Let's take a quick second here for some self-evaluation. We're in mid-November now; how are you as a human being different from what you were in September?
As a person who grew up a fan of the New York Jets, I've spent two months chucking inanimate objects at walls and cursing animals on the street. It'd be fair to say my blood pressure is at a varied level from what it was back then.
It has been a rough year, so most of you are probably also feeling a wee bit different than you did just a few weeks ago. Things change quickly, and it's something we always have to account for when interacting with each other.
We undergo these changes rapidly, yet we (or at least most of us) don't have 250-pound human missiles launching at our craniums on a weekly basis. Can you imagine how different an NFL player -- or team, for that matter -- is now than he was back at the beginning of the season?
All teams have played at least nine games by this point, meaning they could have already gone through several cycles in this process. This requires us to ditch our early-season thoughts on both teams and players and value the most recent and relevant data when formulating our decisions for daily fantasy football. It's not easy, but when we're this deep into the season, it's necessary.
We can accomplish a lot of this with the help of numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players with the team totals being adjusted based on strength of opponent.
Here's how NEP works. Prior to each play, an offense has an expected number of points that it will score on its current drive. A three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 will pick up a first down, increasing those expected points and giving the team positive NEP. That same three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, though, falls short of the sticks. NEP helps quantify the differences between the two events to show us which teams and players have operated in the most efficient manner over the course of a season.
These numbers can also be tainted by early-season data that may have changed by now. But by using splits and filtering in context, they can give us a good look at what we should expect from certain teams going forward. With that in mind, let's look at five matchups we can exploit in Week 11.