NFL

5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 17

Chaos. Hysteria. Panic. Madness.

These aren't just the words used to describe your bowels after gorging yourself on cocktail shrimp and Schnapps. It's Week 17 of the NFL season, yo, and things finna get weird.

Not only do we have to balance the baked-in variance of the NFL, but we have to contend with teams resting players, guys checking out with one game left, and the narrative street associated with dudes set to retire or hit big incentives in their contracts. It's a nightmare in the most beautiful sense.

This means if you're a big-time lover of tournaments for daily fantasy, Week 17 is your Super Bowl. There's zero certainty, nobody has a floor, and you're basking in absurdity. It doesn't get any better than this.

That's not to say we simply toss all rational thought out the window when filling out our lineups. We can still glean plenty of information from looking at how teams and players have performed throughout the season, and there are matchups ripe for the exploiting.

We can spot these using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players with the team totals being adjusted based on strength of opponent.

Here's how NEP works. Prior to each play, there's an expected number of points the offense will score on its current drive. A three-yard completion on 3rd-and-2 picks up a first down, increasing those expected points. That same three-yard completion on 3rd-and-4, however, likely results in a punt, and NEP helps quantify the difference between these two outcomes.

Without further ado, let's snap on some gloves and dig into this potentially bloody and glorious slate. Here are five matchups you can exploit in Week 17.