5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 8

Because we are now seven weeks into the NFL season, we've got information flowing out the wazoo. We know who's getting targets where, which players are feeling the wrath of regression, and which possess the utterly false opinion that candy corn is an inferior Halloween treat. You know, the important stuff.

While it's great to be able to weed out the players who have trash food takes, this influx of information can cause us to over complicate things a bit. Sometimes, we need to just take a step back and return to our basic processes.

That's how Week 8 feels for daily fantasy football. There are some plays that align well with our general processes, but they may not jump off the page because we are fixated on other things. Whether it is recency bias against a certain team or the allure of targeting a trendy, new object, it'll be important that we just look at things how they have played out through the first seven weeks.

We can accomplish a lot of this using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP). This is the metric we use to track the efficiency of both teams and players with the team totals being adjusted based on strength of opponent.

Here's how NEP works. Prior to each play, there's an expected number of points that an offense will score on its current drive. A three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 picks up a first down, increasing those expected points and earning the team positive NEP. That same three-yard completion on 3rd and 4, though, will likely result in a punt, and NEP will help reflect that. The fluctuations of these expected points over the course of a season can tell us which teams and players operated in the most efficient manner.

Let's use this to get back down to the basics and drown out any less-essential information. Here are five matchups we should be looking to exploit for daily fantasy football in Week 8.