Week 1 NFL DFS & Fantasy Football Focus: Maximize Your Chances of Success

By Scott L.

It's Week 1 of the 2025 National Football league season, so there's no reason to over-complicate things.

The assumption is that anyone here reading this articles takes their fantasy football pretty seriously. Clearly, those folks put at least a little bit of time and energy into this and want to be successful. That means a decent amount of time probably already has been spent in the fantasy realm researching players and numbers in preparation for full-season drafts.

The goal today should be not to let that time and effort go to waste when making full-season lineups and to put it to good use when building DFS squads. Keep in mind that salary numbers quoted here are from FanDuel, but the basic principles and approach are transferrable to pretty much any other platform.

Keep it simple. Studs are studs. Players were drafted to be starters for a reason and should be placed in weekly lineups without hesitation until they prove themselves unworthy over time and a large enough sample side for their performance to be meaningful.

From our perspective, it's easy enough to refer back to our full-season draft guide, which can be found in four separate articles posted at THIS LINK.

There readers can find out about the players we targeted, who we did not want to draft at all, our thoughts on this year's rookies and our final preseason observations after watching each team that played its first unit in preseason at least once.

Targeted players and players we drafted as absolute starting running backs and receivers need to be in Week 1 lineups no matter what and are the best place to start when building Week 1 DFS lineups. That part is easy, but hopefully the draft was good enough that there are some legitimate lineup decisions to be made at the third receiver and flex spots.

Tight end is off on a island of it's own; top-tier tight ends such as Brock Bowers, Trey McBride and George Kittle are always worth considering for DFS, pending their price tags of course, but it also is a position to scour for bargains. If a targeted tight end who figures to see pretty good volume is listed at a great price, that's a player we can buy low on in hopes of paying up to get top-tier guys at other higher-scoring positions.

Getting back to what hopefully are some difficult Week 1 full-season lineup decisions, it can be hard to resist the temptation to over-analyze the roster and in create challenging decisions that shouldn't really exist. That's why for us, keeping it simple in Week 1 is the only way to go.

There's no doubt this approach can come back to haunt fantasy managers early in the season. We had Javonte Williams and Keenan Allen on multiple benches when they took the field Thursday and Friday, and they absolutely performed well enough to help us win games this week. We did play Williams in one deeper league, but that's really the only way he should have played for anyone unless a manager had a terrible draft and legitimately considered him their RB2.

But as we already explained, the players drafted specifically to be starters need to start in Week 1. So if he was RB2, Williams should have played. We drafted him, J.K. Dobbins, Allen and Hollywood Brown in several leagues as veteran depth players who could help our teams if they played enough. So far, those players appear to be excellent picks who might move into the starting-lineup conversation soon if they keep getting the playing time and touches we saw earlier this week.

But they shouldn't have started this week unless the draft was a pretty weak one or there are extra receiver or flex spots and a logjam of players being considered for those positions.

That brings us to our next point. When it doubt, go with guaranteed volume.

There are so many players - like Dobbins and Williams, for instance - who we know may be in the starting lineup but really have no idea what that means in terms of their playing time and potential touches. For Week 1 full-season teams, stick with the knowns and use the players who are guaranteed to get the most opportunities.

This is where we can deviate a little bit on the DFS side, however.

In cash games or contests with smaller numbers of players, fewer entries allowed and a higher percentage of payouts, the plan is to go with the high-volume guys in the RB1, RB2, WR1 and WR2 spots while searching for value among the mid-tier receivers and tight ends in hopes of paying up for 1-2 of the Tier 1 wide receivers, running backs or quarterbacks. Players like Williams, Dobbins, Brown and Allen could find a home in one of those lineups because of their low price and value. Keep in mind, however, that many players are mis-priced for DFS in Week 1 so there likely are much-better value players out there.

When building a Week 1 DFS cash-game lineup, start with the mid-tier RBs and WRs, looking for the players who already were targeted in full-season at the best prices in hopes that they will add a touchdown or two to their usual volume. Then find a targeted tight end who plays in a projected high-point-total game and possibly for a team that may need to throw a lot. There might a similarly valued player available for the WR3 or Flex position. Fill one of those spots before rounding out the top of the roster with elite Tier 1 players. The final roster slot, the unfilled Flex or WR3, can be used on a high-upside player - a boom-or-bust receiver who is on the field for the majority of plays and runs a high percentage of routes or a high-volume back.

For GPP contests (tournament formats with thousands of players and large payouts), the overarching strategy is similar in terms of finding value at some positions while paying up for superstars in others, but something must be done to differentiate the lineup in these formats. So, it's possible to pay down for a dual-threat QB like a Justin Fields who may have to run and throw a lot if his team is trailing in hopes that he puts up a 30-spot to go along with whatever the top-tier, high-upside guys in other positions produce.

It's definitely a more contrarian approach in these types of contests, so maybe if there are highly rated players who ere not on full-season target lists, they cn be considered here. Or maybe everyone is in on Terry McLaurin, so Deebo Samuel becomes an option. Tee Higgins instead of Jamar Chase. Jameson Williams instead of Amon-Ra St. Brown. Davante Adams instead of Puka Nacua. Zach Charbonnet instead of Kenneth Walker. Jordan Mason instead of Aaron Jones.

That's the general idea, but sometimes it's possible that because of matchup presumptions throughout the market a Tier 1 receiver like Nico Collins might be getting completely ignored by while others are showing up in a large percentage of lineups. A GPP contest is the perfect time to take a chance on a player like Collins who has great upside but may be facing a difficult matchup.

The truly elite players don't fear difficult matchups, so neither should we. Many of them accept those challenges and try to take their game to a new level. Every player is going to have a bad game, but elite guys are elite because they win a lot more than they lose.

And we always want the odds in our favor when building our fantasy lineups.

Week 1 DFS Player Recommendations

Tier 1 QB

Daniels

Burrow

Mid-tier QBs

Mayfield

Murray

Nix

Bargain Core QBs

Lawrence

Maye

Super Bargain GPP QB

Flacco

Tier 1 RBs

Bijan Robinson

Achane

McCaffrey (if he plays)

Henry

Tier 2 Core RBs

Irving

Jacobs

Taylor

Value Core RBs

K. Williams

Hubbard

Bargain Core RBs

Tracy

Walker

Super Bargain GPP RB/Flex

T. Henderson

Charbonnet

Tier 1 WR

Chase

Tier 2 WRs

Nabers

Thomas

Evans

London

T. Higgins

Value WRs

Jeudy

Pittman

McMillan

Waddle

Pearsall

Bargain WR3/Flex & GPP Core

Egbuka

Bargain WR - any format

Leggette

Tillman

Pittman

Douglas

Tier 1 TE

McBride

Value Core TE

Njoku

Bargain Core TE

Henry

Bargain TEs

Warren

Ertz

Strange

Schultz

Super Bargain TE

Sanders