5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 1
We've only had nine months to over-analyze the living daylights out of this week. After having fever dreams about Tyrod Taylor being sidelined due to a dangerous encounter with Pop Rocks, the start of the season couldn't get here soon enough.
Because we've had that much time to look at each and every one of these games, we can get entrenched in our opinions, not allowing a different vantage point to shift our perspectives on them. That's why I lean on numberFire's metrics, which don't have to sit cross-legged to hide their excitement after watching Antonio Brown highlights on YouTube for three straight hours.
Every week, we'll go through various matchups that numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP) metric views as being particularly juicy.
For those of you who don't know what NEP is, it is the measure of the points added above expectation on each play. In non-nerd terms, it measures efficiency better than something such as yards per carry or yards per attempt. Those yards-per metrics view a three-yard run on 3rd-and-4 as being the same as a three-yard carry on 3rd-and-2. NEP would value the latter much more highly than the former as it would increase the number of points an offense would expect to score on the drive; the former would likely end the drive, thus lowering the number of points an offense would be expected to score.
Throughout the piece, I'll mostly be referring to Adjusted NEP marks from 2014. Adjusted NEP refers to team metrics which have been adjusted based on the opponent, taking strength of schedule into account. The power dynamics of each unit will shift now as we enter 2015 because of offseason changes, but I tried to take those into account when looking at the rankings.
As a note, these matchups do not include the Thursday game between the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers. We're just rolling out the games on the Sunday to Monday slate, but the Patriots' passing offense does have some dank potential in that one. Now, let's take a look at the rest of the intriguing options.
