Fantasy football week 4: Exploitable inefficiencies

Fantasy football Week 4: Exploitable inefficiencies

While it may be easy to find out how many points or yards a defense has allowed, it’s not necessarily the best predictor of future success. In order to get more accurate fantasy predictions, sites like Football Outsiders, tease out as much variance as possible, in order to reveal the true story as we head towards Fantasy Football Week 4!

Football Outsiders uses a method known as DVOA. DVOA is a method of evaluating teams, units, or players. It takes every single play during the NFL season and compares each one to a league-average baseline based on the situation. Remember, we’re dealing with extremely small sample sizes in the NFL and Fantasy Football right now, but here are some exploitable match-ups you may want to consider this week.

*Note: With only three weeks of data, these efficiencies numbers are extremely skewed. As the season progress, they will become more predictive.

Defenses Struggling Against the Pass and Stout Against the Run

Oakland: 29th Overall (Pass: 30th, Run: 16th)

Philadelphia: 20th Overall (Pass: 22nd, Run: 4th)

Tampa Bay: 7th Overall (Pass: 13th, Run: 2nd)

Defenses Struggling Against the Run and Stout Against the Pass

Kansas City: 21st Overall (Pass: 9th, Run: 32nd)

Carolina: 9th Overall (Pass: 6th, Run: 27th)

Buffalo: 6th Overall (Pass: 4th, Run: 21st)

Green Bay: 3rd Overall (Pass: 3rd, Run: 22nd)

Exploitable Defenses in Overall Defensive Efficiency

Washington: 27th Overall (Pass: 27th, Run: 25th)

After last week’s outing in Tampa, Daniel Jones is well on his way to proving the doubters (including myself), wrong. After lighting it up in the preseason, Jones carried his performance over into his first start, throwing for 336 yards, two touchdowns, and rushing for 28 yards and another two touchdowns. What may be more impressive is that he did this on the road, against a much improved Bucs defense that ranks 7th in overall defensive efficiency.

Flash forward to this week, and Jones will have an opportunity to face one of the worst defensive units in the league, Washington. It’s important to note that the loss of Saquon Barkley is massive, but Jones appears to be capable to handle his share of the load. Washington’s defense made a sputtering Chicago offense look good on Monday night, and given the short week and the travel. I would expect the Giants to eclipse their team total of 25.75. I’ll be targeting players like Daniel Jones, Wayne Gallman, Even Engram, and Sterling Shepard in DFS.

New Orleans: 28th Overall (Pass: 25th, Run: 29th)

New Orleans will return home for a marquee matchup against the visiting, Dallas Cowboys, on Sunday night. After being outgained by 249 yards, the Saints somehow escaped with a win in Seattle. While normally, a primetime, home game, in the Superdome would never be called a “let down” spot, I think this game might be. If you read up on how the Saints approached last week’s game in Seattle, you’ll come to find that they treated the game as if it was an early super bowl. With Brees going down, it was an all in effort to come out of Seattle with a victory. They were victorious, but gosh do the metrics look bad. New Orleans needed both a special teams score and a defensive touchdown to survive.

Dallas on the other hand survived a slow start against the worst team in football, but is currently graded out as number one in overall offensive efficiency by Football Outsiders. They are a bit banged up with Gallup out and Cooper dealing with an ankle injury, but I would predict that this offense can bully the Saints defense. Zeke should certainly feast in this matchup.