Cracking DraftKings

The Contrarian: DraftKings Wild Card Weekend 

It's always a good idea to employ some contrarian thinking when building your tournament lineups, but maybe even more so when we're looking at a short slate such as this weekend. With only four games on tap, we can expect the week's chalk plays to have an even larger ownership percentage than normal.

To separate our lineups from the pack, we'll need to pivot away from some of this weekends most popular plays and replace them with some lower owned players with comparable upside - and in a perfect world, perhaps our lower owned selections can outperform the chalk plays we pivot away from. Results like this can have a huge bearing on our standings on the leader boards and turn an already enjoyable weekend of playoff games into one to remember.

This week, The Contrarian walks you through each of this weekends games from a contrarian perspective to help you zero in on where the public's interest will lay for DFS purposes. We also provide you with our choices for the top contrarian plays at each position. Here's a sneak peek at our breakdown of the quarterback position from a contrarian perspective:

QUARTERBACKS

Alex Smith, $5,300

As we alluded to earlier, the veteran signal caller with the game manager reputation usually attracts very little interest and this week will be no different with a tough matchup with the Houston Texans on tap. While Smith rarely sets the world on fire, he offers consistent production at a reasonable price. He’s thrown for two touchdowns and rushed for 50+ yards in each of his past two games and is averaging a respectable 17.6 points per game this season. Flashing back to Week 1 against these same Houston Texans, Smith threw for three touchdowns en route to 23.22 fantasy points. A lot has changed since then of course for both teams, but a Chiefs squad that has cruised into the playoffs on a wave of ten consecutive victories just may surprise some folks with their productivity on Saturday.

Other Quarterbacks Deserving Contrarian Consideration

A.J. McCarron, $5,200: The Bengals could be forced into a shootout with a Steelers team that may be airing it out on the regular this Sunday, pointing us to some nice upside for McCarron.

Teddy Bridgewater, $5,100: This is definitely a boom-bust contrarian selection and not for the faint of heart as we discussed earlier, but it’s always nice to be the guy who takes down a GPP with an outside the box quarterback.   

You can check out the rest of this week's contrarian selections here. Best of luck this weekend and enjoy the games!