5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 8

No matter what the internet may lead you to believe, candy corn is an elite treat. You can have a differing opinion because it's okay to be wrong. But this is just a fact.

As such, we've always got candy corn around the house this time of the year. It fits with the fall mood, it's tasty, and it's just a quick little snack that doesn't take much time to consume. There's just nothing to dislike.

While I will fight you over the quality of candy corn, it's also important to acknowledge the downsides. At the end of the day, it's a lump of sugar, and stuffing too many of those into your system seems sub-Gucci. At a certain point, you gotta pump the brakes even on the most delicious of foods.

As a grown adult, I know that I need to limit my intake of this savory sweet. But it's so hard to just back off. That knowledge that it's bad for me doesn't make resisting it any easier.

Game logs are the candy corn of fantasy football. It's great to be able to see each guy's weekly fantasy output in one click, but if you value your long-term health, you'll keep your eyes elsewhere.

There are so many factors that can influence a player's fantasy point total. Whether it's the health of his offensive line, wind, matchup, the location of the game, or just random touchdown variance, his final score isn't going to tell us much. But when we click on his player card, where will our eyes go first? That all-important fantasy points column. You're not seeing the additional context necessary to fully understand what actually happened in that game, meaning the information that you do see is incomplete at best and misleading at worst.

Every team in the league has now played at least six games, and that can make it tempting to click and see what they've done. But just like me with my candy-corn urges, you've got to resist.

Instead, we're going to put weight into important things with more forward-looking value while trying to make our decisions for daily fantasy football. Included in that process is one of the key variables discussed above: matchups.

Let's try to spot some players this week with favorable matchups who could merit NFL DFS love with the help of numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP). This is the metric we use to track the efficiency of both team and players with the team totals being weighted for the strength of opponent. NEP shows the expected points added on each play throughout the season, allowing us to see the cavernous difference between a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 and that same completion on 3rd and 4.

This is one of the big keys to our puzzle in providing context to game logs. Let's avoid the sugary rush and get to the true meat of what we want. Which matchups should we target in Week 8? Let's check it out.