The NFL lineup optimizer is live. It is free, there is no account, no email, and no cap on how many lineups you can build. It works with DraftKings and FanDuel, and it hands you a CSV formatted for direct re-upload to whichever one you came from.
It is the football version of the baseball optimizer I put up in June, built on the same solver with a different set of rules on top.
What it does
Four steps, and the whole thing runs in a browser tab.
- Upload the player list you exported from DraftKings or FanDuel. Optionally upload your own projections file on top of it — the site’s own numbers are a starting point, not a religion.
- Trim the pool. Turn players off, lock players in, filter by position or team, or knock out everyone below a salary or projection threshold in one click.
- Set the rules. Cash and GPP presets load a sensible starting point; every control stays editable afterwards.
- Generate. Lineups stream in one at a time, with an exposure grid showing which players ended up where. Download the CSV and upload it back.
The rules you can actually set
Most free optimizers give you a salary cap and a lock button. The football-specific rules are the point of this one:
- Quarterback stacking, by position. Not just “two teammates with my QB” but “two teammates, of which at least one is a wide receiver” — or a tight end, or a back. Set the shape you want.
- Bring-back. Require one or more players from the team your quarterback is playing against, so a shootout pays you twice.
- Defense exclusions. Never roster a defense against your own quarterback; optionally never against any of your players.
- Per-team caps. Total players from one team, and separately the maximum receivers and backs — two backs from one team are splitting the same carries.
- Set-level diversity. Player exposure caps, a quarterback rotation window, cooldowns, minimum unique players per lineup, and separate overlap caps on the passing core and the skill core.
All of it is enforced as hard constraints inside a mixed-integer program, which is the same class of model the paid tools run. Nothing is a post-processing filter that quietly drops your lineup count.
Reading the exposure grid
After each run the tool shows an exposure grid: every player who appeared in at least one lineup, down the side, with a percentage showing how much of your set he’s in. It’s the same idea as the exposure grid on the baseball side — covered in more depth there — but football reads differently because there’s only one quarterback slot. Rotating him is most of your diversity in a single decision, which is why the QB rotation window exists as its own control instead of hiding inside the general exposure cap: a quarterback used in the last few lineups sits out the next one, so twenty lineups don’t quietly turn into four quarterbacks repeated five times each.
The shared passing-core and skill-core overlap caps do a similar job one level up. Two lineups can reuse the same quarterback without being the same bet, as long as the receivers around him change — that’s what the passing-core cap measures. The skill-core cap does the same thing across every non-defense position. Neither number is exotic; both come straight out of the exposure grid once you know what to look for in it.
What it does not do
Worth being straight about this up front.
- It does not make projections. It optimizes the ones in your file. If your projections are bad, you will get a beautifully optimal bad lineup.
- Classic contests only. No Showdown or single-game formats yet — those have a different roster shape and a multiplier on the captain slot.
- No Yahoo yet. The baseball version supports it; football is waiting on Yahoo publishing their NFL templates.
- Up to 25 lineups per run. It shares one small server with three other tools of mine, and I would rather it stay fast and free than get greedy.
- Stacking is not automatic. The cash and GPP presets load sensible defaults, but nothing forces a stack on you. Leave every rule at zero and it will happily hand you nine unconnected players if that is what your projections say to do.
Why it is free
I am an operations research analyst. I have spent twenty-odd years building optimization models for companies that mostly used them to route trucks and staff shifts, and for the last while I have been converting those models out of Excel and putting them on the web one at a time. This one started as a spreadsheet I built for myself in 2014, then sold on Fiverr for a few years, and it has been sitting on a hard drive since 2021.
The workbook itself had not been touched since October 2021 — eleven older copies of the same file sat next to it, overwritten versions from a few years earlier that never got cleaned off the drive. Porting it was not a rewrite of the model; the rules that make a good NFL lineup had not changed in five years. What changed is the language they are written in, and that a browser can run it now instead of a copy of Excel with a solver plugin installed.
It costs me almost nothing to run — it shares a server with the route optimizer and the staff scheduler — so there is no paywall, no trial, and no “three free lineups” teaser. If it is useful to you, it is useful to you.
Who this fits
If you are playing a single lineup in a cash game, most of the machinery here is overkill — set your rules once, generate one lineup, done. Where this earns its keep is tournaments: building twenty or more lineups that are each individually strong but different enough from each other that one bad quarterback does not take out your whole night. A spreadsheet, or a person doing it by feel, handles that badly past a handful of lineups. A solver does not get tired of checking the two-hundredth combination.
If you want the mechanics
Two companion posts go under the hood: one on why correlation is a constraint and not a preference in football, and one on what I found when I opened the 2021 Excel model that this was ported from. The baseball side of the story is in A Fantasy Lineup Is Just a Knapsack Problem and One Good Lineup Is Easy. Twenty Is the Hard Part.
Not affiliated with DraftKings or FanDuel. For entertainment purposes only.
Things that I use, like, and am affiliated with:
Mint Mobile offers great cell phone service for $15 flat, get $15 off using the link. Get discounted phones with service activation and no contract.
I never spend money before I check Mr Rebates or Rakuten to get cashbacks, rebates, discounts, coupons or cheaper gift cards.