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As you probably have already heard, Rotoballer has partnered with Fanduel to bring you the finest weekly league fantasy football action. In this strategy series, we're going to bring you some tips on how to play and win Fanduel leagues!
To play these weekly games and take advantage of an exclusive offer, you can register on Fanduel through this link and you will be given a 100% bonus on your first deposit! After you've registered, sign up for Fanduel's Friends Of FanDuel League. It's a cheap $5 entry tournament with over $2500 in prizes awarded!
Editor's Note: The FFPC Playoff Challenge is back with a massive $500,000 grand prize and $1.35 million total prize pool, paying down to 800th place. Here's the deal: no salary cap, no draft, no pickups, no subs. Choose 10 players, and as NFL teams get knocked out so will your players, so choose your team wisely. The 7,250 entries will sell out quickly, and registrations will close on Saturday January 10th at 4:30 pm ET . Don't wait - get your team now and end your fantasy football season with a shot at $500,000! Sign Up Now!
How to Win on Fanduel Football - Advice for Weekly Fantasy Gamers (Part 4)
In our third installment last week, we gave you detailed analysis on how the RotoBaller experts make their tough decisions at the very elusive Running Back position. The discussion focused on the approaches of "Going with the Star" vs " Going with the Scrub", and the various outcomes and variations that you can bring to the table by being shrewd with your salary cap budget and player analysis. In this week's article, we will get into how we catch the brightest stars (no pun intended) in for our wide receiver choices, so your job at looking like a fantasy football genius will be that much easier!
Sizing Up Your Wide Receiver Options
At all positions, people can easily make the mistake of gravitating to the biggest name players without thorough matchup analysis. The faux paux that many novice salary cap players make is to think that all opposing defenses are created equal. Perhaps in the eyes of Mother NFL who loves all her junky and elite defenses just the same, but not in our critical eyes! In fact, the only thing we care about when we start going down the line of who not to use in any given week starts with the list of top ranked defenses. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend that if any of your potential wideout options are up vs. a top 10 overall or top 10 pass defense, you should avoid those matchups. They are statistically more likely to yield poor results (which almost always leads to tearful fantasy owners). Once you eliminate that player pool with the highest likelihood to "poop the bed" (statistically speaking of course), then you can begin to follow our next steps to finding both tremendous value and bankable consistency.
Banking on Consistency
We look for a overwhelmingly good reasons to spend big bucks on any player in a salary cap format like Fanduel. When we say spend big bucks on a wide receiver, we'll define that as anyone $7,500 or more. That's a limited cream of the crop bunch, but you will likely want to have 1 bonafide stud in there each week. As we saw just on Thursday night this week, constant target monsters like Brandon Marshall are worth breaking the bank for, but ONLY when they are also matched up against a putrid secondary like the New York Giants. Each week, there should be 1 or 2 of the top Wide Receiver options facing a putrid defense and if you are looking to spend big dollars, then you want the opposition's defensive secondary to look like a huge brick of Swiss Cheese! The Giants brought one of the absolute worst ranked overall and pass defenses into this week's matchup, so anyone who identified him is a monster play this week did their homework and made a calculated use of their fantasy budget. Starts like that help win weekly tournaments, so don't think it is always the sneaky and super cheap value play that you need to unearth to strike fantasy football gold.
Finding Tremendous Value
Once you have dwindled down your budget by splurging your little heart out on a #1 QB, RB, and WR, the time has come to start making the even tougher decisions of salary cap league fantasy football. You'll still have many positions to fill, including 2 more WR slots. We discussed the way running back injury fill-ins present some easy-to-identify values and this can work with wide receivers as well. In fact, because of the depth of most teams wide receiving units, there is usually someone waiting in the wings to take the snaps of an injured starter. In the NFL, the most important thing is opportunity and playing time. A lot of teams in the modern pass-heavy climate use 3 or 4 wide receiver sets and run spread offenses and this allows for some very cheap and sneaky value plays to emerge in any given matchup. An opposing bad defense is a great thing to pick on when looking for sleeper wide receivers, so always start there. Take the bottom 10 defenses, for example, and then look at the QBs facing those defenses to see who throws the most. Make sure you are targeting a quarterback that can drop back 45-50 times a game without flinching a la Peyton Manning or Tony Romo, Drew Brees or Matt Ryan. Their #3 or #4 receiving options (i.e Harry Douglas) still can have big play sleeper potential and for less than 5K of your budget, you may need to get one of those types of guys into your mix.
At the end of the day, if you always try to pick on terrible pass defenses, and look for pass heavy offenses with good quarterbacks when trying to narrow down your wide receiving options, your core group will have a higher chance at succeeding. Good luck heading into your week 6 matchups RotoBallers!
Now that you've got the basics down, are you ready for the real thing?
This week, Fanduel is hosting an exclusive partners-only tournament. It's an inexpensive $5 entry tournament with over $2500 in prizes awarded. And remember, our experts are hanging around in our chatrooms all day to answer any type of lineup questions you might have!
(If you are a first-time Fanduel user, you can register through RotoBaller and get a very nice 100% deposit bonus).
That's it for this week fellow RotoBallers! Stay tuned for our next installment and don't forget to sign up for a Fanduel contest this week to start experiencing all the fun and instant fantasy football gratification that has been missing in your life!
