5 Daily Fantasy Football Matchups to Exploit in Week 16

This is a truly blessed time of year. Sure, we get those holiday things that people seem to enjoy, and some time off of work is nice, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about actionable sample sizes in the NFL, the purest cause for a jolly attitude.

In baseball, we get 162 games on which to judge a team. By the end of the year, you know in which areas each player excels and struggles, meaning you can shrug it off when Mike Trout goes 0-for-4 at the dish because you know dude's good at mashing taters.

In basketball, each team can get somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 possessions per game. Your sample size there goes up in the blink of an eye, so we're not fretting if DeMarcus Cousins struggles to knock down his shot on a single night.

It's a whole heck of a lot harder in the NFL. Not only do we get just 16 games each year, but even the samples within those games are capped. So when Marcus Mariota has a bad game, it's nearly impossible to tell how much we should be panicking.

Once we get this deep into the season, though, we've got about as much information as we're going to get. We know which teams are good and which are bad, making it easier for us to simply disregard one down game and move on. Things like injuries can change situations pretty drastically, but as long as we consider the context for the struggles, we should be able to make fairly sound decisions.

For DFS, this is a huge tool to have at our disposal. If a certain player was a disappointment the previous week, he's not likely to carry heavy ownership on the following slate no matter how good his matchup may be. If we can spot guys who are due for a massive rebound, we can give ourselves a leg up on the competition. Correctly identifying those bounce-back spots is much easier once our sample sizes are this big.

Week 16's main slate presents us with a number of scenarios where we'll have to decide whether or not what we saw in the most recent game was legit. If we guess correctly, it could pay massive dividends. If not, then we cut our losses and move onto the circus that is Week 17.

Thankfully, we've got some help in diagnosing where we do and don't want to invest in the form of 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 for the strength of opponent. While a yards-per-attempt metric will view each play without context, NEP allows us to see the massive difference between a three-yard completion on 3rd and 2 and that same completion on 3rd and 4. Using NEP can show us both which teams simply had a down week and which are paired with poor defenses that could prime them for a bounce back.

Which offenses fit this mold in Week 16, warranting exposure via our hard-earned DFS bankroll? Let's check it out. Here are five matchups we should look to exploit on the main slate.