Welcome to Advanced Matchups!
Using the Fantasy Points Data Suite, I’ll dig into coverage shells, blitz rates, individual matchups, and more every week throughout the season. If you believe this is too much overanalysis, Millionaire Maker winner rsbathla disagrees with you, crediting this very article as part of his process.
This column is mostly geared toward giving you an edge in large-field main slate tournaments on DraftKings, but I’ll also recommend player props so you can easily take advantage of my findings.
This year, I’ll be placing an additional focus on ceiling outcomes in this article, due to my offseason research revealing that this is the best way to utilize schematic matchups. I’ll still include ordinary over/under prop recommendations, but I am also going to make an effort to point out opportunities for ladder bets — that is, betting a “base rung” over/under in conjunction with at least one alternate over line for the player in question — to take advantage of ceiling predictions.
This article’s props went 68-62 in 2024. For tracking purposes this year, I’ll only count the base rung of any ladders for the record, but I’ll also keep track of overall ROI with the higher rungs included.
Key Ceiling Matchups
New to Advanced Matchups, here I’ll provide every player who qualifies as a ceiling game candidate (~35% to ~100% increased odds of scoring 20.0 or more PPR fantasy points, depending on the coverage shell) based on the criteria from this study.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean I like every one of these players this week, as there’s plenty of additional context we must apply. You can CTRL + F each name to quickly find my thoughts on each of the players above. (If their name doesn’t appear in any of the write-ups below, it probably means I don’t like them very much.)
If the above numbers or the linked study are confusing, don’t worry about it. Simply keep reading to learn what I think of these players (and many others) for this week.
Matchups To Target
Note: We have the least certain matchup-related information early in the NFL season. Therefore, for these initial few weeks, I’m largely avoiding matchup angles where too many team inputs have changed over the offseason. Wherever additional uncertainty exists, I have tried to be transparent. That all means this article won’t function as a full slate walkthrough. So, for these early weeks (and every week, but right now especially), Advanced Matchups is best consumed alongside Scott Barrett and Jake Tribbey’s DFS Slate Breakdown, which releases Saturdays.
