Haibo Does Data: Week 9 – RB Win

Hello everyone – welcome to Week 9 of the column! We’re officially halfway through the season! As we dive deeper into the data, also check out our weekly Haibo Does Data podcast on Youtube as well: YouTube Link

Card/Combo of the Week

One of the great things about SmashUp is that not everyone has to play the same way. We’ve already seen several great strategies and archetypes develop over the course of this season already. We’ve seen the Stack strategies where you find a great matchup (often a Defense) and stack as many SmashCards as you can on that slot. We’ve seen the Afterlife Express strategy – with Hail Mary, Speed Demon, and Freight Train giving you a potential game winning 90 card points. This week, we’ve seen the development of another strategy – I’m calling it RB Win.

This strategy is anchored by 2 lineup cards: Hellacious Halfbacks and Hurricane Season. EClausen used this to great effect to get the highest score of the week and win the Fantasy Frenzy Weekly Tournament. Almost 40% of the top 50 scoring lineups had some iteration of this strategy.

The strategy itself is super simple – take the 3 best RBs you can regardless of cost and play Hellacious Halfbacks and Hurricane Season. Hellacious Halfbacks powers up all RBs on your team at the expense of your QB while Hurricane Season does the same but at the expense of your WR/TEs. Pair those together and if you hit on the RBs, you’re scoring massive points. EClausen chose to not even play a QB and TE in her lineup. Even with subpar performances from CeeDee and Chase, she still took the overall points title.

There could be some price balancing on these cards on the horizon so this week is a great chance to try out the combo at its full power!

Summary Metrics

This past week, we had the highest number of participants since our inception. Almost 2,000 users played over 4,000 different lineups across our weekly tournament, league play, and single player campaign modes. When we aggregate all of the data across those 4,000+ lineups, these were the top picked players.

While we certainly continue to see some of the high priced players getting picked – we also see a lot of value picks showing up in the top 5 as well. Perhaps the highest value pick from last week was also our #1 played overall player – Cade Otton at TE. With Godwin and Evans out, Otton was the de-facto WR1 and TE1 for the high octane Tampa Bay offense and was priced in a great spot on the TE salary scale. We are also seeing the impacts of SmashCards, as the popularity of Cannon Arm pushed Cousins and Stafford into the #2 and #3 most picked QBs last week and Burnt Ends propelled the Tennessee Titans defense into the top picked defense.

Speaking of cards, here are the top 10 played cards last week.

1. SmashCard
2. The Human Vulture
3. Starting RB
4. Run CMC
5. Not So Wide Receiver
6. Starting WR
7. Roll of the Dice
8. Ride or Die
9. Speed Demon
10. Anti-Hero
11. Cannon Arm

We see a lot of our usual suspects in the top 10 with Human Vulture, Starting RB/WR, and Run CMC as top 10 stalwarts. However, the aforementioned Cannon Arm sees its first foray into the top 10. It is joined by another newcomer – Anti-Hero. Anti-Hero was a special card designed for the Super Bowl and Travis Kelce last season. It triples the TD points for any TE. This season, it has not been very popular as TEs have had some struggles in the early going. But not this week – with the #1 most popular pick being Cade Otton, we saw a resurgence of Anti-Hero back into the top 10.

Let’s take a look at the top played combos.

• Cade Otton – Anti-Hero
• David Montgomery – Roll of the Dice
• Saquon Barkley – Starting RB
• Alvin Kamara – Run CMC
• Justin Jefferson – Starting WR
• Jalen Hurts – Scramble Spikes
• Bijan Robinson – Run CMC
• De’Von Achane – Run CMC
• Kyren Williams – Starting RB
• Kyren Williams – The Human Vulture

As stated, Cade Otton + Anti-Hero was the most popular player/card combo from last week. We’ve harped on the home run potential of RB by committee + Roll of the Dice and no RB committee is as potent as the Lions. Of the 2, Montgomery has been the much more popular pick for Roll of the Dice and that’s paid off quite a bit in previous weeks. We keep coming back to Run CMC. We’ve talked about it in both this column and in a few of the Haibo Does Data videos. By and large, Run CMC doesn’t hit very often. However, one of the players that it has historically hit on a few times is Kamara and those who played Kamara + Run CMC this week were rewarded as he hit the targets once again and gave players 30 points at great pricing value.

Best of luck to everyone this week and go set your lineups!