NFL

5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 6

You have not lived until you've tried to buy groceries on a budget. Although my petitions for it to be added to the 2020 Olympic Games have been for naught, this is sport at the highest level.

On one hand, you want to treat yo self. It's been a long year for a lot of people, and splurging a bit on groceries can be a bit of a release from the hellish firescape that is 2018.

On the other, those Hulu, Netflix, HBO GO, and NBA League Pass subscriptions ain't gonna pay themselves. Flexibility is a necessity.

As such, we're all forced into some mental gymnastics as we swerve through the aisles. Before pulling the trigger and putting that brand-name laundry detergent in the cart, we've got to decide: do we want to pay up here or elsewhere?

It's certainly not an easy dilemma because we don't truly want the off-brand version of anything. But if we can find areas where the gap between the pricey option and the bargain brand is smaller, that's how you stick the landing.

Sure, the store version of the low-fat sour cream is a bit too watery, but if it helps upgrade you to Sam Adams Octoberfest from Keystone Light? That's a sacrifice I can bump with.

All of this training is going to come in handy this weekend in daily fantasy football. As of Friday morning, there's not a ton of obvious value on the board, and there may not be any unless there's some unexpected injury news later on. But we know how disgusting Todd Gurley has been, and with his price up to $9,500 on FanDuel, it's time to limber up.

We need to find slight discounts wherever we can so that we can fork over the necessary cash to pay for our studs. Thankfully, there are solid avenues for exactly that on this slate.

Some of these lower-cost plays have volume comparable to their spendier counterparts, and it doesn't hurt that they've got some juicy matchups to boot. It makes settling for the second tier a whole lot more palatable.

To help identify these bargain ballers in plus matchups, we'll turn to numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), which tracks the expected points added or subtracted on each play throughout the season. As opposed to a yards-per-play-type metric, NEP is able to quantify the difference between a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 and a three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, helping us identify efficiency on offense and defensive shortcomings.

We've been training for this type of slate ever since our parents jettisoned us off the family trips to the grocery store. Now it's time to apply all that we've learned. Which matchups can we look to exploit in Week 6 while hopefully finding some discounts along the way? Let's check it out.