Hidden Gems. Week 6 Underdog Battle Royale Value Picks.
We took a bye week from Battle Royale to discuss Resurrection strategy last week, but we are back to preview the Week 6 slate from a drafting perspective on Underdog Fantasy.
In Week 5, user ‘GlueEater’ took down the $30,000 top prize with a very clean, logical lineup:
- A Jalen Hurts to Dallas Goedert stack
- 3 elite WRs (yes, Puka is elite, get over it)
- A lone RB in a blow-up spot
The most interesting part about this lineup were the ADP values. Glueeater grabbed Hurts six picks after ADP, Puka six picks after, and Breece Hall eight picks after. I reviewed the full lineup on my portfolio review show on Monday if you’d like to analyze further.
We spend a lot of time in this space cooking up galaxy brain, “scroll the eff down” ideas in hopes of creating unique rosters that can differentiate us from a massive field, but it is also important to remember that we can also generate uniqueness by grabbing ADP fallers.
I like going into a draft with a unique lever I want to pull (I’ll outline 3 of those ideas below), but we should also be willing to abandon those plans if a better one presents itself, like scooping players with elite talent who fall a round past ADP.
Most of the time we will have to be our own driver for uniqueness with most drafters sticking closely to ADP, but when they deviate, we should pounce on the values and allow the room to gift us uniqueness in another way.
As always, special thanks to Chad Maschke’s Battle Royale data for giving us drafted percentage numbers.
QB/TE Stack: Sam Howell & Logan Thomas (ADPs: 35.9 & 34.8)
Sam Howell (QB11) is going undrafted in most contests this week and Logan Thomas is being drafted less than 20% of the time, which means this stack will be utilized by less than 1% of the field.
I think that’s crazy.
Howell finished as the QB6 last week and threw the ball 51 times. He threw it 41 times the week before. As a result, Washington now sports the highest PROE (pass rate over expectation) in the entire league. Aka, this is a team that is willing to chuck it.
I think there’s a clear Top 3 at QB this week (Hurts, Justin Fields, and Tua Tagovailoa), but after that it’s a bunch of pocket passers who will need to throw for multiple TDs to hit a high score. There’s no reason Howell can’t find himself atop this cohort with the Commanders’ pass-happy leanings:
As for Thomas, he earned an eye-popping 11 targets in Week 5. But what’s even crazier is that not all of these were low calorie, dink and dunk throws near the line of scrimmage. Thomas earned 21% of the team’s total Air Yards and garnered 40% of the end zone targets:
I think Thomas is in play as a one-off TE selection this week, but I always like correlating my QB with their TE.
I specifically like this duo when I take Bijan Robinson in the first round of drafts. It’s not farfetched to think we could get the Bijan explosion game followed by Howell slinging it in comeback mode.
RB: D'Onta Foreman (ADP: 35.7)
One thing I like to think through in these contests is leverage. We discussed this concept in our Week 1 piece in regards to the 49ers offense and this week we have another prime opportunity to exploit field tendencies.
D.J. Moore is currently going as the No. 5 overall pick in Week 6 contests, ahead of Bijan, A.J. Brown, and Davante Adams–just to name a few.
I certainly understand why this is happening (he’s coming off an 8-230-3 game and now faces the Vikings), but I think this is an extremely frothy ADP for a player whose volatile production doesn’t match up with the profile of a player who is regularly drafted in the first round.
I’ll have a very small amount of DJM in my Battle Royale portfolio this week (and exclusively paired with Fields when I do grab a sprinkle), which means I need to consider ways to further leverage this fade.
One obvious one is by loading up on the WRs going directly after him like AJB and Adams.
Another one is to pair Fields with Cole Kmet (ADP: 31.3) instead.
But these pivots don’t give us access to players who aren’t being drafted in 100% of contests.
That brings us to D’Onta Foreman, who will have the entire backfield to himself on Sunday with both Roschon Johnson and Khalil Herbert out.
Foreman gives us a chance to leverage against the field’s overconfidence that the Chicago points will be primarily generated by DJM.
While DJM, Fields, and Kmet are the most likely path for the Bears to put up a big score, what if they do most of their damage on the ground instead?
In these scenarios where Foreman scores a couple TDs, not only have we unearthed a hidden gem that our opponents won’t have, but we also crater all of the teams who overpaid for Moore.
WR: Christian Kirk (ADP: 35)
Let’s play a little game…which WR would you rather have:
Player A: Drafted in 100% of Week 6 Battle Royale contests, 20% target share, 2 Top 24 finishes at the position
Player B: Drafted in less than 20% of Week 6 Battle Royale contests, 23% target share, 4 Top 24 finishes at the position
I guess this blind item is functionally useless since you can already see Christian Kirk’s name in the header, so I’ll go ahead and spill the beans.
Kirk is Player B and Calvin Ridley is Player A:
The Jaguars are similar to the 49ers in that they have a QB who spreads the ball to four legitimate pass-catching weapons (Ridley, Kirk, Evan Engram, and Zay Jones) who all have the ability to pop off for big games.
On top of that, the Jags get a juicy matchup against an exploitable Colts secondary:
This presents us with a great opportunity to fade the most popular of options in Ridley (Jones will likely be out again this week, by the way) and target the player who isn’t regularly drafted.
In Week 2 this was Brandon Aiyuk. In Week 6 it’s Christian Kirk.
Good luck this week. For more Battle Royale and Underdog strategy, you can check me out on Friday afternoons with the Badge Bros.
You can put these strategies into pratice on Underdog Fantasy, where you can get a 100% deposit match of up to $500 when you use promo code LIFE below!
