If you’ve looked ahead to Week 4’s Thursday start DFS slate, you’ve probably already started thinking about one of the week’s biggest dilemmas – “Do I play Antonio Brown in a Thursday Night Football game?” To make matters more difficult, the Steelers will be playing a divisional foe and will have to rely on their backup QB to make throws. Those are topics for another day, but in this article, I’d like to take a look at elite WR performance on TNF.
In the DFS community, we have rules of thumb that will hopefully help us avoid stepping on landmines as we construct our teams – don’t play Andy Dalton on the road, don’t trust a John Fox injury report, and perhaps the most set-in-stone rule of all – fade the passing game in the TNF game…maybe fade the game entirely.
Indeed, when I look at total Plus/Minus for all WRs playing in TNF games on DraftKings, it’s pretty ugly:
Why are Thursday Night Football games so gross? Here are two theories that people often use:
1) Not enough time for the players to recover from the previous week
2) Less time to game plan for opponent
The second theory is the one that I think more closely applies to this article. What do you do when you don’t have enough time to properly plan for something? You go with what has worked in the past and you take your chances.
Let’s say I’m hosting a birthday party for my kid and her friends at my house. What do I do about lunch if I don’t have the time or information to contact each parent and find out what their kid likes to eat? Order a bunch of cheese and pepperoni pizzas. Do I run the risk of one kid being allergic? Yeah. Could it be a weird group of kids where 7 out of 10 prefer green peppers and feta cheese for toppings? Sure. But most of the time, if I just take my chances with cheese and pepperoni pizzas, I’ll come out ahead. It’s worked in the past and it will probably work this time.
So now, you’re the Steelers and you are facing an AFC Central rival on a Thursday game. Well, you just lined up Le’Veon Bell multiple times at wide receiver last game and you let Antonio Brown throw a pass every now and then – now you have some version of Mike Vick in there too, so is it time to see what kind of crazy shit you can draw up to try and fool the Ravens? Yeah, I think they’re probably better off just keeping it simple and trying to get the ball to Brown and Bell as often as possible.
I created a WR trend on DraftKings that looks specifically at players priced $6600 and up and how they’ve fared in TNF games in 2014 and 2015. The results were somewhat surprising:
The sample sizes are obviously not huge, but still represent over a season’s worth of results on both Monday and Thursday. The results go back further on FanDuel, so I tried running the query there as well. Before doing so, I upped the salary cap threshold to $7600 to give me roughly the same caliber of players on FD since the salaries are different:
The FanDuel results, going back to 2012, follow the same progression: worst on Monday, average on Sunday, best on Thursday.
The worry anytime you don’t have huge sample sizes to work with is that one or two results are skewing the numbers. So I looked at the best and worst games within the result set to see if maybe there were one or two really great TNF scores and/or one or two awful MNF scores:
The results are pretty evenly distributed at both the top and the bottom though.
I also wanted to run a salary-independent query to look at the numbers through that lens. Back on DraftKings, when I applied the filter, “Player is averaging 5+ targets per game,” the results continue to match those in the previous section.
Given the boost that we’ve just seen to the elite WR1s along with the knowledge that WRs as a whole underperform on TNF, I’m expecting the WR2 numbers to be very ugly. WR2s are kind of hard to define, but setting the salary threshold at $4500-$5600 on DraftKings seemed to give me the Torrey Smith, Mike Wallace, Jordan Matthews (remember, these are mostly 2014 results) players I was looking for.
As predicted, the results are bad, really bad, on Thursdays.
DraftKings:
FanDuel:
The most expensive receivers have performed the best on Thursday Night Football. Early in the season, they are also super-highly owned. Last year on a TNF game, I outsmarted myself and faded Julio Jones vs Tampa Bay. He was 20 to 30% owned on FanDuel and went for 32.6 points. My week was basically over before it even got started. The stupid decision I made that week is still in the back of my mind anytime I am looking at players from a TNF game.
If you want to fade an elite WR on TNF due to matchup or circumstance, that’s fine. I’m definitely not saying you should always play WR1s who play on TNF either. What I am saying is you need to have a reason other than “Thursday.”
