This article is part of our FanDuel Fantasy Football series.
The key to performing well in large Guaranteed Price Pool (GPP) tournaments on FanDuel is identifying which players will perform well and not be highly owned. Going hand-in-hand with that approach, you should fade players that are highly owned, and it certainly helps if these highly-owned players put together bad performances. Large tournaments, like the $1.5M NFL Sunday Million, pay out to only the top 13,584 of 68,965 entries (19.69%), so being different with your player selections can be very important. Projecting player ownership can be difficult; however, FanDuel runs tournaments on Thursday with lineups that lock through the rest of the week. Using player ownership percentages in the Thursday NFL Bomb is a very good indicator of what to expect in the Sunday GPP's. Below, each position has a table with players' salaries and ownership percentage and a graph showing the distribution of ownership by salary.
Quarterbacks
Eli Manning will be the highest owned quarterback this week, followed by either Drew Brees or Ben Roethlisberger. The majority of the remaining quarterbacks have very low ownership percentages.
Running Backs
Rashad Jennings will easily finish as the highest owned player this week. He should finish close to 40 percent owned. This is a very similar to last week when Donald Brown was close to 40 percent owned. He put up a terrible game, so if you faded him, you probably did pretty well. Brown went from the highest-owned player in Week 4 to only 0.5 percent owned Thursday night. It is hard to fade Jennings with such a great matchup, but if he underperforms, you are in a great spot. Le'Veon Bell and DeMarco Murray took up another large chunk of the running back ownership.
Wide Receivers
Antonio Brown will easily be the highest owned wide receiver this week. He has been a monster so far, and it will be hard to fade him. Steve Smith and rookie Kelvin Benjamin will be neck-to-neck for second highest percentage owned.
Tight Ends
No surprise here, Travis Kelce is the most used tight end, followed by Larry Donnell. Both guys are coming off big games, and I would fade them both. I am very intrigued here by Rob Gronkowski. He is only 0.6 percent owned. If he can go off for a 100-yard, two-touchdown performance, you could be in a great position against the rest of the field.
Kickers
The graph is interesting here. As expected, people went heavy on the cheaper options.
Defenses