5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 3

One of the world's biggest injustices is the demonization of boneless chicken wings. This does not feel like an exaggeration at all.

The most common rebuttal to the correct assertion that boneless wings are elite is that they are chicken nuggets. But why is this viewed as being a negative?

Chicken nuggets are a delicious treat when you are a child, and the taste of that goodness does not change as it slides down your gullet just because you are an adult. Breaded meat slathered in sauce is good no matter how much you compare it to a child's food.

This is just a classic example of overthinking it. Why would you go for the messier food with less meat when there's a just-as-tasty alternative without the drawbacks? Because of a perception that it's less cool? That's hustling backwards.

We see these situations in daily fantasy football all the time, too. We can sometimes get caught up in trying to be different to the point where we make sub-optimal plays. Sometimes, we just overthink it.

Week 3 is not the week to unnecessarily complicate matters. There are some potential obvious values at running back due to injuries, and there are multiple potential shootouts on the board. Our process says these are situations that should make us slobber all over the keyboard. It's best just to take what the slate is giving you.

In order to keep ourselves grounded and prevent ourselves from over-complicating our lineups, we can lean on a little bit of data, which doesn't have time for things as trivial as the societal implications of preferring boneless over bone-in wings. Specifically, we'll be checking out numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the in-house metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players. A three-yard pass on 3rd and 2 is wildly different from a three-yard pass on 3rd and 4, and NEP helps quantify those discrepancies.

If we use data and a little bit of common sense as our guide, we should be able to pinpoint the best matchups to target on the slate and avoid the pitfalls of overthinking matters. With that in mind, which matchups should we look to target in Week 3? Let's check it out.