The best football holiday of the year is on Thursday, with a Thanksgiving tripleheader set to stuff football fans. There are contests for each individual game as well as all three together — in this piece, we’ll take a look at the best lineup options for contests that include the entire slate of games.
Ahead of this Thanksgiving, let’s serve up a winning DFS lineup using DraftKings’ prices.
Week 13 Thanksgiving DFS Picks
- QB: Tua Tagovailoa ($6,000)
- RB: De’Von Achane ($7,700)
- RB: Jahmyr Gibbs ($7,500)
- WR: Jameson Williams ($6,100)
- WR: Jaylen Waddle ($5,400)
- WR: Rome Odunze ($5,000)
- TE: Tucker Kraft ($3,700)
- FLEX: Rico Dowdle ($5,500)
- D/ST: Cowboys ($3,100)
QB: Tua Tagovailoa
The Thanksgiving slate is a tricky one for quarterback matchups. There’s a clear top three in Jared Goff, Jordan Love, and Tua Tagovailoa, but none has a particularly enticing matchup. With that being the case, saving a little of your budget by choosing Tua is the best value play.
Tagovailoa will have to play in cold weather, as the Accuweather forecast in Green Bay projects an evening temperature of 27 degrees with winds of 15 miles per hour. He has played four NFL games with a kickoff temperature of 40 degrees or colder, and has thrown four touchdowns to five interceptions.
Still, that’s a relatively small sample and doesn’t preclude that Tagovailoa could maintain his recent hot streak. Miami’s quarterback has thrown seven touchdowns to no picks in his past two games, both home wins. So, while the conditions give Tua a lower floor than Love or Goff, the ceiling is comparable and thus worth the savings for the rest of your lineup.
RBs: De’Von Achane, Jahmyr Gibbs, and Rico Dowdle
Here’s where saving a bit at quarterback pays off. If you go with Goff instead of Tagovailoa, you’d have to leave out De’Von Achane, who has thrived as the Dolphins’ bell cow. Achane has been the RB6 overall in fantasy since Miami got back from bye in Week 7, and he’s also fifth among RBs in receiving yards over that span.
Jahmyr Gibbs is the second-most expensive running back on the board, but he’s worth including given the Chicago Bears’ relative weakness against running backs. The Bears rank 19th in PPR points per game allowed to RBs, their worst against any position. Gibbs has scored in five of his past six games and is the safer option among Lions running backs to choose (David Montgomery is nursing a shoulder injury).
Finally, Rico Dowdle is the FLEX option in this lineup. Dowdle has become the Dallas Cowboys’ bell-cow back, taking a season-high 42.3% of the team’s touches in Week 12. Now, he gets a New York Giants defense allowing the seventh-most PPR points per game, one of the best matchups for any position on Thursday.
WRs: Jameson Williams, Jaylen Waddle, and Rome Odunze
Jameson Williams is a strong boom-or-bust option for daily fantasy, as he’ll have a lower roster percentage than the elite wideouts but can easily finish as the WR1 overall on the day with his explosiveness. The Bears actually allow the third-highest explosive pass rate this season, ahead of only the hapless Jacksonville Jaguars and Cleveland Browns. That plays right into Williams’ hands.
Jaylen Waddle is coming off his best game of the season, recording a season-high 144 receiving yards and a touchdown in Week 12. The Packers are a tricky matchup for wide receivers, but top cornerback Jaire Alexander remains out with a knee injury, softening this matchup for Waddle and Tagovailoa alike.
Finally, Rome Odunze remains the cheapest of the three Bears wide receivers despite seeing a welcome uptick in volume. In two games under interim offensive coordinator Thomas Brown, Odunze has seen 20 targets and caught 11 passes for 104 yards. The fantasy production hasn’t been there just yet, but the volume is elite, and the game script should require a lot of passes for Chicago.
TE: Tucker Kraft
Tucker Kraft is touchdown-dependent at this point, but that’s true for every tight end in this contest not named Jonnu Smith (who has the highest salary of any tight end on Thursday). Kraft leads the Packers by a considerable margin in red-zone targets (12), red-zone receptions (nine), and red-zone touchdowns (five), and the Dolphins have been a middle-of-the-pack fantasy defense against tight ends.
The other element to keep an eye on is the health of Romeo Doubs. The wide receiver is in the concussion protocol and is unlikely to play on a short week. Given that Doubs is second on the team in red-zone receptions behind Kraft, that removes another competitor for those premium targets.
D/ST: Dallas Cowboys
As abysmal as the Dallas Cowboys have been on defense much of this season, any D/ST is worth starting against Tommy DeVito. The New York Giants’ second-year quarterback has an eye-popping 16.4% career sack rate and has taken at least four sacks in five of his seven career starts. For perspective, the highest sack rate for any QB this season is Will Levis at 14.7%.
The Cowboys aren’t likely to score a pair of kick return touchdowns again as they did in Week 12, but they shouldn’t need that to deliver a workable D/ST output. With Micah Parsons terrorizing quarterbacks again, expect DeVito to go down several times on Thursday afternoon.