Now that teams have solidified their 53 man rosters, picking your daily fantasy football rosters should be much easier. You have a much better idea of which direction teams are leaning in with their starters, and the strategies that they plan on using are revealed in a little more depth. For example, in Buffalo, it was assumed that QB Matt Cassel was going to see playing time, but they have announced now that he has been cut.
This is information that everyone has at their disposal, and it’s something that will be reflected on any daily fantasy sports site that you use, which would seem to even the playing field when it comes to you versus your competition. But, that’s not actually true. Because we know a little bit more about how teams are going to formulate their strategies, we can use that information to see which supporting players will see more action. In Buffalo, we now know that they are intending on using Tyrod Taylor as their starter, so when they Bills play the Indianapolis Colts on September 13th, we can have certain expectations from what Taylor will be likely to do and who he will rely most heavily on. Taylor doesn’t have a ton of playing time, and over the last two years, has only had four appearances. However, what little we do know about him involves that he relies more heavily on rushing than he does passing. He’s only made 5 attempts and has had 1 completion. Granted, this is a very small number, but either way, a 20 percent completion rate isn’t very good. He’s been much more successful with his running game.
That means that the Bills’ running backs will have more chances than usual. LeSean McCoy is slated to be the top RB on the Bills, and in a league where running backs are not stressed as important, you can more than likely get McCoy for very cheap. If you have already overextended your salary, that’s a decent play as he will be cheap, but because of the situation in Buffalo, he will be outperforming the salary that he is priced at.
Situations like these will happen often throughout the league, and not just in Buffalo. Week #1 is an especially good time to pad your roster with plays like this because the players that are affected will definitely not be priced correctly. The first weekend of the season never has enough good information for daily fantasy sports sites to price salaries correctly, and this is when you will be most likely to find inefficiencies–especially if you are able to price things better on your own.
Another example of this happening is in Philadelphia, where the Eagles cut Tim Tebow. Tebow was never in the conversation about being a starter, but Tebow is a very physical QB that has big strength in running the ball–much like McCoy. However, the fact that Philly doesn’t want to retain Tebow indicates that they are going to be more pass heavy than originally thought. You can take a different approach here than in Buffalo. Wide receivers will see more play here, and many receivers and tight ends that wouldn’t normally see a lot of targets will be getting more action. Miles Austin would hardly ever make a daily fantasy roster normally, but this year, he can easily be used as a mid to low tier player, and you will hardly ever pay much for him, especially early in the year. Last year in Cleveland, he had 47.3 yards per game, but this year, you should expect that number to be much higher as he is the top performer in Philly. That just means he will get many more targets from QB Sam Bradford. Even if his performance levels do not change, his numbers will go up simply because he will see more action.
Again, most fantasy players will not be looking for trends like this, but there are many of them out there. And if you use them to your advantage, you can find lots of these little things, and clean up on these value situations during the first few weeks of the season until the fantasy football sites catch on to what’s happening.
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