NFL

Fantasy Football: 7 Quarterbacks With Favorable Early-Season Schedules

Jim Sannes  —  @JimSannes Aug 24th, 2016
Whether you're streaming or need an early-season fill-in, you'll want to snag a quarterback with an easy schedule. Which late-round quarterbacks can we target who fit this mold for fantasy football?

Whether you're looking to stream quarterbacks in season-long fantasy football, or the guy you drafted has an affinity for toying with air pressure, your focus on a fill-in is going to be the same. You need to find a player with an easy early-season schedule. Why settle for a tough road to points at the time when you'll need that quarterback most?

Pinpointing such a schedule is never simple due to the multitude of changes teams undergo over the course of one offseason. However, we should still be able to have a solid idea of which quarterbacks will be in quality spots once the regular season begins, and that can at least help guide us from the start.

With Tom Brady's suspension and the recent surge in the popularity of drafting quarterbacks late, let's take a look at some players who appear to be in fortuitous spots to start the season. We can identify these players using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the efficiency of teams and players with the team metrics being weighted for strength of opponent. Any team rankings referenced will come from the end-of-season Adjusted Defensive Passing NEP per play marks for 2015, which -- although flawed -- can push us down the right path when we also factor in logic based on offseason moves.

numberFire premium members can check out these matchups for themselves using the season-long draft kit. The "Defensive Matchups" tab labels when quarterbacks will be facing a poor defense throughout the season, allowing you to see for yourself when a guy may be primed for a big output.

If you're drafting Brady or looking to stream, you clearly aren't going to be pilfering one of the top options on the board. As such, we'll only look at quarterbacks ranked 13th or lower in average draft position (ADP) for 12-team, point-per-reception leagues, according to Fantasy Football Calculator. These guys may not be fantasy studs, but they should be able to start the season off on the right foot. Let's take a look at who qualifies.

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