5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 14

If you ever get bored, go back and look at what happened in Week 1 of the season. It seems like a total bizarro world at this point.

Ryan Fitzpatrick put Jameis Winston on notice by throwing for 417 yards and 4 touchdowns against the New Orleans Saints' putrid defense. Kenny Stills showed he was primed for a breakout with Jarvis Landry gone as he posted 106 yards and 2 touchdowns. Rob Gronkowski proved he was in for a huge year by turning 7 receptions into 123 yards and a touchdown.

Nothing has changed, right?

If you view teams based on the way they looked early in the season, you're probably going to lose money down the stretch. Injuries can drastically alter teams, players get role changes, and turnover in coaching staffs can shake up an entire offense. Every team is different now than it was a month ago, much less 13 weeks.

As such, we've got to always be on our toes and constantly reevaluating teams and players when trying to make decisions for daily fantasy football. That's going to play an even bigger role when you look specifically at the Week 14 main slate.

Many of our decisions for this slate will hinge on how much weight we put on recent performances relative to what happened earlier in the year. If something changed to make those recent performances more sustainable, and we fail to react quickly enough, we're going to miss out on some baller plays. We should be doing whatever we can to avoid such a pitfall.

One tool in making these determinations will be numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the expected points added or subtracted on each play throughout the year. NEP illustrates the massive difference between a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 and a three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, helping us decipher which teams are actually operating in the most efficient manner.

Using things like NEP, we can compare how a team has performed before and after a change took place, whether that be an injury or something else. This is going to help give us a better idea of what we should expect from a team in its current state, allowing us to decide how to proceed.

Context is critical whenever discussing matchups this late in the season. Once we account for that context, which matchups should we be looking to exploit in Week 14? Let's check it out.