Sitting down and constructing a daily fantasy football squad launches a series of mostly unanswerable questions that hinge on matchups, historical trends, recent statistical happenings that may or may not be anomalies, and myriad other nagging internal queries that leave us with a sense of vague unease, no matter the final result.
And your daily fantasy lineup concoction is of course dictated by the kind of game in which you’re playing. A slightly more conservative lineup — one stacked with players who sport decidedly high fantasy floors — is called for in 50/50 games and head-to-head throw downs. Volatile lineups — sprinkled with players with low floors and sky-high ceilings — are required to take down the week’s largest tournaments.
We know that yardage is far more replaceable than touchdowns, and that total yards is more predictable than who finds their way into the end zone on a given Sunday afternoon. But how can we leverage that information, along with the glut of stats thrown at daily gamers every week?
How can we convert consistency and volatility into daily fantasy cash-money?
A new daily fantasy website, Victiv, site seeks to make this arduous task easier for those who pour untold hours into formulating lineups with just enough predictability and upside to land in the money in cash games and tourneys alike. Victiv has introduced a tool designed to do just that. It’s called Victron.
Victron, which has no formal relation to robotic 80s cultural icon Voltron, generates weekly lineups based on your priorities and points of emphasis. You can create lineups based on seven factors: touchdowns, passing yards, receiving yards, rushing yards, historical performance, and matchups.
You want a touchdown-centric daily lineup — one teeming with guys who are most likely to end up in the end zone once or twice on Sunday? Would you prefer a lineup based on a more predictable statistic like yardage? Do you want a team filled with players who have juicy matchups against teams bleeding fantasy points to a particular position?
Just tell the Victron Machine, and it shall be done.
In the lead up to Week 6, for example, adjust the Victron scale in favor of touchdowns and you’ll get a lineup anchored by the likes of Peyton Manning, Antonio Brown, Marshawn Lynch, and Julius Thomas — all of whom have been touchdown-scoring machines through the season’s first five weeks.
Ask Victron to emphasize receiving yards and you’ll get a Week 6 team that includes Gio Bernard, Kelvin Benjamin, Alshon Jeffery, Julius Thomas, and Joique Bell. It makes sense that Bernard and Bell — along with waiver wire wonder Branden Oliver — are on this receiving yardage-focused roster, as all three backs could be PPR dynamos in their Week 6 matchups.
Request a matchup-based lineup for Week 6 and Victron will generate a Blake Bortles–Allen Hurns stack (combining a quarterback and pass catcher in one lineup) as they take on an atrocious Tennessee secondary allowing 35.5 schedule-adjusted fantasy points to opposing receivers. This matchup-centric team also sports Alfred Morris and Le’Veon Bell — two runners facing decidedly favorable Week 6 matchups.
Victron, like any algorithm-based tool that helps spot the best weekly plays, shouldn’t be taken as the end-all-be-all of lineup construction. It does, however, offer a solid basis for creating teams designed to succeed in cash games — 50/50 contest, for instance — and those engineered to go against hundreds or thousands of competitors in weekly tournaments.
Fidget with the Victron Machine and see if you can drain a little of the unease from your daily fantasy roster building.
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