Week 1 is finally here, the Sunday main slate comes with it, and Mike McClure, the DFS multimillionaire over at CBS Sports, has posted his picks for DraftKings and FanDuel. The full lineup advice is right here at CBS Sports, and if you play DFS with any seriousness, it's worth your ten minutes.

I wrote last month that draft season demands homework, not hype, and DFS is the same animal with a faster heartbeat. One Sunday, one salary cap, no do-overs. The guys who cash aren't the ones chasing last year's box scores, they're the ones who figure out where the value actually sits on a Week 1 slate where nobody's played a real snap in seven months.

Week 1 is different from every other week on the calendar, and here's why. Prices were set in August on projections and reputation. Somewhere on that board is a receiver about to see ten targets because a rookie corner got exposed, or a running back about to inherit a goal-line role nobody scripted. McClure made his name finding those guys, and his process has held up across a decade of doing this, which is more than most of us in this business can say about anything.

A quick word of caution from an old man who's watched a lot of Sundays go sideways. Week 1 lies. I said it on the betting side and I'll say it here: the teams you saw in September rarely resemble the ones you see in November. So build your lineups on roles and usage, not on last season's finish. A 2025 stud priced like a 2025 stud who's now splitting snaps is a trap. A second-year wideout priced like an afterthought who's running with the ones is gold.

My buddy Dave Morgan, our analytics kid, would tell you to stack the correlated plays and let the math work, and on a main slate he's usually right. Pair the quarterback with his receiver, get a piece of the game total everyone's piling into, then find your differentiated cheap plays to afford it. The winning lineup almost always marries one obvious stack to two contrarian value plays nobody else had the nerve to roster.

Whatever you do, treat your entry fees like entertainment money, same as I'd tell you at a betting window. DFS in Week 1 is the most fun you'll have losing fifty bucks all year if it goes wrong, and the most fun you'll have winning it if McClure's value plays hit the way they have before.

Go read the picks, do your own homework on top of them, and enjoy the first real Sunday we've had since February. Football's back. About time.