5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 8

Cincinnati Bengals' Passing Offense

Andy Dalton's game logs aren't candy corn. They're blood, guts, and gore. But even if they lack that sweetness, they're still abundantly misleading.

Dalton has topped 17 points on FanDuel just once, and he has been held below 13 points in half of his games. The player card comes with a "NSFW" warning before opening. And if you click on it, the odds you plug Dalton in are likely pretty low.

But again, we need to add context to the discussion before drawing any rash conclusions. That context is huge for Dalton given the defenses he has faced this year.

Here's a look at where those opposing defenses have ranked against the pass this year. The "Rank" column is where each defense ranks in Adjusted Defensive Passing NEP per play, numberFire's schedule-adjusted metric that shows how good a team is at defending opposing aerial attacks. The "FD Points" column shows the number of points Dalton scored in that game based on FanDuel's scoring system. The schedule-makers have not been kind to Dalton and the Cincinnati Bengals.

Four of Dalton's six games have come against defenses ranked 11th or better against the pass. He went off for 286 yards and 4 touchdowns the one time he faced a defense ranked outside the top 20. The team he'll face this week -- the Indianapolis Colts -- is dead last against the pass. Those game logs don't look as scary now, do they?

The Colts have allowed at least 295 yards passing to six of the seven quarterbacks they have faced, a list that includes juggernauts such as Jared Goff, Carson Palmer, Brian Hoyer, and Blake Bortles. Dalton may not be having a great year, but he's at the very least within that tier as a passer if not above it.

So, the matchup is not an obstacle for Dalton. But it's easy to worry about the spread in this game. The Bengals are 10.5-point favorites, a script that sets up better for rushing than passing. While this does justify saving some salary on a guy like Joe Mixon, it shouldn't scare us off of Dalton.

Since the start of 2013, the Bengals have been favored by at least a touchdown at home 10 times with Dalton at quarterback. Here's how those games have gone.

The recent results are a bit more mixed, but in these 10 games, Dalton has failed to throw at least two touchdowns just twice, and he has topped 20 points on FanDuel seven times. This would seem to indicate that the heavy spread shouldn't bother us all that much.

Dalton's $7,600, which isn't that bad on a slate where trustworthy value is hard to find. He's a great asset to just plug and forget.

Any time we're on Dalton, we should want to be on A.J. Green, too. Green has 31.8% of the team's overall targets and 60.0% of the team's throws at least 16 yards downfield. You can get scared of his home/road splits if you want, but with some help from the RotoViz Game Splits app, we can see that Green performs well in the same conditions as above for Dalton.

Green's expensive at $8,500, but he's in a great spot to rack up some points this week. You should be slobbering over this guy. But if you want to save some cash and just scrape for a touchdown, then Brandon LaFell and Tyler Kroft are the guys you should peep.

LaFell has 9 of the team's 21 red-zone targets this year, and four of those targets have been inside the 10. The Bengals' implied team total is the fifth-highest on the main slate, meaning LaFell's a decent bet for a touchdown at $4,600.

Kroft isn't quite as cheap at $5,700, but he has had solid involvement recently with a 16.8% target market share the past four games. LaFell seems to be the more desirable asset due to his low salary, but you can do a lot worse than Kroft as your tight end.