5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 3

Oakland Raiders' Passing Offense

There's only one game this week with an over/under above 50.5, and that's the contest between the Oakland Raiders and Washington. You're going to want exposure to both sides, so be sure to give guys like Kirk Cousins, Terrelle Pryor, and Jordan Reed a sniff. But it's hard to pass up the Raiders with how good they have looked through the first two weeks.

Among the 33 quarterbacks with at least 30 drop backs this year, only Sam Bradford has a better Passing NEP per drop back than Derek Carr. The gap between Carr's mark (0.49) and third place (Tom Brady at 0.37) is huge, so this team has been the real deal thus far.

You can write part of that off as being noise, and because they faced the Jets in one of those, you may be right. But we also should have expected improvements here thanks to the addition of Jared Cook.

When Cook was with the Green Bay Packers last year, he missed six games early on due to injury. This means -- including the playoffs -- the Packers had him at their disposal for 13 games and were without him for six. Here are Aaron Rodgers' splits in those games, with "Success Rate" denoting the percentage of drop backs that increased the team's expected points for the drive.

Cook may not be a superstar, but he showed last year that he can make a good offense much better with Rodgers doubling his per-drop back efficiency when Cook was on the field. Carr seems to be reaping the benefits early in 2017.

They are in another good matchup this week against Washington. Through two weeks, they sit 26th against the pass, according to numberFire's metrics. This is after they finished 24th in the same metric last year, so these struggles likely aren't due to a small sample.

Carr's $8,400, which isn't cheap, but he's also likely worth that. The harder aspect of the equation is with whom you stack him.

Both Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree are $7,700 after Crabtree's three-touchdown game last week. That will inflate his ownership, but he also may not have to deal with Josh Norman as much. So which side do we pick?

It largely depends on your process. Taking the larger view and factoring in both games, we see that Cooper has a 30.51% target market share for the year and a 30.77% red-zone market share. Crabtree will likely have the better individual matchup, and he soaked up the more recent red-zone targets after Cooper struggled there in Week 1. Cooper's the play if you want to factor in his Week 1 usage, but Crabtree's the better option if you believe the target redistribution in Week 2 was due to performance.

The alternative is to just avoid the conundrum and ride the new guy with Cook. He has 11 targets through two games, and he has played at least 71.2% of the snaps in each. At $5,200, you could do a whole lot worse.