FanDuel Daily Fantasy Football Helper: Week 1

The NFL is back in action this week, and with that, we have our first slate of real, honest to goodness daily fantasy football! While the lack of injury news tends to make Week 1 more straightforward than future slates, we already have a potential slate-changing development brewing with the Pittsburgh Steelers and whether Le'Veon Bell will play on Sunday.

We'll dig into that and more in the first edition of our weekly FanDuel primer, where we give you an overview of the Sunday main slate to help you get started on your research. As always, we recommend checking out all of numberFire's premium tools at your disposal. In particular, the heat map is a great way to get a general overview of the slate's implied totals, and every team's strengths and weaknesses. You also have access to numberFire's weekly projections, which can assist you in nailing down who might be the slate's top scorers and best values.

While we shouldn't see many surprises in Week 1, be sure to also pay attention to inactives prior to Sunday's games, which can often completely change the makeup of a given slate. After all, injuries can have a huge impact on playing time, where an otherwise low-priced backup can suddenly find his way into a feature role and become an excellent play.

Now, let's run through some of this week's top plays on the FanDuel main slate.

Quarterbacks

Tom Brady ($8,600 on FanDuel): The New England Patriots carry the second-highest implied total on the board (28.25) in a home spot against the Houston Texans, and if they're going to achieve that lofty mark, there's a good chance a lot of those touchdowns will be coming off Tom Brady's arm. The Texans will have J.J. Watt back, and when the Pats faced a healthy Texans defense in Week 3 last season, they struggled mightily to run the ball. The end result? New England went to the air, and Brady racked up 378 yards and 5 touchdowns. It's a lot to ask for a repeat of that stat line, but Houston's secondary isn't expected to be their strong suit, and they ranked 26th in Adjusted Defensive Passing Net Expected Points (NEP) per play in 2017.