5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 17
New Orleans Saints Passing Offense
The over/under on this game is up to 56.5 points. Game stacks for days, homies.
Even though the Saints are 6.5-point underdogs for the game, the meaty over/under allows them to rock an implied team total of 25. That's the ninth-highest mark on the slate, and it's fully justified when you look at what Drew Brees has continued to do to opposing defenses this year.
Individually, Brees is fourth in Passing NEP per drop back and first in Success Rate of the 39 quarterbacks with at least 100 drop backs. He's facing the league's 23rd-ranked pass defense that is now without its top cornerback in Desmond Trufant. This is an area where Brees can absolutely feast, and he's just $8,200 this week.
The elephant in the room here is Brees' home/road splits. We know he's a guy we traditionally want to target only when the Saints are at home, and they're in Atlanta this weekend. That equation changes a bit, though, when he has a roof over his head.
Below is a look at how Brees has done on the road since 2011 based on whether or not the stadium had a roof. There were 15 games with a roof and 31 without, and it's pretty clear in which scenario we'd prefer him for fantasy.
| Brees on Road | Attempts Per Game | Yards Per Game | Touchdown Rate | Interception Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| With Roof | 45.07 | 335.07 | 3.85% | 2.22% |
| Without Roof | 41.00 | 304.65 | 4.80% | 2.68% |
For some additional context here, over the same span, Brees averaged 333.98 passing yards per game at home on 40.40 attempts. Sure, the efficiency was higher at home, but dude was still getting more yardage on the road than he was at home.
The thing that may help this fly a bit under the radar is Brees' touchdown rate on the road beneath a roof. It fell to just 3.85% in our sample compared to 4.80% in non-roofed away games and 7.28% at home. Shouldn't this push us away from Brees?
Based on math, that would seem to be a false conclusion. As numberFire's JJ Zachariason wrote back in June, touchdown rates are extremely fluky in small samples, and 15 games certainly does count as such. If a player deviates heavily from his career marks in a smaller sample, you can generally expect some regression in this department. With Brees' touchdown rate being so much higher on the road in non-roofed games -- situations where you'd expect the reverse to be true -- we can safely assert that Brees may simply be the victim of bad touchdown variance that's masking some truly dopetastic outings.
Talking you into using Brees likely isn't too hard. As with Ryan, though, it's his passing outlets that are a bit more difficult to pin.
The top choice here should likely be Michael Thomas. In the two games since Thomas returned from injury, he has one more target than Brandin Cooks, and Thomas has out-snapped Cooks in both games. Additionally, Thomas has four red zone targets in those games while Cooks has zero. From a safety perspective, Thomas holds the edge.
This isn't to completely omit Cooks from consideration, though. Cooks has 140 yards in three separate games this year, and Thomas' top output in that department is 130 yards. Cooks has at least eight targets in each of the past four games, and he hasn't been below 61 yards in any of those. Thomas should hold a slight edge, but Cooks is also a top-tier option.
