Week 11 DraftKings Monday Night Football Showdown: San Francisco 49ers vs. Arizona Cardinals

Injuries: The projections assume Kyler Murray will not play and Colt McCoy will start.
Best plays: DeAndre Hopkins has the most positive leverage for the CPT spot, with Jimmy Garoppolo and Colt McCoy looking like the best values in the FLEX position among the highest-salaried players.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

This season, we'll 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 the best and worst values for an upcoming matchup.

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

A breakdown of methodology and the most similar historical matchup to this game: 2021 Week 19: New England Patriots–Miami Dolphins, with Mac Jones playing Jimmy Garoppolo‘s role and Tua Tagovailoa as Colt McCoy.
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 2018-2022 Showdown contest results to optimal allocations.
Recent CPT ownership trends are 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 to 2022 and found the closest analogies to this contest according to the following parameters: Betting spread, over/under and average fantasy points scoring for the top-ranked positional players of both rosters (QB1, RB1, WR1, TE1).

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

Historical			Current
Player	Pos	Team	Player	Pos	Team
Mac Jones	QB	NE	Jimmy Garoppolo	QB	SF
Damien Harris	RB	NE	Christian McCaffrey	RB	SF
Jakobi Meyers	WR	NE	Deebo Samuel	WR	SF
Hunter Henry	TE	NE	George Kittle	TE	SF
Tua Tagovailoa	QB	MIA	Colt McCoy	QB	ARI
Duke Johnson Jr.	RB	MIA	James Conner	RB	ARI
Jaylen Waddle	WR	MIA	DeAndre Hopkins	WR	ARI
Mike Gesicki	TE	MIA	Trey McBride	TE	ARI

The spread and over/under are similar in these matchups (Patriots -5.5, 41 O/U versus this matchup at 49ers -8, 43.5 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
Duke Johnson Jr.	MIA	RB	CPT	22.2
Brandon Bolden	NE	RB	FLEX	20.6
Dolphins	MIA	DST	FLEX	20.0
Damien Harris	NE	RB	FLEX	17.3
Jaylen Waddle	MIA	WR	FLEX	13.7
Hunter Henry	NE	TE	FLEX	13.6

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 a 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 versus 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 choices from those matchups by position rank according to salary.

Breaking down total optimal rosters

This graph illustrates the full range of allocations for the different positions to measure how many of the 500 optimal rosters had exactly zero, one or two of the given positions.

Historical ownership

The boxplot above shows the ranges for CPT ownership for each starting player in contests since 2019.

Projected ownership versus optimal

This is where the analysis comes together and becomes actionable. What’s most important when viewing these numbers is to contrast them to the optimal numbers taken from the analysis above for different positions. Then, we see where the leverage may exist.

The two tables below compare the optimal allocations above, with adjustments for the personnel of this particular matchup, to our ownership projections for CPT and FLEX.