Getty Gallery: 1/5
It's amazing that we've already flown through five weeks of the 2018 NFL season. And to begin Week 6, it's an always-interesting NFC East matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants. Both of these teams need to get back in the win column and hope to do so on Thursday Night Football.
While this game means a surprising amount for an early-season matchup, it means DraftKings is rolling out the red carpet with its showdown options once again. After a solid showing on Monday Night Football with optimal lineups, we'll hope to roll that success into Week 6 now.
The popular daily fantasy sports site is offering quite a few huge showdown games this Thursday. With the Eagles-Giants drawing plenty of attention, DraftKings is first offering the always-popular $10 game with $1,250,000 guaranteed. First place in this 150-max game will win $250,000.
Along with the headliner, DraftKings is offering a lower buy-in option with their 20-max game that has $200,000 guaranteed and a $3 entry fee. Other games worth noting include a $12 single entry with $30,000 guaranteed and multiple other single-entry and 150-max games.
Before we dive into the action for Week 6 and the Thursday Night Football game let's offer a quick insight into how showdown games work.
– Six total players (one captain, five flex players)
– Captain selection costs 1.5 times standard salary but scores 1.5 times the standard points
– Can choose from any position (QB, RB, WR, TE, K, DST)
– $50,000 salary cap
– You can use more than one quarterback
When building lineups, there are a variety of ways to go about it, and while you typically would think kickers and defenses aren't worth using, that isn't always the case. Much of how you build lineups will depend on how you think the game will play out. Kickers and defenses, along with players further down the depth chart are quite a bit less expensive, and if you use the right one it allows you to free up salary cap for other spots and big names.
I'll break down a few different lineups which will include a variety of players in the captain spot. There will be one optimal lineup (mix of high-owned players, one or two risky plays), a lineup for 150-max games (more risk), and one for single entries/cash games (high-floor players). Before diving into that, though, I'm first going to hit on showdown strategy for this week's game. Every week the strategy will be different, as choices for captain spots will vary.
Let's dive in by first evaluating the captain spot and then rolling through lineups.