CFB All Star - Lesson 02 - How to Approach the FLEX Position

The FLEX spot is a great feature that DraftKings offers that other major sites do not. It makes the game a lot more fun and gives good players an edge over their opponents. As is the case with most positions, the FLEX spot should be approached differently in different kinds of formats.

Cash Games

When constructing cash game lineups, as stated previously, we want to minimize our risk and attempt to field the team with the highest floor possible. Generally, running back is the position with the most week to week consistency and makes for the best FLEX position play most weeks. However, there will be outliers as the season progresses and some weeks it will be optimal to play a wide receiver in your FLEX spot. Possession receivers are often viable FLEX plays when their price is exploitable.

The FLEX spot in cash games, while being incredibly important, is just another cash game roster spot. Don’t overthink it. Take the best player available with the highest floor.

Tournaments

As we’ve discussed before, tournaments are basically and “anything goes” game when it comes to constructing lineups. You want to maximize your upside and be somewhat contrarian at the same time. When it comes to the FLEX spot, wide receiver is typically the best way to go.

There are a couple different ways I prefer to approach a tournament style FLEX spot with a wide receiver: pay big or punt.

If you followed college football closely last year, you know that teams like California and Washington State were pass heavy offenses that relied on multiple different receivers to move the ball down field and score touchdowns. Washington State is the much better offense in this example, and they give us our expensive tournament options. Guys like Vince Mayle, Gabe Marks, and Isiah Meyers were generally mid-top tier options and were full of upside considering they all saw 8+ targets per game, most of them being downfield. The fact that WSU averaged 4 touchdowns per game didn’t hurt either. High output offenses, like WSU of 2014, without a clear cut number one target give us plenty of boom/bust options to work with on a week to week basis.

On the punt side, we have California, a team that averaged more points per game, but actually had a running back that touched the ball and contributed every game. Cal had 4 “main” receivers that all had at least 46 catches. The amount of catches isn’t the stat to look at when looking for a punt wide receiver, though. What we want to look at is the big play potential and how many chances, on average, the wide receiver we’re considering might get to make that big play. The value of these players is relative week to week, but the cheap guys who see deep targets in a pass heavy offense offer quite a bite of upside for tournament purposes.

Finally, there is one last way to approach the FLEX position: Completely punt tight end. I’m saying take the cheapest player on the board that has caught a pass before and pray he does something. This strategy is fine, although volatile, in tournaments and cash games as long as you understand the opportunity cost of the move. Does the player you’re paying for have the floor/upside to make up for the 0 you may (probably will) have to deal with? If the answer is yes and you can stomach it, pull the trigger and enjoy it!

Continue Reading CFB Training Camp

CFB All Star – Lesson 01 – Random Factors
CFB All Star – Lesson 02 – How to Approach the FLEX Position
NEXT LESSON – CFB All Star – Lesson 03 – How to Approach the 2 QB Roster
CFB All Star – Lesson 04 – Using Stats to Predict Performance

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