Hidden Gems. Underdog Pick'em Plays for Lions @ 49ers.
I’m honestly starting to get sad.
We only have three games left in the NFL season.
Last week we drafted 100+ teams on Underdog Fantasy, and one of our late-round gems–Baker Mayfield–ended up being the optimal QB on the slate.
For this week’s edition, we are going to switch things up a bit and focus on Pick ‘Ems.
I recently wrote up a piece (and made a video) about Underdog Fantasy’s Pick ‘Em game if you want to get familiar with the format.
One of the reasons I’ve come to love Pick ‘Ems is because you can think of them like a DFS lineup. Instead of selecting individual picks in a vacuum, you can string together correlated picks that tell a story about a specific game flow or outcome.
Here is 5-leg Pick ‘Em entries for the Niners/Lions game that leverage our tools and projections at Fantasy Life.
As a reminder, you can get a 100% deposit match of up to $100 when you sign up for Underdog Fantasy below with promo code LIFE!
Lions @ 49ers Pick'Em
The Niners Demolition Script
We are very bullish on Brandon Aiyuk this weekend (you can read Dwain’s thoughts on his matchup here). Underdog has him listed at 80.5 receiving yards and our projection is for 88.4 receiving yards, so that’s a logical place for us to start by taking the higher:
Now we start thinking about a game script where Aiyuk has 80+ receiving yards. What also happens in these scenarios?
If Aiyuk goes higher than 80.5, it’s also highly likely that Brock Purdy is having a good game as well. In his Favorites piece, Matthew Freedman outlined a simple case for Purdy having success in this spot:
He’s at home for the second week in a row. The 49ers have had just one road game since Christmas. Purdy has an extra day of rest. Williams is healthy. And Levi’s Stadium has a windless and sunny forecast that projects a Jan. 28th all-time record high of 70 degrees.
The last 5 QBs to face the Lions have all thrown for 345 or more yards. We are not going to get fancy. We’ll add Brock Purdy higher than 276.5 passing yards to the entry.
And if Purdy is slinging it around the yard all day, we know another 49er pass catcher is likely to be a beneficiary.
If Purdy is clearing his number, we’ll want to find another pass catcher to pair him with.
Enter George Kittle, who faces a Lions team that ranks 23rd against the TE position for fantasy points allowed.
Considering we have Kittle projected for 66.8 yards, it makes sense to take the higher on his 60.5 receiving yards number.
We now have a Purdy “double stack” in our lineup with Kittle and Aiyuk where we are getting value on both the Kittle and Aiyuk numbers.
Eventually, we’ll add a Lions piece to the entry–you can’t submit an entry without having players from at least two teams–but we are going to add one more Niners piece to this onslaught.
Christian McCaffrey’s fantasy points number is set at 20.05 on Underdog. The story we are telling with this game is that the Niners offense rolls and it’s really hard to envision that happening without CMC racking up a ton of fantasy points.
This is a fair line based on our projections (we have him at 20.3), but in the context of this Pick ‘Em his odds of going higher than this number increase when the other things in our entry hit (the offense moving the ball at will).
We’ve now told a story of the Niners offense rolling and CMC mopping up a TD or two at the goal line.
To cap this off, we’ll need to add an entry involving the Lions.
Geoff Ulrich likes Jahmyr Gibbs higher than 47.5 rushing yards, but I’m a little worried about that selection for this specific entry. If the Niners are crushing, then there could be less rushing work for Gibbs.
However, the Rivals tab gives us another way to play Gibbs–in direct competition with his less explosive backfield mate David Montgomery:
In this selection, we only need Gibbs to rush for at least 1.5 yards more than Montgomery. By playing this head-to-head we don’t have to worry about the Lions running game in relation to the Niners stout defense.
And considering how efficient Gibbs has been–and the likelihood that the Lions turn to him more and/or that he delivers a big play–makes this an easy selection in this entry. The game scripts where Montgomery out-rushes Gibbs tilt much more to closer game flows and/or the Lions maintaining a lead.
So now we can put it all together. Our correlated entry pays out 12 to 1:
And the beauty of an entry like this is that we don’t need to actually get five individual things right. If Purdy throws for 300+ yards, the Kittle and Aiyuk stuff will likely hit in tandem.
So the thesis of an entry like this is that we only need to get three things right (Purdy, CMC fantasy points, and Gibbs > Montgomery) instead of 5.
Good luck to us.
