BUILDING FOR WEEK 1
Everyone has the projections.
Nobody has the last four hours.
We measured it across 55,441 player-weeks of real DraftKings history: salary alone already prices about 88% of everything knowable about a player. Going from good public projections to perfect player evaluation moves your correlation with actual results from 0.598 to 0.600 — which is to say, nowhere.
Out-projecting the field is a solved, dead game. SlateIQ plays the part that isn't: what changed after the price was set.
WEEK 1 OPENER
reading the board…
Get told when it goes live
One email when the board turns on four days before kickoff. No drip sequence, no upsells in between.
HOW IT WORKS
01
DraftKings prices the slate days early
Salaries are set once and never move. They already contain almost everything knowable about a player — talent, role, matchup. That part of the game is finished before you open the lobby.
02
Then the week actually happens
A starter tweaks a hamstring Friday. A backup gets the goal-line work. Weather turns. None of it is in a price that was set on Tuesday, and that gap is the only thing the field hasn't already paid for.
03
We track the gap, not the player
Live DraftKings salaries joined against live injury and beat reporting, every few minutes. Who got hurt, whose price hasn't moved, and which cheaper teammate just inherited the touches.
WHAT GOES LIVE
Slate analysis
The full board read through the staleness lens — where the price and the news disagree, ranked by how much it actually matters.
Picks
The plays that come out of it, with the reasoning attached rather than a naked list of names.
Sleepers
Cheap players who just inherited a role. The beneficiary engine already surfaces them: one WR sitting behind three hurt teammates at minimum salary.
Scoops of the week
The handful of news items that genuinely moved value, and what they were worth. The edge is speed on news, so this is the part that compounds.
THE PLAN
Everything above turns on four days before the Thursday night Week 1 kickoff — analysis, picks, sleepers and the scoops of the week, on the first real slate. Between now and then the board gets updated consistently as camp news lands and DraftKings posts live pricing.
Nothing is being shown today because there is nothing honest to show. Preseason boards are flat-priced and ESPN lists most of training camp as questionable — a designation that means something in November and nothing in August. The pipeline below is already running against it; we just aren't going to dress up noise and call it a pick.
Nothing is being shown today because there is nothing honest to show. Preseason boards are flat-priced and ESPN lists most of training camp as questionable — a designation that means something in November and nothing in August. The pipeline below is already running against it; we just aren't going to dress up noise and call it a pick.