Your weekly guide to Sunday night’s Showdown slate on DraftKings. Ryan Clifford breaks down the top options at CAPT & FLEX, optimal stacking rules, and all of the slate-specific strategy you’ll need to get yourself atop the leaderboards!
I finally got around to recording my entire process for building MME Showdown lineups with the Elite Fantasy optimizer, which is now posted on the website under the main optimizer tutorials section. Here it is: Optimizer Tutorial for DK Showdown.
And here is tonight’s slate-specific optimizer setup (if the video won’t play, it’s likely still processing; give it a few minutes, refresh, and try again):
Setting Up the Optimizer
You’ll want to jump into our optimizer, which has been preloaded with our projections for the entire week, and then you can set up your initial groups:
- At least 1 QB (Mayfield, McCoy)
- At most 1 K (Parkey, Gano)
- At most 1 DST (Browns, Giants)
- In the position stacks tab, stack CAPT with at least 1 QB/RB/WR/TE/K/DST from the same team
Building the Punt Pool
Next up, we need to put our “punts” into the player pool, as we’ll be building a group with them.
You must pay attention to the inactive list that is announced 60-90 minutes before kickoff. Make sure none of these guys are on that list. Some of them will probably be, and you’ll need to adjust your pool at that point.
Here are the punts you should add to your player pool at this point.
Browns: Andy Janovich (RB), Marvin Hall (WR)
Giants: Alfred Morris (RB), Austin Mack (WR), Kaden Smith (TE), Levine Toilolo (TE)
CAPT Pool
No interest in the quarterbacks tonight at CAPT. For the Browns, this is an offense that has shown an explosive side, but it’s usually riding on the back of the run game.
Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt are two of my favorites for CAPT exposure tonight. These two have appeared in 14 perfect Showdown lineups since 2019, and one of the two were the optimal CAPT in five of those games. The Giants rank in the bottom 10 of the league against the run.
Jarvis Landry and Rashard Higgins are both in play as CAPT’s, too. Both are on the field nearly every down, and both have at least 6 catches in each of their last two games.
For the Giants, Wayne Gallman is the clear RB1 on this team, and should be in your CAPT pool. I’m not terribly excited about the receivers with Colt McCoy likely starting, but I will have small tastes of Darius Slayton, Sterling Shepard, and Evan Engram.
Here’s a look at my approximate exposures at CAPT:
- Nick Chubb 35%
- Kareem Hunt 20%
- Wayne Gallman 15%
- Jarvis Landry 10%
- Rashard Higgins 5%
- Evan Engram 5%
- Sterling Shepard 5%
- Darius Slayton 5%
CAPT Groups
Refer to the video above for detailed instructions on setting up tonight’s CAPT pools.
Filling the FLEX Pool
The last step is to fill in the FLEX pool with all of the remaining players that will appear. Again, you may need to adjust when inactives are released, but for now, you should have 35 total players in your pool.
CAPT (8): Chubb, Hunt, Landry, Higgins, Gallman, Shepard, Slayton, Engram
QB (2): Mayfield, McCoy
RB (6): Chubb, Hunt, Janovich, Gallman, Lewis, Morris
WR (9): Landry, Higgins, Peoples-Jones, Hall, Hodge, Slayton, Shepard, Tate, Mack
TE (6): Hooper, Njoku, Bryant, Engram, Smith, Toilolo
K (2): Parkey, Gano
DST (2): Browns, Giants
Optimizer Settings
We’re ready to build! Head back into “Advanced Options” and use the following settings:
- 1-2 unique players
- $48,900 maximum salary
- max 3 offensive players vs. defense
- 15% randomness – MAKE SURE TO TURN ON & CLICK ON “CHANGE ALL PLAYERS” (see image below)
- 0.1 minimum projection included in calculation
Correlations
Notable Positive Correlations
Colt McCoy – Golden Tate 0.44
Baker Mayfield – Rashard Higgins 0.42
Colt McCoy – Darius Slayton 0.41
Colt McCoy – Sterling Shepard 0.38
Baker Mayfield – Jarvis Landry 0.35
Colt McCoy – Evan Engram 0.34
Baker Mayfield – KhaDarel Hodge 0.25
Baker Mayfield – Austin Hooper 0.23
Baker Mayfield – Donovan Peoples-Jones 0.23
Baker Mayfield – Harrison Bryant 0.22
Colt McCoy – Kaden Smith 0.21
Baker Mayfield – David Njoku 0.20
Graham Gano – Giants DST 0.19
Wayne Gallman – Graham Gano 0.17
Wayne Gallman – Giants DST 0.16
Notable Negative Correlations
Giants DST – Nick Chubb -0.33
Giants DST – Baker Mayfield -0.30
Wayne Gallman – Nick Chubb -0.20
Giants DST – Cody Parkey -0.20
Graham Gano – Nick Chubb -0.15
Build!
We’re ready to go. Click on “Calculate 50 Lineups” (or less depending on how many you are building) and your first 50 lineups will be built. If you’re like me, and you’re building more than that, click that same button again and spit out 50 more. With the randomness set to 15% and 3 unique players, you shouldn’t get too many duplicate lineups.
When you have your second set of 50 lineups, click on “select lineups” and “move 50 selected” from the drop down menu, and it will move all of the non-duplicated lineups over to your first batch. Keep repeating the process until you have your desired number of lineups.
Click on “export lineups”, make sure to select to proper slate, and your lineups are ready to upload into DK!
Conclusion
Remember to keep an eye on inactives, I’ll be in chat once they’re out.
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