Fantasy News & Analysis

Premium Content Sign Up

DraftKings Showdown: Chicago Bears vs. Green Bay Packers Sunday Night Football

The changing DFS and fantasy football landscape is shifting toward single-game contests. At DraftKings, the biggest is their Showdown Captain Mode format. The format blends the ease of focusing on a single game with the ability to differentiate yourself from the competition by choosing a total of six players.

Editor's note: Now available to all PFF ELITE subscribers, the NFL DFS Optimizer gives both new and die-hard DFS players an opportunity to generate optimized single lineups and multiple lineups for DFS tournaments and contests on DraftKings, FanDuel and Yahoo DFS.

The biggest wrinkle of the format is the ability to choose one captain, who costs and is scored at 1.5 times the standard values. The CPT designation opens up another layer of strategy while exponentially increasing the number of possible lineup combinations, which is important for reducing duplicate winners and split prizes. I wrote a primer on playing this format, with details on historical positional trends and salary usage.

This season I’m going to analyze all of the NFL’s “island” games (TNF, SNF and MNF) and playoff matchups, utilizing PFF’s weekly projections, current betting lines and millions of simulated historical combinations to identify who are the best and worst values for an upcoming matchup.

There are five main components to each Showdown slate analysis that you’ll find below:

  • A breakdown of methodology and the most similar historical matchup to Chicago BearsGreen Bay Packers as an illustration of the matching process: 2015 Week 16 SteelersRavens, featuring Antonio Brown as Davante Adams and Ryan Mallett playing the role of Mitchell Trubisky.
  • Optimal lineup allocations (CPT and total roster) for both teams based on the results of similar historical matchups.
  • Comparison of player ownership projections for FLEX and CPT produced by a model trained on 2018-2020 Showdown contest results to optimal allocations.
  • Recent CPT ownership trends illustrated for both starting lineups.
  • A table showing the most common players on optimal lineups for each player. This allows you to see which other players are commonly found on the same optimal lineups as a player you’re interested in rostering. 

METHODOLOGY

To analyze this specific Showdown slate, I looked through thousands of NFL matchups from 2014-2020 and found the closest analogies to this matchup according to the following parameters: betting spread, over/under, average fantasy points scoring for the top-ranked positional players of both rosters (QB1, RB1, WR1, TE1).

For this game, I won’t detail every matchup that falls into the top 100, but for illustration let’s look at the most similar matchup:

Historical Current
Player Pos Team Player Pos Team
Ben Roethlisberger QB PIT Aaron Rodgers QB GB
DeAngelo Williams RB PIT Aaron Jones RB GB
Antonio Brown WR PIT Davante Adams WR GB
Heath Miller TE PIT Robert Tonyan TE GB
Ryan Mallett QB BLT Mitchell Trubisky QB CHI
Javorius Allen RB BLT David Montgomery RB CHI
Kamar Aiken WR BLT Allen Robinson II WR CHI
Maxx Williams TE BLT Jimmy Graham TE CHI

The spread and over/under are similar in these matchups (Steelers -11.5, 47.5 O/U versus this matchup at Packers -9.5, 45 O/U). All the players aren’t perfect matches, but that’s why we use 100 similar matchups and not just the single most similar.

The optimal roster for that historical matchup, assuming positional salaries equaled what they are for this Showdown slate, would have been:

Player Team Position Roster Position Fantasy Pts
DeAngelo Williams PIT RB CPT 36.3
Javorius Allen BLT RB FLEX 22.2
Ryan Mallett BLT QB FLEX 15.0
Kamar Aiken BLT WR FLEX 14.6
Antonio Brown PIT WR FLEX 13.8
Chris Matthews BLT WR FLEX 10.9

For this game and 99 other similar matchups, I calculated every possible combination that fits with Showdown rules (one CPT, at least one offensive player from each team) and would fall under the $50K salary threshold assuming the salaries for the historical similar matchups are the same as those for this contest.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT CAPTAIN

The most unique part of the format, and therefore the biggest opportunity for competitive advantage, is choosing your CPT. Should you always choose a QB who typically has the highest absolute fantasy scoring? Are defenses and kickers viable options? RB vs. WR?

I went through the millions of possible lineup combinations for the 100 most similar matchups and found who the CPT selections were on the top-five scoring lineups for each matchup. Here are the 500 CPT from those matchups by position rank according to salary.

DOMINATE FANTASY FOOTBALL & BETTING WITH AI-POWERED DATA & TOOLS TRUSTED BY ALL 32

Unlimited Fantasy League Sync
Fantasy Start/Sit Line-Up Optimizer & Waiver Wire
WR-CB & OL-DL Matchups, PFF Player Grades, & Premium Stats 2.0 Tools
Nathan Jahnkes Rankings - #1 Most Accurate Last 70 Weeks
PFF Best Bets, Player Props, & Power Ranking Tools
NFL Mock Draft Sim with Trades & Draft Grades

Already have a subscription? Log In

Subscriptions

Unlock the 2023 Fantasy Draft Kit, with League Sync, Live Draft Assistant, PFF Grades & Data Platform that powers all 32 Pro Teams

$31 Draft Kit Fee + $8.99/mo
OR
$89.88/yr + FREE Draft Kit