Week 9 DraftKings Sunday Night Football Showdown: Tennessee Titans vs. Kansas City Chiefs

Tannehill should start: The projections assume Ryan Tannehill will start and not be materially limited.
Best CPT and FLEX value: JuJu Smith-Schuster has the most positive leverage for the CPT spot while Patrick Mahomes is a better FLEX play.

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: 2017 Week 17: New England Patriots–Buffalo Bills, with Tom Brady as Patrick Mahomes and LeSean McCoy playing Derrick Henry‘s role.
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
Tom Brady	QB	NE	Patrick Mahomes	QB	KC
Dion Lewis	RB	NE	Clyde Edwards-Helaire	RB	KC
Brandin Cooks	WR	NE	JuJu Smith-Schuster	WR	KC
Rob Gronkowski	TE	NE	Travis Kelce	TE	KC
Tyrod Taylor	QB	BUF	Ryan Tannehill	QB	TEN
LeSean McCoy	RB	BUF	Derrick Henry	RB	TEN
Kelvin Benjamin	WR	BUF	Robert Woods	WR	TEN
Charles Clay	TE	BUF	Geoff Swaim	TE	TEN

The spread and over/under are similar in these matchups (Patriots -11, 47.5 O/U versus this matchup at Chiefs -12.5, 46 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
Dion Lewis	NE	RB	CPT	35.3
LeSean McCoy	BUF	RB	FLEX	19.7
Rob Gronkowski	NE	TE	FLEX	17.7
Stephen Gostkowski	NE	K	FLEX	14.0
Deonte Thompson	BUF	WR	FLEX	13.1
Kelvin Benjamin	BUF	WR	FLEX	12.0

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.