Photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck, USA Today Sports

KNOW YOUR Opponents

If you want to finish at the top of the standings in a mid-to-large field GPP, your roster has to stand out from the crowd. Studying a list of projected roster percentages is a helpful first step, but it lacks the context of how the most popular players fit together under the salary cap.

To gain some insight into how the majority of entrants will allocate their cap space, so you can spend yours differently, let’s think about how the public is most likely to attack roster construction at each position.

Slate Overview- The Chalk is Hitting

This is a season where the chalk has hit in big ways as last week, just about all of the highest-rostered players had phenomenal games. Last week, the most popular stack was Tua Tagovailoa, Tyreek Hill, and Jaylen Waddle a cumulative roster percentage of 78%. Combine that with D.J. Moore 28% and Tony Pollard 51%, and you quickly get to a roster percentage that is much higher than a normal week. This is the second week in a row that some of the most popular players worked out.

Here's the thing though, and why it is important to understand roster percentages. There were plenty of people who had the combination of Tua, Tyreek, D.J. Moore, and Tony Pollard and minimum cashed. In a given slate, if you’re going to take highly rostered players, you’re going to need to differentiate yourself with some very low rostered players. Last week, the winning roster had a 1.6% Tyler Conklin who had 26 points and a 0.9% Saints defense who had 16 points. Taking the chalk stacks can certainly pay off, but to truly win a GPP with these chalk lineups, you need to find ways to separate yourself from the competition and doing things such as taking two low-rostered Jets (Conklin and Garrett Wilson) players is certainly a way to differentiate yourself.

So, how should you change going forward? The reality is you probably shouldn’t change anything based off of two weeks, but there is a larger theory at play this season. This season compared to prior seasons seemingly has seen a bit of a pricing change where the sites try to anticipate players who are going to step into an opportunity if there is an injury. For example, Deon Jackson this week is $5,200, starting for the injured Jonathan Taylor. In past years, he likely would have been in the mid-4k range as they are really trying to prevent any running backs from being viable under 5k. What this does, is it forces a smaller playing pool and forces people into more of a balanced lineup, where historically you could build a true stars/scrubs type roster. When a value play does arise such as Tony Pollard last week, it’s going to be higher rostered than it may have been in previous years.