Understanding the highs and lows of NFL players will make you more successful in your DFS contests.

There is a high probability that one of your rosters or players will underperform no matter how much research you do or how confident you feel when you hit submit. It is important not to get discouraged and understand that variance is always going to be apart of DFS. There are both positive and negative effects variance can have on your lineups but the good news is, there are some things you can control. It is important to know how to combat the negative effects of variance in any way you can.

Accept that variance is apart of the game

In Week 13 last season, Ryan Fitzpatrick at just a $5400 salary on DraftKings powered DGENNARO29 to a $1 million tournament win with his six-touchdown performance against Tennessee. In this career game, Fitzpatrick scored 42.32 points on DraftKings. DGENNARO29 also made the wise decision of stacking DeAndre Hopkins in his lineup which put him over 300 points for the week. The very next week, fantasy owners may have been hoping for a repeat performance from the Harvard graduate as they faced a putrid Jacksonville Jaguars defense in Week 14. At a salary of $6400, many saw this as an extreme bargain for someone who just put up a six-touchdown game. He did it once; why can’t he do it again? Fitzpatrick scored a subpar 12.9 points on both Fanduel and DraftKings including zero touchdowns in Week 14.

Perhaps you think you would not have made that same mistake. Although, a six-touchdown game doesn’t come around very often. Why would fantasy owners have reason to believe Fitzpatrick could have repeated a game like that? Lets just say that Ben Roethlisberger burned a lot of people with this same thought process earlier in the 2014 season. Ben Roethlisberger exploded for 6 touchdowns against the Indianapolis Colts in Week 8. It was a 47.78 performance on Draftkings. He then followed that up the very next week with six more touchdowns against Baltimore in Week 9. Like a lot of you, when you first starting reading this article, many thought that there was no way Fitzpatrick or any quarterback could repeat this performance… but Roethlisberger did.

The Roethlisberger and Fitzpatrick scenarios from last season are prime examples of the week-to-week and player-to-player variance in the NFL. It is the uncertainty that keeps us coming back for more. If you want to avoid being discouraged early in your DFS career you need to be able to both temper expectations, but at the same be open to variance. More importantly, be open to greatness.

How to combat variance

Variance is very real each week in DFS but there are ways to lower the risk as a whole. Say you are playing $100 on a given week. You are better off increasing the number of entries while decreasing your buy-in when selecting games. For example, it is to your advantage to join as many $5 dollar and below games as opposed to a $50 head-to-head and two $25 50/50 games. Not only do you expose yourself to better daily players at the higher entry levels, you are leaving yourself more exposed to NFL player variance. It’s possible to post a great point total in a head-to-head game but if your opponent has a 1% owned wide receiver that lights up the scoreboard, you may leave the week with a poor taste in your mouth. Your lineup may have beaten 80% of the field on that day but the fact that so much of your entry was tied to the variance of one opponent, you have a higher chance of ending your week in the red.

Another great way to combat variance is to enter more than one lineup in both your cash games and tournaments. Exposure is the key term to remember here. Your exposure is the percentage of ownership to one NFL player or offense in a given week. You leave yourself open to another form of variance if you just trot out one lineup. You should limit your exposure to any player or offense to 50%. An early injury to your stud running back can end your week quickly, especially in tournaments. It is important to diversify your lineup portfolio to lower your risk and combat variance.

When to embrace variance

Sometimes variance can be a good thing. One example of this would be in tournaments. Uniqueness is important but only if you pick the right players. Ideally in tournaments, you are looking for upside players to round out your lineup… players that have the potential to massively outperform their salary. A great place to start when looking for this type of production variance is touchdowns.

Touchdowns are relatively rare, in turn they provide a substantial amount of variance in our lineups each week. Often times when constructing a cash game lineup you want to completely ignore the touchdown stat and focus on who has the best chance to get you targets, catches, and yards… that puts you in the money. Tournaments however force you to consider touchdown variance. The only way you will win is to cash in on this volatility and score some touchdowns to bring your roster to the top of the leader-board. The tournament player embraces variance and is only focusing on his teams potential, not just their floor.