5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 4

My first viewing of Finding Nemo was a magical experience. Not only was the movie great, but it was my 12th birthday, and I successfully used a dirty popcorn napkin to evade a classmate I had no desire to see. It doesn't get much better than that.

We bought the movie on VHS when it was released, and I couldn't stop watching it. Whether it was the misshapen fin, the thrilling chase scene, or the various "butt" jokes, it was clear that this was the greatest movie ever made. Nothing could replace it.

Then Spider-Man 2 came out the next year, and I was onto the next thing.

No matter how great my bond was with Nemo and his rescuers, I was able to abandon it for another movie simply because I had seen the alternative more recently. Objectively, Spider-Man 2 is a flaming turd next to Finding Nemo, but how are you going to explain recency bias to a kid who still believes that clouds come from the smokestacks at factories?

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easier now to see that Finding Nemo is the superior flick, and I will fight those who say otherwise. But recency bias is still going to creep into the back of my head, and it can lead to some bad decisions from a DFS perspective.

The most recent game is always going to be freshest in our minds, meaning we'll give it more weight than we truly should. Sure, there will be actionable changes based on injuries and usage, but more often than not, variance is going to play a significant role in our decision-making. It shouldn't.

To fight this, it's good to use analytics as a check on our perceptions. Specifically here at numberFire, we use Net Expected Points (NEP), a metric that tracks the efficiency of each player and team with the team totals being weighted for strength of opponent. NEP brings context into a situation, telling us that there's a huge difference between a three-yard pass on 3rd and 2 and that same three-yard pass on 3rd and 4. In its simplest form, it tells us which teams and players are doing their jobs most effectively.

Let's use these tools to check our recency biases and identify the teams in the best spots to succeed on the main slate in Week 4 for NFL DFS. Which matchups should we be trying to exploit? Let's check it out.