College Football DFS Optimizer

Lineup optimizer

DraftKings college football classic: eight roster spots under a $50,000 cap. FLEX takes a runner or receiver; S-FLEX also accepts a second quarterback. Edit any cell, add your own players, and solve. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

The rows above are worked examples, not today’s salaries. Paste in the real board and your own projections to get a lineup you can use. The solver is exact: for a roster this size it returns the true optimum rather than a greedy approximation.

The problem it solves is a known one

Fill every roster slot, stay under the salary cap, maximise projected points. This is a bounded knapsack problem — a standard exercise in integer programming with well-understood solutions. Given a set of projections, an optimizer returns the mathematically best lineup in milliseconds.

There is no proprietary advantage in this step. Two optimizers fed identical projections return identical lineups.

Garbage in, confidently optimal garbage out

Because the solver is exact, it will faithfully maximise whatever numbers you hand it. Weak projections do not produce obviously weak lineups — they produce lineups that look rigorous and are wrong. The output's confidence is a property of the solver, not evidence about the inputs.

The parts an optimizer cannot do for you

Correlation between teammates, exposure across a portfolio of entries, and expected ownership are all decisions you supply as constraints. An optimizer run without them returns the single highest-projected lineup, which in a large tournament is usually the most common lineup on the board — the worst possible place to be.

Common questions

Do I need an optimizer to play DFS?

No. It saves time on the arithmetic. It supplies no information you did not already have.

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