You're not going to find any low ownership here. Secret's out about the Cardinals, and errrybody in the club's about to jump on these pups. I'm okay with that because their pricing still provides stupid value.
As mentioned in the Week 1 edition of this breakdown, Carson Palmer had the sixth best Passing NEP per play among quarterbacks with at least 200 drop backs last year. So far this year, he's second in Passing NEP behind only Ben Roethlisberger. Yes, that means he's above Tom Brady, even though Brady has had 39 more drop backs through the first two weeks. It's time Palmer gets the respect he deserves in the form of your DFS ownership.
Let's circle back to Roethlisberger for a second. He has 43.67 Passing NEP this season, and Palmer is second at 31.26. That's a pretty significant gap. How did Rothlisberger build such a commanding lead in just two weeks? He racked up 26.18 Passing NEP in Week 2 alone. That would put him in sixth place on the season based on only that week. And who did he face that week? That would be these San Francisco 49ers.
Part of that wretched performance was probably due to traveling east and operating on one less day of rest, so we shouldn't expect Palmer to post numbers anywhere near the same as Roethlisberger. But he doesn't need to. He's tied for the ninth most expensive quarterback on FanDuel and the 12th most expensive on DraftKings, and if you want to stack him with a receiver, you'll have no trouble doing so.
You all saw the nastiness that Larry Fitzgerald dropped on the world last week. He's second in the league in Reception NEP behind Antonio Brown, who is quite good at football. He has also been targeted 17 times this year, 32.69 percent of all of the targets on the team. You can get all of that at $6,700 on FanDuel and $5,800 on DraftKings. I'm easily dropping that in cash, and I don't mind doing it in tourneys, either, despite the high ownership.
I'm not quite as excited about John Brown, though he isn't a bad option at the price of $6,000 on FanDuel or $5,100 on DraftKings. The reason he doesn't get me all hot and bothered is that he's down at 12 targets. Now, that's 23.08 percent of the team's total, which isn't bad. But it means they'd probably need a higher passing volume than they may get when favored by seven points. I don't mind him in tourneys, but his floor isn't quite high enough for me in cash at this time.