5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 9

It's election season. I don't have to tell you all about the downsides of scarcity.

Because most political seats are contested by just our two major parties, you don't have robust options for which way you can go. The odds are high that you'll wind up DGAFing it and picking an unsatisfactory option just because they best fit what you want. It sucks, but that's how politics work.

Daily fantasy sports are better than politics. Please contain your shock at hearing this.

In our search for which guys we're going to plug in our lineups each week, we don't have to settle for an option who just checks one of our boxes. The player can be both superbly talented and in a good matchup. That inefficient player who kinda makes you want to vomit? You can go ahead and pass him up even when he's facing a dud of a defense.

With plenty of bad players in good matchups this week, we may be tempted to dabble in those waters. But just remember that because DFS is a gorgeous beast, you don't have to, and there are ways to avoid it in Week 9.

We can identify these good players in great 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 totals 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 will increase those expected points, netting the team positive NEP. That same three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, though, will likely result in a punt, and NEP will help reflect the difference between the two outcomes. Tracking these fluctuations over the course of a season will let us know which teams and players operated in the most efficient manner.

While stiff-arming those less-than-satisfactory options, let's take a look at five matchups we can exploit for DFS in Week 9.