5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 8
Did y'all ever play the Sims video game back in the day? No judgement if you didn't. Just know you missed out on the greatest thing to happen to computers in the 2000's.
Anyway, for those of you not blessed to be a degenerate nerd born in the 1990's, in Sims, you basically just help these computerized people live. You tell them when to eat, when to go to the bathroom, when to shower, and when to sleep. Sound creepy? You bet! It's great!
Outside of those necessities, you can also have these little homies do fun things. They can go dancing, challenge a friend to some chess, or play with puppies. This, to me, seemed much more fun than tracking when Fred needed a good bowel movement. So, I used a cheat.
By entering a certain code, I could get them to be happy, fed, awake, and BM-free for as long as I wanted. I could make things simple so that I could just enjoy the fun tasks as opposed to working too hard to keep them alive. Embrace simplicity when it is available to you.
Last week, this was the winning strategy in daily fantasy football, and it very well could be again this week. If you rolled the obvious matchups, you probably found yourself in a profitable spot. There are some similar opportunities in Week 8.
Obviously, you're going to need to have some sort of differentiation in your lineup if you want to strike it big in a tournament. But when you're establishing your core, unfadable players, there are certain opportunities you simply can't ignore. We're going to go through some of those today using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP).
If you're new to the site, here's a crash course in NEP. At the beginning of each play, there is an expected number of points a team will score on their present drive. A positive play (such as a three-yard rush on 3rd and 2) will increase that, resulting in positive NEP. A negative play (such as a three-yard rush on 3rd and 4) will decrease that, resulting in negative NEP. NEP just rounds up all the fluctuations in these expected points over the course of a season and puts them into one stat, with team NEP totals being adjusted based on strength of schedule.
Now, last week, I mentioned a few plays that were too widely accepted to be further discussed. Todd Gurley makes this list again this week. Again, you should play him. You'd be a fool not to in this situation. But you don't need me to tell you that as I'm sure plenty of other analysts have done so already this week. These other matchups are simply other good values that may not be getting as much ink as Gurley has gotten this week. With that said, let's get cracking.
