NFL

5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 9

Week 9's main slate provides a couple of juicy matchups to target, including Jared Goff against the New Orleans Saints' pass defense. Which other situations should we be looking to exploit in NFL DFS?

With six teams on bye in Week 9, things have been trimmed to the point of scrambling. We don't have endless games brimming with fantasy goodness waiting to pop off; we've got about three.

Game environment is superbly significant in NFL DFS. If you wind up targeting a player in a projected low-scoring slugfest, it's entirely possible they'll have a good day. But that player's ceiling won't be as high as the others, and the odds that he busts are a wee bit higher than we'd like.

It's okay to cross games off of your list when building a lineup. After all, you've got just nine slots to fill on a roster, and wasting one of them on a dud of a game can drag the rest of your team down. On a slate like this, it pays to zoom in on the games that figure to be most fruitful.

For Week 9, there are three games with a total higher than 50. Six games have totals of 47.5 or lower, which is borderline passable in today's high-scoring environment. If we're hunting for plays that can explode, we're likely best suited sticking in those potential shootouts.

Luckily for us, there are ways to attack each game where you're not resorting to targeting assets facing elite offenses. Game environments likely matter more than matchups overall, but getting a high-powered offense against an over-matched defense certainly won't hurt matters.

In order to find the best way to attack these shootouts, we can take a peek at numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players. NEP looks at the expected points added or subtracted on each play, meaning it can quantify the immense difference between a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 and a three-yard completion on 3rd and 4.

When we're looking at the juiciest games on the main slate, what are the best ways to attack them from a matchup perspective? Let's check it out.