"Out of sight, out of mind," is more than just a phrase that describes my fruitful offseason best-ball investment in Jace Amaro. It's a legitimate psychological factor that crops up in our everyday lives.
The email attached to my credit-card account deactivates, meaning I don't get the notification that my bill is due. Am I going to remember to pay that puppy? Unlikely.
I walk out of the kitchen to watch three minutes of one of this century's most influential, thought-provoking films (Rush Hour, obviously), and you can bet that the cookies in the oven are going to burn.
And those fantasy assets on a bye last week? They didn't score three touchdowns against the Cleveland Browns, so why should I get all excited about them?
When teams and players aren't shoving their Gucciness in our grills, we can forget why we fell in love with them in the first place. The good vibes from Week 5's heroes are still ruminating, making it easy to overlook a forgotten team in a great matchup.
That would be an issue in Week 6.
Everywhere you look on this slate, there are teams in tremendous matchups that -- on paper -- appear to be some of the juiciest available. However, they could lag behind with last week's darlings also in quality spots, and we should absolutely try to take advantage of any potential oversights.
We can spot these matchups using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP). This is the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players with the team metrics being weighted based on strength of opponent.
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 pick up a first down and likely increase that expected point total, giving the team positive NEP. That same three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, though, results in a likely punt, and the team will get negative NEP because of it. Tracking these fluctuations over the course of a season can tell us which teams operated in the most efficient manner.
Let's use this tool to look at Week 6's slate without the burden of "out of sight, out of mind," and break down five matchups we should be looking to exploit.