5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 2

Beware, all ye daily fantasy sports players. Point chasers are coming. And their thirst shall threaten our existence on this beautiful planet.

There weren't a ton of huge performances in Week 1 of the 2017 season, but those that did happen are now burned into our minds. There's Kareem Hunt flashing his Gucciness in the grills of the New England Patriots. Then Mike Gillislee scored three touchdowns in his debut for the Pats. Sam Bradford helped turn Stefon Diggs and Adam Thielen into overnight celebrities. Why use Le'Veon Bell when Tarik Cohen is sitting there, waiting for me to thrust him into my lineups?

There are players who will be underpriced in Week 2 based on their usage in the season opener, and some of them may be the guys mentioned above. But we also can't lose site of our processes in DFS just because Player Y lost his gosh-darn mind in one game.

In looking back at high-ownership players in DFS last year, we found that every single position scored fewer points when they were popular than they did the previous week. In other words, people often made sub-optimal moves just because a guy blew up the previous week. We want to avoid that.

So, what does this mean for Week 2? We can apply usage data from the opening slate of games to see which players figure to see the volume we need for DFS. Combine that with some spicy matchups, and we should be able to avoid the treacheries of point chasing.

In order to spot those matchups, we'll be leaning on numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to measure the efficiency of teams and players over the course of a season with the team totals being adjusted for strength of opponent. NEP gives us the context to know that a two-yard rush on 3rd and 1 has way more value than that same rush on 3rd and 3, helping us discern which offenses were actually operating in the best manner.

While looking out for any potential landmines due to point chasing, which matchups should we try to exploit in Week 2? Let's check them out.