As sure as the sun will rise in the East, NFL players who put up big performances in a given week will be overpriced the following Sunday. As the face of most franchises, you can be sure that a big week from a quarterback will get major run on ESPN and all of the post-game shows, in addition to being discussed on local sports radio all week.

In a GPP, this knowledge is very useful, as you can be confident that next week’s ownership percentages will be higher than they should be, as casual DFS players will tell themselves that the offense is firing on all cylinders, or whatever other cliché they favor, and they will downplay the more important factors such as matchup and expected game pace.

In addition to the recency bias appearing on the side of your competition, we have the added benefit of DFS sites buying in as well, no pun intended. I wanted to see exactly how strong the bias was at QB and what happens when you take the top five scoring QBs and look at what they do on the field the following week.

The below list takes the average fantasy points of the top five scoring QBs on DraftKings in a given week and follows the same five QBs into the next game, comparing their average points and salary between the two weeks. Keep in mind that from an earlier article on the analysis of DraftKings Millionaire Maker winning lineups, we calculated that the goal value (fantasy points per $1,000) that we are shooting for to take down a GPP is in the 5.00 range at QB.


With the goal of a 5.00 value QB in mind, we can see by the above chart that following the ‘hot’ QB into his next game is a horribly poor strategy in a vacuum. In fact, only once, in Week 15, did the average of those QB the following week even top 4.00 value.

The next thing to notice from the above is that DraftKings shows an increase in QB salary off a good performance, with 11 of the 15 weeks showing the top five to have an increased average salary the following week regardless of matchup. More specifically, let’s look at the cumulative averages:

The target 5.00 value for taking down a GPP on DraftKings is coincidentally the exact cumulative average of the top five scoring QBs in 2015 to date.

On the other hand, we see the folly in riding the hot QB into the following week. On average, we are paying $75 more per player to get 10.51 fewer points. The earlier chart proves that there are players the following week who will get us our value, but they aren’t going to be the ones that just did it, and those that ride the recency bias are inner-tubing their way to the bottom of the drain. When Flavor Flav shouted, “Don’t believe the hype,” he was doing nothing less than issuing the first DFS commandment.

Now, take what you’ve learned and sign up for DraftKings.