5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 3

You are not, I assume, an emotionless robot. As such, you're going to react when bad things happen in fantasy football, and oh, baby, have the first two weeks been brimming with badness.

If I hand Coby Fleener my beating heart, and he proceeds to sneeze on it and then watch it tumble hopelessly to the Earth, that's going to affect the way I view him as a fantasy asset going forward. The loss associated with that broken trust sucks, and because we're emotional beings, the feelings are going to stick in our minds for a long, long time.

That can become an issue when we're trying to make optimal decisions.

Let's say that the New Orleans Saints scorned you in a great matchup earlier this year, and they find themselves in a good spot again later on. Are you going to be able to overcome that letdown and go all-in for a second time? It's definitely not easy, and it's why we need to try to take that aspect out of the equation using the beautiful, emotionless guiding lights that are analytics.

You see, analytics don't give a rat's backside about your dad gum feelings. They're going to show you where you want to invest, regardless of how those assets may have wronged you in the past. They can help you spot matchups you may otherwise gloss over due to a bias from past experiences, and our job is to use these fancy tools to spot which matchups are prime for the picking in Week 3 of NFL DFS.

Specifically, we'll be using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP), the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players, with the team totals being adjusted for strength of opponent.

Here's how NEP works. Prior to each play, an offense has an expected number of points it will score on its current drive. A positive play -- such as a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 -- will increase the team's expected output for the drive, resulting in positive NEP. That same three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, though, will likely end with a punt, resulting in a loss of NEP for the offense. The sum of these fluctuations over an entire season can show us which players and offenses operated in the most efficient manner.

Let's use these metrics to break down five plus matchups for the slate of games this upcoming Sunday, including a few that may make your insides all tingly with the rage of recency bias.