5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 4

Y'all like chalk?

I'm not talking about being sprawled out on the driveway while drawing stick figures of your mom and dad. Nope. This is shoving that stuff all up in your mouth and chewing until it'll slide right down your esophagus.

That's what's popping this week in NFL DFS. There are some great matchups on the board, and everybody knows it. Specifically, we're talking about loading up on the San Diego Chargers against the New Orleans Saints' attempts at assembling a defense and Kirk Cousins with the Washington pass catchers against the Cleveland Browns. There are legit reasons that these plays are popular, and you should absolutely be using them in cash games, but the stench of high ownership fills our nostrils as we crank out tournament rosters.

This doesn't mean those are the only favorable matchups on the board.

With such obvious plays available, people can get blinders to other possibilities, allowing them to go overlooked in the eyes of the public. Let's exclude those two abundantly chalky options and try to find some other plus matchups we can exploit using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players with the team metrics being adjusted based on strength of schedule.

Here's how NEP works. Prior to each play, there's an expected number of points a team will score on its current drive. A three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 would move the sticks, increasing the expected points for the drive and resulting in positive NEP. If they get that same three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, though, it'll likely result in a punt, giving the team negative NEP. Tracking these fluctuations over the course of a season will give us a good idea of which units are operating in the most efficient manner.

Let's look at what these numbers are saying about the matchups for Week 4, giving us potential places to look if we want to avoid the crippling ownership of the Chargers and Washington's passing game.