5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 5

It's only Week 5, and the NFL has already showed us just how brutal it can be.

Week 4, especially, was a gruesome one with Earl Thomas and Tyler Eifert suffering nasty injuries that will likely cost them the rest of the season. Nobody wants to see that ever, but it feels even worse when the players are set to hit free agency in the offseason. These injuries aren't going to help their pocketbooks.

The human side of injuries is what's most important here as broken bones can have long-term effects on a person's health. Though it doesn't matter nearly as much, this does affect daily fantasy, as well.

With Thomas now being on the sidelines, we have to change the way we view the Seattle Seahawks' defense. We've seen what a big effect injuries have had on the Atlanta Falcons the past few weeks, and the Seahawks now join that group of teams that have lost impactful defensive players. If we look at full-season metrics and take them at face value without accounting for changes in those situations, we're going to whiff pretty often in DFS.

Injuries are going to play a big role in this Week 5 slate from a DFS perspective. High-powered offenses are facing depleted opponents, and sometimes, the offenses we want to target are themselves dealing with dings and dents. How do we navigate through those tricky waters and zero in on the right plays?

We can get part of the way thanks to some help from numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP). NEP shows the expected points added or subtracted on each play throughout the year, helping illustrate the wide chasm in value between a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 and a three-yard completion on 3rd and 4. Full-season metrics will get a bit dirty due to injuries, but we can also dig a bit deeper to see the efficiency of teams with and without the pieces they are lacking.

Dealing with situations where we have high-impact injuries means we will be dabbling in hypotheticals, and that can lead to some missteps. But with NEP and other advanced metrics, we can at least make more educated guesses.

With that in mind, which matchups should we be looking to exploit in Week 5 for daily fantasy football? Let's check it out.