Fantasy football week 11: Exploitable inefficiencies

Find out which players you should be considering when entering your NFL DFS lineups this week.

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 11!
Football Outsiders uses a method known as DVOA, 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.

Defenses struggling against the pass and stout against the run:

Atlanta: 30th Overall (Pass: 31st, Run:10th)

New York Giants: 27th Overall (Pass: 28th, Run:13th)

Tampa Bay: 21st Overall (Pass: 27th Run:1st)

Houston: 18th Overall (Pass: 20th, Run: 6th)

Tennessee: 16th Overall (Pass: 22nd, Run: 4th)

New York Jets: 11th Overall (Pass: 24th, Run: 2nd)

Defenses struggling against the run and stout against the pass:

Kansas City: 17th Overall (Pass: 5th, Run: 31st)

Carolina: 15th Overall (Pass: 3rd, Run: 32nd)

Baltimore: 14th Overall (Pass: 8th, Run: 28th)

Buffalo: 13th Overall (Pass: 9th, Run: 27th)

Indianapolis: 10th Overall (Pass: 6th, Run: 23rd)

Exploitable Defenses

Miami: 31st Overall (Pass: 30th, Run: 30th)

Buffalo will head south, to take on the Miami Dolphins, in a game in which the Bills are currently a 6.5 favorite. After a tough outing against Cleveland, this would appear to be a good, “get well” spot against the Dolphins this week. The total on this game has seen the most movement of any game, as it opened at 39, and is now up to 41, a critical number.

Prior to last week, Devin Singletary appeared to separate himself from Frank Gore, and he made for a high ownership play last week. Given the box score from Sunday, people may be scared away, but my advice would be to go back to the well this week with Singletary. Although he didn’t produce much, he was still the clear lead back over Gore last week. Singletary doubled Gore’s snaps, playing 46 snaps, to Gore’s 23.

Miami’s defense isn’t necessarily a full funnel, but they’ve allowed 5th most PPR points above opponents average to running backs, through 10 weeks.

https://twitter.com/beerswater/status/1194675657197981696

Detroit: 25th Overall (Pass: 23rd, Run: 20th)

Detroit will play host to the visiting Dallas Cowboys, in a game in which Dallas should be hungry after a loss in primetime last Sunday. With Stafford out, and the season in peril, it will be interesting to see what type of effort we got out of the Lions on Sunday.

The Dallas offense will have an appetizing matchup, as the Lions have slid to 25th in overall defensive efficiency. Injuries and trades haven’t help, but this is a very exploitable defense. Detroit has faced its share of tough defenses recently, however the Cowboys currently rank 1st in offensive efficiency. Excluding the game last week against the inept Bears offense, since week four, the Lions have allowed an average of 31.2 points.

Dallas on the other hand, will welcome the Detroit defense, as this will be the second easiest defense they’ve face, (other than the Giants, where they scored 37 points), after the three easy games to stat the year. Excluding the Giants, the average defensive efficiency of their opponents after week three, was 10.8. The massive drop in competition should do wonders for this offense in need of a win. I’ll be targeting Prescott, Elliot, Cooper, and Gallup, in all formats.