Levitan's Solo Pod: Adam Makes Worst Mistake of the Season (Episode 1030)

Adam Levitan (0:15)

Hello, and welcome to episode 1030 of the official Establish The run.com podcast. My name is Adam Levitan. I am one of the co-founders here at ETR, and we are coming off of the machine-new kind of week. Yes, that's right. All week, I stared at this massive CJ Stroud projection we had at this big Nico Collins projection. And my pathetic, tiny human brain just couldn't get my head around it.

A lot of other people couldn't get their head around it either. Lowering the ownership, making the Stroud, Nico Collins stuff sim really well on both sites, especially on FanDuel, where they were a bit cheaper. And I saw that, I saw Nico Stroud stuff simming really well. And of course, I not waived it because in my pathetic head, Stroud is not a good fantasy quarterback. When the Texans play well, it's through dominant defense. CD Lamb has a difficult match up here and is very expensive. But of course, all that ignores why the projection on Stroud was so good. The Cowboys play so fast. Opponents run so many plays against them. This game is indoors. Cowboys defense is inept. I mean, if you look at our defense versus position stuff, and by the way, you can see that table in the data section of the NFL tab. Our DVP stuff had the Cowboys inflating quarterback scoring by 12.4% over baseline expectation. That was the most in the NFL. Same with wide receiver, 7.3% inflation, most in the NFL. So it's tough. There's some nuance here between what I think we should be trusting the machines on and what I think are more spots to IKB, to I know better. I think this CJ Stroud, Meekle Collins, CD Lamb play from week four is an example of one where I really do want to trust the machines on. When we have a really good projection on star players, when the game total is higher than my initial gut would have been on it, and yet people, including me, don't really want to click it. For example, in the 3-3-3 on DraftKings, Brad was 7%, Nico 12%, Lam 7%.

So I know I'm not doing a good job of describing the difference here. I think the place where there's more room to IKB, to I know better than the machines, the better place to do that is in more volatile situations. There were not a lot of moving parts in Dallas, Houston. But in other situations, certainly, there's more volatile spots. For example, Silva thought we were too light Emmanuel Wilson workload in projections relative to Helani. Turned out, Silva was right. That was a really tough spot.

I'll talk more about Pukin Naku in a minute, but we had a tiny dock on him for injury risk. In my heart of hearts though, I thought a good chance he wouldn't be limited at all. That was a spot where you could IKB. On Dontavian Wicks, is he good enough to score fantasy points against Trent Mcduffey with Jalen Hurts at quarterback? That's another one you could IKB.

I guess my point is that the Dallas Houston projections, there wasn't much to IKB.

I could say, well, I think that Cedric Shroud sucks. That's not an IKB. That is not an input. All that is baked into all the data already that the machines know, that the modeling knows, that the Sims know. So, on the Dallas Houston projection, it was just rock solid. There was nothing tough about it on the input side. And that's the spot where I want to lean into the Sims the hardest. So yes, I should have had the Shroud, Niko stuff in tournaments. Shout out to the people who did. I know there were a bunch of you got a bunch of messages about people winning some really nice stuff. Shout out to you. And by the way, on like the spots to IKB versus where it's solid, I would think that it's pretty easy to figure out. One of the reasons that we started that projections context show and Leone does the lineup building show and why we talk about inputs on pretty much every show is to try to put context around it. So if you want to IKB, you guys know exactly how we're projecting these tough situations.

As for cash in week four, man, I blew it on DraftKings. Like, I really, really did think Puka was going to be perfectly healthy. I talked about it a bunch and it was such a big game for the Rams. They didn't want to fall to one and three. They hate the Eagles. I'm just such a Puka guy in general. He's so incredible. Any time Puka Nakua is healthy and the greatest wide receiver, kingmaker of all time, Matthew Stafford is also healthy and Puka Nakua is below 8K on full PPR DraftKings, I want to be playing him. And like, I don't get into those, you know, every slate is different. I agree. Every slate is different.