5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 16

The Great British Bake Off is probably one of those shows you're sick of hearing people tell you that you should watch. It's basically the new Breaking Bad, except they're cooking lemon drizzle cake instead of meth.

The general gist is that it's a baking competition with amateur chefs. Each week, they bake three challenging dishes, and one baker is eliminated while another is dubbed that week's "star baker."

The show is addictive partly because of its startling politeness but also due to the nature of baking. You have to prepare all the ingredients correctly, bake it at the right temperature, take it out at the right time, and gussy it up for the judges. It -- weirdly -- makes for riveting television.

A good bake happens when all of these stars align perfectly. If just one thing goes awry, your sponge may be too chewy, and you'll be packing up your KitchenAid mixer and leaving that flour-coated tent behind.

In Week 16, we need a good bake. But the list of things that could send it hurtling into the trash is daunting.

Instead of fretting about how long our dough needs to prove, we're worried about weather. After that, we need to consider a team's home/road splits. Then there are the impactful injuries, team-wide efficiency, matchups, pace, and on and on and on.

And at this point in the year, you can add motivation to the list. If a team has nothing to play for, they're more likely to bust, even if all the considerations above are working in their favor. If you don't at least factor that in, you're begging for a burnt lineup.

Predicting which players will go off in a given week is already hard enough. That level of difficulty just gets cranked up this late in the season with so many additional variables to consider. It can be frustrating, but with the upsides being a Paul Hollywood handshake, you can understand why we want to give it a go.

Today, we're going to try to consider all of those things when assessing which matchups are worth exploiting in daily fantasy football on the main slate. To get a firm grasp on each situation, we'll be leaning on numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players. NEP measures the expected points added on each play, meaning it will illustrate the massive difference between a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 and a three-yard completion on 3rd and 4.

NEP can give us necessary insights on which matchups are favorable for an offense in addition to which teams may be set up to struggle in certain situations. That -- along with a couple of other data points -- gives us the keys to a sick lineup and the inside tracking on being crowned this week's star baker.

Which matchups should we look to exploit in Week 16? Let's check it out.