5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 9
San Diego Chargers Passing Offense
The past few weeks may have masked it, but you can bet your bottom that Philip Rivers is a good quarterback.
Rivers hasn't topped 16 points on FanDuel since Week 5, and he has only done so three times the entire season. That's not exactly what we're looking for when we have to pay $8,300.
This all looks a bit different when you provide the context of which teams the San Diego Chargers have faced. Two of their past three games have been against the Denver Broncos, numberFire's second-ranked pass defense. They also faced the Kansas City Chiefs, who rank fourth in that stat. This means 37.5% of his games this year have come against top-four defenses against the pass. That's going to have an effect on your fantasy output.
Against the non-elite defenses, Rivers has absolutely feasted. If we were to look at just those five games, he'd rank sixth in both Passing NEP per dropback and Success Rate. He'll get another one of these tasks on Sunday against the Tennessee Titans.
The Titans got off to a solid start defensively, but their metrics have been sliding of late. They enter Week 9 ranked 28th in Adjusted Defensive Passing NEP per play, right behind the much-maligned New Orleans Saints. That's not an area you want to inhabit on the defensive side of the ball.
Each of the past three weeks, a quarterback has finished as a top-10 scorer against the Titans. Andrew Luck is sickly, so that's easy to understand. But the other two were Blake Bortles -- a noted hater of efficiency -- and Cody Kessler, who fell to the third round in this year's draft. Rivers may not be scorching the Earth right now, but he absolutely could do so against Tennessee.
Tyrell Williams didn't practice Wednesday due to rest, but assuming he's good to go, he's in a spot to unleash some nastiness this week. Williams has been one of the more efficient wide receivers in football this year, ranking seventh in Reception NEP per target of the 56 receivers with at least 40 targets. His price has gone down because of the matchups with Denver, but his production has been tremendous, and he's got the usage we want.
Williams has a 19.0% target market share since Keenan Allen's injury, which is a bit below our threshold. But if we exclude those games against Denver (where wide receivers go to die), this jumps to 21.8%. Given his production and his salary, this is the type of guy we want to pair with Rivers in tournaments.
