FanDuel Studs to Target in Week 5

Without a doubt, most of you know the famous fable of the tortoise and the hare.

You know, the one where the tortoise challenges the hare to a foot race because he's exhausted with hearing the hare drag on about how fleet-footed he is. The one where the hare gets out to a commanding lead and assumes he can't lose so he takes a nap mid-race all the while allowing the tortoise to catch up and win the race.

Last week I felt a lot like the hare getting outfoxed by the tortoise. After two weeks of winning every single 50/50 contest I entered, I got overconfident and threw too much of my bankroll into my cash contests, wiping out virtually all of the profit I had made the previous two weeks. Son of a ...

The point of all this is that, as many far smarter DFS minds will tell you, you can't win them all (and you need to manage your bankroll accordingly). But win or lose, you need to stick with a winning process. And in cash games you want to select studs with butter matchups to lock in those high floors while leaving the door open to probable upside. But in DFS, it's unavoidable that in some weeks, like mine last week, your lineups will consist of players hovering around their floor with none bringing their trademark upside to the table. When that happens, you're probably going to lose.

Looking back at last week's FanDuel Studs column, Cam Newton and Matt Forte were my only "hits", and even then they were only middling options at their positions. But I still feel like the reasoning behind those picks were solid. And that's all you can ask for in a sport as volatile as football.

Randall Cobb against the 49ers secondary, who'd been absolutely torched in the passing game the previous two weeks? Gimme that all day. Latavius Murray, a high-volume running back with good efficiency metrics going up against the lowly Bears rushing defense? Yeah, I wanted that. And I'd want it again.

So even if you walk away from this weekend with a loss, know that if you stick with a winning process, you should come out ahead in the long run. With that said, let's take a look at some of the studs you should be building your lineups around in Week 5.