well offensively and Maye is likely the 3rd or 4th highest ownership QB this week but has 2 or 3 rushing TD upside IMO.
- LSU/Mizzouri (Daniels/Cook – $16,400 combined salary) …In the case of Daniels & Cook, there are great WR that you can game stack around them and I don’t think Daniels is a sure thing to go out and rush for 99 yards like he did last week, but all of his rushing touchdowns have come on the road and that’s another reason to just play 1 WR with Daniels and 2 with Cook.
- Oklahoma/Texas (Gabriel/Ewers – $17,400 combined salary) … If you believe the game will shootout then you go all in here. Personally I think the OU defense is pretty good and Texas will need to lean on Jonathan Brooks while OU will have to lean on Gabriel. It’s a game we can pluck a single WR from but I am not heavy on game stacking these QB.
MY CORE QB RANKINGS
- Drake Maye – UNC
- Jayden Daniels – LSU
- Garrett Shrader – Syracuse
There’s arguably what feels like a million RB options this week but guess what. All of them but one are as blah as you can think of. The Contrarian build this week is going heavy on RB and hoping for the TD variance God’s to bail you out.
Good luck with that….
CORE OPTIONS
- Devin Neal – Kansas – $6300 … This is the easy? one if I say so myself. Neal’s gonna get the ball early and often and should continue to average yards at a a high clip.
- Trey Benson – Florida State – $6600
SECOND TIER
- RJ Harvey – UCF – $6100
- LeQuint Allen – Syracuse – $5800
- Jonathan Brooks – Texas – $6700
Sleepers
- Carson Steele – UCLA – $5600
- Trevor Etienne – Florida – $5400
- Omarion Hampton – UNC – $5700 … Only way Maye doesn’t break slate is Hampton breaking it.
Big time WR/Gamestack week with Mizzouri (Burden/Wease), LSU (Nabers/Thomas), Florida State (Wilson/Coleman) and UCF (Baker/Hudson) all having 2 really good options. Of the four, I don’t love Florida State as much as I probably should because I think they’ll run all over VT instead. UCF makes a ton of sense, assuming that they can slow down Kansas ground game and get enough possessions themselves to justify having 2+ WR. Normally though I lean building the ‘optimal’ type build with spreading it out and this is a nice deep slate here so I’ll lean 4 individual WR’s myself.
CORE OPTIONS
- Devontez Walker – UNC – $3000 … The expectation is that Walker will make his season debut after being cleared by the NCAA — and of course, it’s a soft matchup and he is min priced on a slate when paying for 2 QB is going to be at a premium. 80% chalk? Who cares, take it.
- Luther Burden – Missouri – $6900 … Theo Wease is a FINE pivot at $1400 less, I think they get even workload and you will not be disappointed with either.
- Malik Nabers – LSU – $6500 … Should be 8k, next question.
- Ricky Pearsall – Florida – $7400 … An island option vs Vandy, who continues to be terrible in coverage.
- Javon Baker – UCF – $5400 … Slight lean on Baker vs Hudson this week and Xavier Townsend likely draws some looks too.
THIS WEEKS SLEEPER?
- Marvin Harrison Jr – Ohio State – $8900 … It’s hard to call arguably the top WR in the nation a sleeper, but with so many other games standing out this week, it’s almost as if we’re just gonna gloss over Harrison in a great gamescript vs Maryland — who lets be honest, hasn’t really faced anyone on his level or even close to it.
OTHERS I LIKE
- Josh Kelly / Kyle Williams – Washington State
- Jalil Farooq – Oklahoma
- Tyler Brown (5300) & Beaux Collins (5200) – Clemson
DRAFTKINGS CORE OPTIONS
- QB – Drake Maye
- RB – Devin Neal
- WR – Malik Nabers
- WR – Devontez Walker
LINEUP CONSTRUCTION
- 2 QB, 4 WR
BETS
- Oklahoma +5
- Washington State ML
- Syracuse/UNC over 59.5
Side Note: Ohio State is either winning by 3 or winning by 40.