Siddown. Close the door. I got the Week 3 Tailgate open on the desk here and a cup of coffee that’s been cold since the second quarter, and we’re gonna go through it line by line, because that’s the service.
Here’s the verdict up front, so nobody’s waiting around: our guy read the slate beautifully and read the players about half as well. He circled the two best games on the board before kickoff and both of them delivered exactly what he said they’d deliver. Then the money in those games went to three guys he never typed. That’s the whole story, and lemme tell you, it’s a more painful kind of miss than just being wrong.
But the Play of the Day was the top wide receiver on the entire slate at five percent owned. So we’re not throwing anybody in a river today. Let’s do the books.
THE GOOD
Braden Pegan ($6000 – Utah)
8 catches, 122 yards, 2 touchdowns, 35.2 DK points, the number one wide receiver on the slate, at 4.85% ownership. The Tailgate Play of the Day. Our own model liked the player — third-rated WR on the board — but had him projected for 12.95. The article went past the projection on a revenge-game read and got nearly three times the number, and almost nobody else in the pool was there. That’s not luck, that’s finding a spot the numbers couldn’t see. Beautiful thing.
via GIPHY
Nate Sheppard ($9200 – Duke)
“Chalk in cash,” he wrote. 23 carries for 154 and two scores, plus a receiving touchdown, about 37.6 DK points, second-best running back on the slate. He went 37.9% owned and he paid every one of them. Everybody wants to be a hero and fade the expensive chalk. Sometimes the expensive chalk is expensive because it’s good. Capisce?
Kamario Taylor ($8800 – Mississippi State)
This is the one I want to put in the ledger in ink, because he did it against the house. Our model had Taylor fifteenth among quarterbacks, rating 50.4, nothing special. The article called him top-two on the slate and said the price would scare people off. 18 of 26, 251 yards, 4 touchdowns, plus 8 for 33 on the ground. 28.3 DK points, QB3 on the slate, 9.87% owned. When a guy overrules my numbers and cashes, I don’t argue with him. I write it down and I buy him lunch.
The supporting cast
Kienholz 25.3 and QB5. Sellers 22.5 and QB7 with two picks and still fine. Yamir Knight at $4100 went 7-70-1 for 20.0, the ninth-best receiver on the slate at 4.88 points per thousand. Lawayne McCoy at $4600 hit 16.2 on 3.08% ownership — exactly the “cheap third stack piece” job he was assigned. King Miller went 16-102-1 for 19.2. Nobody’s ashamed of that group.
THE BAD
Yannick Smith ($4000 – SMU) over Yamir Knight ($4100 – SMU)
This one stings because the room was right and the guy was wrong. The article names Knight, Smith and Cooper in the same breath, then says out loud that Knight’s gonna be the popular one with 7.7 and 6.9 to show for it — and picks Smith. Core play. Top stack. Final: Knight 20.0, Smith 3-50-0 for 8.0. A hundred dollars in salary separated them. That’s a process miss, not a bad bounce. When you’ve correctly identified the right room, don’t get cute about which door you walk through.
Nyck Harbor ($3900 – South Carolina)
One catch, 22 yards, 3.2 DK points, 77th receiver on the slate, at 22.67% ownership. Article had him in the game stack and flagged him as “no secret.” He wasn’t. He was a fifth of the field’s roster and he did nothing. In fairness the model owns half of this — we had him rated fourth among all receivers. Both of us got taken.
Tre Richardson ($6100 – Louisville)
Called it “my cash WR.” Went 1-14 rushing and 4-62 receiving for 11.6 and WR32 in a game that put up 72 points. The Louisville-down-three-receivers logic was sound and the targets did pile up — they just piled up somewhere else. Right call, wrong day. Nobody’s getting whacked for that one.
Kevin Jennings ($8200 – SMU)
24 of 35 for 222, one touchdown, two picks, 13.4 points, QB17. If you built the double-QB lineup out of that game like the article suggested, Kienholz carried you and Jennings was the anchor around your ankle. Nate Frazier gets a lighter sentence — 14-75-1 for 13.5 was underneath the number but the road-SEC-opener logic was honest work.
THE AMAZING
Braden Pegan, and it isn’t close. Play of the Day, top-scoring wide receiver on the board, 35.2 points, 4.85% ownership. Understand what that means: we had ninety-five percent of the room passing on the best receiver on the slate, and our guy put a flag in him in the headline slot. You can be wrong about six other things in a week where you do that. That’s the one everybody remembers, and they should.
via GIPHY
THE UGLY
Utah. The whole Utah side of the card, except the one guy above.
Wayshawn Parker, $7000, listed as a core play, 25.71% owned: 10 carries for 30 yards, 2 catches for 1, 5.1 DK points. Forty-second running back on the slate. 0.73 points per thousand. Devon Dampier, $9400, the most expensive quarterback on the board at 25.92% owned: 20.5 points, QB8, 2.18 per thousand — not a zero, but at that salary and that ownership it’s a loss.
And here’s the part that makes it ugly instead of just bad. The article named the risk — Utah goes up big, the starters sit. Utah won 33-0. The game script the article warned about arrived exactly on schedule. But Parker didn’t even get his in the first half like the write-up promised; 10 carries for 30 is a bad day, not a blowout day. Two quarter-of-the-field plays, both in the same game, both underwater. That’s how you lose a slate even when your best call hits.
via GIPHY
THE MODEL
Alright, my turn on the hot seat, because I don’t grade a tout with numbers I won’t defend. And while we’re being honest: every ownership number in this column is our own projection, not a settled count. Nobody hands out the real ones after the fact, so read those percentages as where we thought the room was going, not where it went.
We were mediocre. Spearman correlation of our rating to actual points came in at 0.418 at quarterback, 0.459 at running back, 0.355 at receiver. Projections did better than ratings across the board — 0.565, 0.484, 0.443 — but the top-ten rated guys at every position came up short of their own projections: QBs averaged 20.5 against 24.6 projected, backs 13.5 against 17.4, receivers 13.6 against 16.9. That’s a slate where the board was too confident, top-down.
The specific black eyes: our number one receiver, Jeremiah Smith, rated 89.6, went 5-85-0 for 13.5 at 30.17% ownership. Our number one back, Bo Jackson, put up 14.3. Our fifth receiver, Omarion Miller, managed 4.8. Harbor, as covered. The article took our chalk and our chalk didn’t show.
Now the part that should sting both of us. The Tailgate correctly picked SMU-Louisville and Mississippi State-South Carolina as the two best games on the slate. Both went over, 72 and 75 points. Dead right. And the three biggest scores to come out of those two games were:
- Kendrick Raphael (SMU, $4800) — 24-197-3 plus 2 catches, about 43.8 DK points, the top scorer on the entire slate at 3.71% ownership. Our model had him 22nd among backs.
- Matt Fuller (South Carolina, $4900) — 17-73-1 rushing, 7-85-1 receiving, about 34.8 points, RB3 on the slate. Our model had him 13th.
- Keyjuan Brown (Louisville, $5200) — 10 carries, 163 yards, 2 scores, about 31.3 points at 0.76% ownership. Our model had him 28th.
Three cheap running backs, in the two games everybody in this building agreed were the best games, and neither the article nor the model put a single one of them on the page. Elsewhere: Keelon Russell went for 39.4 and QB1 (we had him seventh), and Ashton Daniels threw for 377 in a 50-36 loss for 35.8 at 1.19% owned (we had him 22nd). Add it up and the lesson is the same one every week — we’re both good at finding the game and lousy at finding the cheap guy inside it.
THE BETS
Four top bets, and we split them down the middle. Two and two.
Kansas +5.5 — LOSS. “The 5.5 theory rides again.” It did not ride. Arizona State won it 24-17, which is a seven-point margin, which means no cover and no moneyline. And the article talked itself into it while listing the reasons not to: four quarterbacks on the injury report, coming off a loss. When you write “I don’t care” about your own evidence, that’s not conviction, that’s a decision you already made. Our own agent had the same side, so we ate it together.
SMU/Louisville OVER — WIN. 31-41, 72 points, cleared by a mile. Best bet on the card and it was never in doubt.
South Carolina -4 — LOSS. Mississippi State won outright, 41-34. And read the article’s own parenthetical: “Going against my own models here, so probably sharper just to take the over?” Yeah. It was. The over hit, the side didn’t, and the model was on Mississippi State. When you flag in writing that you’re fading your own numbers and then do it anyway, I gotta write that one down as process.
Rutgers +21.5 — WIN. USC 42, Rutgers 35. Lost by seven, covered by fourteen and a half. “They slow it down, this turns into a running game battle and they’ll cover.” That is precisely what happened, and Antwan Raymond went 21-122-1 doing it. Best-reasoned bet in the article.
THE VERDICT
Grade: B-
The Play of the Day was the number one receiver on the slate at five percent, the expensive chalk paid, and he beat our own model on Kamario Taylor. That’s three real wins and any of them can make your week.
What keeps it from being a B+ is the cheap-guy problem. He found the right games and then reached for the mid-priced names inside them while the $4800 backs went off. Same thing at SMU, where he had the right receiver room and picked the wrong receiver by a hundred dollars of salary. And two core-ish plays in one blowout at twenty-five percent ownership each is a concentration problem regardless of how it broke.
Carry this into next week: when you love a game that much, buy the cheapest piece in it too. That’s where the 40-point scores live.
So we’re square. The books balance, nobody owes me anything, and I’ll see you next Saturday with a fresh pot of coffee and a sharper pencil.