Can you feel that? The anticipation of the NFL season has people at an almost euphoric state. At this point all the football and fantasy related talk that has been brewing for the past 6 months is about to erupt. We are at a historic and unprecedented time for both daily and regular fantasy football. Industry experts are betting on huge volumes of players coming into the daily fantasy sports player pool as the regular season kicks off. And this all kicks off in approximately 48 hours. Let’s just say this has all of us just a little bit too excited. This excitement is ushering in a situation that smart daily fantasy sports players would be wise to take advantage of.
Doubling Down on Opening Night
One of the plays that is becoming industry standard is to enter Thursday Night Contests and fade the Thursday night entry. The reason is obvious, if you have ever played a Thursday night GPP tournament, it is littered with people who have stacked sometimes entire lineups around the Thursday Night game. This strategy may have worked on opening night last year when Peyton unleashed for 7 touchdowns in his opening act of the 2013 season but this year I am betting that lightning does not strike twice. As long as there is not a ceiling breaking performance that single handedly wins players GPP tournaments the fade of opening night will be one of the easiest ways to gain some positive Expected Value right away this daily fantasy sports season. On top of the EV you will gain, it will also provide insight into how others are leaning for this first weekend. Information is power and understanding how others are viewing this weekend will only help you make better more informed decisions.
The Matchup
The defending super bowl champions get the high powered Green Bay Packers at CenturyLink field in Seattle. The Green Bay Packers starting skill position players are all priced like a high powered offense across the daily fantasy sports industry. Accordingly, it is extremely hard to see any value in rostering any of them against the best defense in the NFL. So throwing out all Packer stacks the only foreseeable value could be found on the Seahawks roster. But this brings me back to my initial point of this not only being a Thursday Night Game but also being Opening weekend. It is entirely possible that in some lower priced GPP tournaments on FanDuel that we see Russell Wilsons ownership coming in at close to 50%. This just simply is not a profitable play this weekend. I will eat crow if anyone from this game busts out in a big way but in understanding how others are going to construct their Thursday Night Rosters, the easiest and most straightforward way to gain EV in these contests is to simply fade the entries that most of these rosters are going to have.
