NFL DFS Stacks for Super Bowl LIX: Correlations for Philadelphia and Kansas City

February 9, 2025

Thunder Dan Palyo analyzes the correlations between all relevant players for Kansas City and Philadelphia and gives you his favorite ways to stack both sides for Super Bowl LIX in your DraftKings and FanDuel DFS showdown lineups.

Super Bowl LIX brings us a rematch of the Eagles and Chiefs, who battled it out in the big game just two years ago, with the Chiefs coming out on top in a high-scoring close game.

Vegas likes this game to be close (Chiefs -1.5) and high-scoring (48.5 total). Both teams had fantastic regular seasons and are loaded on both sides of the ball. It should be a great game and incredibly entertaining. For DFS purposes, it's going to be a challenging slate as there are so many different viable combinations for showdown lineups.

I'm going to focus on the DraftKings Showdown slate with the idea of helping you build some correlated lineups - lineups that contain players who are likely to perform well in the same game and not at the expense of the other player. I've done this for a few years now, and I always find that it helps me build lineups more easily based on various game scripts. In this article, I'll share my research with you and build a few sample lineups with my favorite plays and correlations.

DFS Correlations: Super Bowl LIX

Kansas City Chiefs

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Here's a quick breakdown of how to read the chart. The weekly scoring (in DraftKings PPR format) for the most relevant Kansas City offensive players, kicker, and team defense are listed week by week.

A few omissions would be JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marquise Brown, as well as second tight end Noah Gray, but I try to keep the number of players tracked to a minimum to prevent the chart from being unnecessarily large or complicated.

You can also see the scoring of the Chiefs' opposing QB, RB1, and WR1 from each week. The raw total of Kansas City's top three scorers by week is also included, as well as the raw totals of their kicker and defense, with weekly averages at the bottom.

The values in the column furthest to the right are the correlational coefficients for each pairing. This number is always between -1 and 1 and represents a positive or negative relationship between two data sets.

Positively correlated sets are represented by positive numbers and are color-coded green, while negative relationships are red. The closer the value is to one or negative one, the stronger the positive or negative correlation is.

Let's start with the positive relationships. While nothing stands out in a big way (we are usually looking for something around 0.4 or higher), it's pretty obvious that Mahomes pairs well with each of his pass catchers.

However, at 0.28, the correlation with Xavier Worthy is twice as strong as Mahomes' relationship with DeAndre Hopkins and three times larger than his relationship with Travis Kelce, which I admit is a bit of a surprise.

The other notable positive correlation is Mahomes to his opposing quarterback at 0.25. This is not an uncommon correlation to find in the NFL, and playing both QBs together in showdown lineups is something that we do quite often anyway.

The problem with double-stacking Mahomes with two receivers is that none of them correlate well with each other. However, Kelce and Worthy have a much weaker negative correlation at 0.20 than Hopkins and Worthy, who have the strongest relationship of any two players on the team with a -0.67 value.

That's likely due to how much Worthy has taken over a larger role in this offense late in the season, while Hopkins has taken a back seat and seen his snap counts go way down.

If I play a KC running back, it has to be Kareem Hunt, even if he will be more popular. Isiah Pacheco's correlation was negative with Mahomes, even in a small sample size, and Hunt has continued to be the more effective back down the stretch. Hunt is the most likely to get the goal line carries, and if I'm playing a "Chiefs win" game script, then I'll have Hunt in there.

The last thing I will point out is that the weekly average of Mahomes-Kelce-Worthy was just 42.6 DK points compared to 60.1 for the Philly trio of Hurts-Barkley-Smith and 61.8 for Hurts-Barkley-Brown. So, from a raw points perspective (think cash games), it makes the most sense to jam three of the Birds into your build.

Philadelphia Eagles

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Let's start with positive correlations. Hurts has positive relationships with A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, though Smith's was twice as strong. Both receivers missed a handful of games, so the other guy went off a few times in the other receiver's absence.

Brown and Smith have a weak positive correlation, so a Hurts-Brown-Smith triple stack checks out and would be contrarian since it would fade Saquon Barkley, who is projected to be one of the highest-owned players.

Barkley has a bit of an odd positive correlation with tight-end Dallas Goedert. It might be purely coincidental, as there's no real explanation for why that would be the case.

The other pairing that stands out is kicker Jake Elliott and the Philly defense. That combo had a 0.16 positive relationship and a much higher weekly average (16.6) compared to Harrison Butker and the KC defense (13.2). If you pair a kicker and a defense together, it makes sense to go with the Philly duo.

As far as Hurts and Barkley go, we saw them both go off together last week, but in general, that game was the exception, not the rule. The two are negatively correlated and so I'm going to have less Barkley than the field, especially in my Hurts lineups.

I love the matchup for Goedert this week against the KC defense, so I'm going to ignore the slightly weak relationship (-0.19) with Hurts.

Hurts had a fairly neutral relationship with opposing QBs at -0.10, so my plan to pair him with Mahomes in a majority of builds checks out on both sides.

One popular strategy is to pair running backs with their team's defense as that pairing historically has a positive correlation, however Barkley, Pacheco, and Hunt all had negative correlations with their defenses so that's something I won't be doing.

I like the Eagles to win a close game, but I will be building for multiple scenarios, including a Chiefs win. I do think it's a close game regardless of who wins, so I like making more balanced (3-3 or 4-2) builds instead of any 5-1 overloads.

Sample DFS lineups

Lineup 1: Eagles win, Hurts MVP, Kicker-Defense pairing

Lineup 2: Chiefs win, Mahomes spreads it around

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