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 are 11-4 (+4.15u) so far this season. For tracking purposes this year, only the base rung of any ladder counts for the record, but the units are displayed with the higher rungs (alternate lines at longer odds) 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, or that they aren’t on the main slate and have no props that interest me posted yet.)
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: Week 4 is somewhat of a tipping point for matchups, where much of the skill comes in determining whether to rely on current-season or previous-season numbers. I’ve largely split the difference here by focusing more on what defenses have shown us this year, but still factoring in 2024 within smaller-sample schematic splits for WRs and TEs in particular. This leads to many of my write-ups spinning the matchups from the table above in a slightly different direction. This will not be the case as often in subsequent weeks, as the study this table is based on was conducted from Week 5 on.
