5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 2

Because we're only human beings, it's easy to overreact to what happened in Week 1 of the NFL season. After all, it's the only sample we've got on each player in his most relevant circumstances; how could we not get a tad overzealous in obsessing over one game?

If we had a full summer to assess each performance and pick it apart, we'd probably come to the right conclusions eventually. But the NFL is a different kind of beast.

Instead, we've got another round of games coming down the pipe right away. There's no time for dilly-dallying up in here.

If we put too much weight into what happened in Week 1, we're going to go down a dangerous path that is surely going to lead us into trap plays that'll snatch us either this week or the next. But if we completely ignore it, we'll be too slow to react to what is truly the most actionable information we've got.

And so, it's critical that we ask ourselves this: Is what I saw in Week 1 legit?

Answering this question correctly will give us a huge leg up on our competition. If it is legit, we'll be able to buy high or sell low based on those performances, and there's value in that. But if what happened in Week 1 was a fluke, and we can buy into a bounceback or stay off a ticking time bomb of regression, the upsides are pretty tasty.

That's the task at hand entering Week 2. And it's not an easy one. But which performances can we believe after the opener and leverage in our rosters this Sunday?

We can get a bit of a hand in this task by leaning on numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the model we use to track the expected points added or subtracted on each play throughout the season. A three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 is wildly different from a three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, and NEP can help us quantify those differences.

Using an expected points model at least keeps us from falling into the traps of looking at which teams scored the most points or had the most yards. Those are the two biggest pitfalls from such a small sample.

Then, we can sprinkle in a little logic to decide how much of what we saw last week we can believe. Doing this should help us identify which matchups we actually want to target in Week 2 and which are best to avoid.

With this in mind, which matchups should we look to exploit on Sunday's main slate? Let's check it out.