How Much Do Quarterbacks Benefit from a Plus Matchup in Daily Fantasy Football?

For every year from 2004 to 2014, Madden was a staple in my household. I would buy the game as soon as I could, and then I'd hop into Franchise Mode and immediately launch a torpedo into the New York Jets' roster. This was binging on Netflix before Netflix was a thing.

Because I was generally using Kellen Clemens, Geno Smith, or some other debatably startable quarterback, it would take me a while to get the hang of each new game. This usually resulted in abuse of the reset button and a couple of controller chucks per game.

Eventually, my frustrations would mount so much with Chad Pennington's noodle arm that I'd throw in the white flag. I had exhausted all of my options, and it was time to resort to the last option: toggling the difficulty.

I have the hand-eye coordination of a tipsy toddler, so I was never able to hold my own on All Madden. Once those turnovers started to rack up, though, I'd take that puppy off of All Pro and bump with Pro for a bit, attempting to free myself from the depths of video-game purgatory.

It was the most blissful feeling in the world. Suddenly, defensive backs had squirrel-level awareness, and Jeremy Kerley became Dez Bryant, high-pointing every ball in the corner of the end zone. Some of you may think that's too easy, but I like it when Thomas Jones wins the MVP with his 38 rushing touchdowns.

Not shockingly, real football is similar to this. When a team is facing a tough opponent, they're likely to struggle. If they're facing a porous defense, it's as if they've changed the difficulty level, allowing them to post video-game numbers in real life. No position is more dependent on this matchup discrepancy than quarterback.

There are a couple of questions at hand here when it comes to picking a correct quarterback matchup. First, how do we pinpoint which defenses to target? Second, how much does this success translate over into daily fantasy football?