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Daily Fantasy Football: Does Quarterback Production Decline the Second Time Facing a Divisional Opponent?

The second time a quarterback faces a divisional opponent, it would be logical that he may take a hit in daily fantasy football production. Does data back this up?

There are a lot of words that could describe me. "Athletic" is not one of them.

As such, it should come as no shock that my sister and her friend would whoop up on me and my adult neighbor (Matt) at two-hand touch football when I was a kid. They had speed, agility, and moves, while neither Matt nor I would even get the liberal tag of "sneaky athletic."

That's when you've hit rock bottom.

For the first year that we played them, my sister and her friend won every time. This was a span of at least 20 bouts, so we're not talking about a small sample size here. We flat out sucked, and they took full advantage.

Despite our physical limitations, Matt and I did have one thing working in our favor: familiarity.

After being destroyed dozens of times, we had picked up on the tendencies of our opposition. We eventually knew what play they would run simply because it had worked to perfection against us so many times.

This helped lead to the biggest upset in backyard football history.

As my sister's friend dropped back to pass, Matt recognized the pattern my sister was running. He jumped the route, picked off the pass, and took it to the house. I was probably eating grass or something, but either way, we finally recorded our first victory against our nemeses. And it was all due to familiarity.

Because NFL players have the luxury of watching film and utilizing scouts, you'd think they'd experience similar advantages as familiarity increases. That can't be a good thing for the fantasy production of quarterbacks.

The positive here is that we only see this repeat during an individual season when teams face divisional opponents for the second time. Outside of that, everything should be relatively fresh, and we shouldn't have many qualms about rolling these guys out.

But what about those second divisional games? Should we actively avoid quarterbacks facing an opponent for the second time in a season? Let's investigate.

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