Finding good quarterback plays when playing daily fantasy football on FanDuel and DraftKings One of the most common themes in our considerable reader email each football season is, "how do I find a good QB/RB/WR/TE for double ups/big tournaments/heads up games." Which is to say, "how do I play daily fantasy football?" Well, that might be an oversimplification. But the feeling behind it is sincere - daily fantasy football is one of the most complex of all of the DFS contests because analyzing each position is an endeavor entirely unto itself. While there is some overlap, trying to figure out a good QB AND a good RB - to say nothing of a solid tight end or defense - requires analyzing all different kinds of data. This year, we're going to take selections out of our free NFL eBook and take an even deeper dive into how we go about picking players at each position for each kind of contest. Today, we're going to get started at the top - Quarterback. We hope you enjoy! In case you didn’t notice, on Saturday we released our brand new NFL DFS suite of tools including full projections, optimal NFL lineups and Player Lab which includes filters to help you create NFL lineups for FanDuel and DraftKings. It’s a robust set of tools; well beyond anything we’ve ever had and something we feel will help our users *ahem* tackle the NFL season. Using tools like these for the NFL season is crucial and you can grab a free 2 WEEK trial to test out yourself. START YOUR FREE 2 WEEK TRIAL! FINDING GOOD DAILY FANTASY QUARTERBACKS Finding a great daily fantasy quarterback can mean a lot of different things, because there is a huge difference in what our goals are across different contest types. Do we want to target a quarterback who is a known commodity - a steady, week-in-week-out guy who is priced pretty much fairly, with a high floor and a lowish ceiling? Do we want to try and shoot the moon, taking a QB and WR pair that's very erratic, but has high upside? Do we want to spend up for safety at quarterback, or go cheap at quarterback to spend up elsewhere? It's truly a dilemma. Quarterbacks - the most predictable position in fantasy football Quarterback, thankfully, is one of the more projectable positions in daily fantasy football. That's not to say there's ever a "sure thing" when it comes to projecting athletic performance, but quarterbacks provide at least some sanity in that regard. Since every play starts with the quarterback touching the ball, he has the opportunity to "get to the long run" in terms of sample sizes...

DFSR's Daily Fantasy NFL Podcast - DFS Quarterback Strategy 8/25/16 DFSR's Doug Norrie and James Davis take a deep dive look at rostering QB's in DFS for FanDuel and DraftKings. By far the "safest" position on the field, we simply cannot roster the most expensive quarterbacks and move on. James and Doug discuss the position as a whole and what numbers are correlated to fantasy success on a week-to-week basis. Some relevant factors include Vegas implied totals, spreads, opposing team pace and much more. This is the first part in the positional primer series running from now until the beginning of the season. Subscribe to this podcast on...

DFSR's Daily Fantasy NFL Podcast - BlogTalkRadio Expert's League Draft DFSR's Doug Norrie joins the Blog Talk Radio expert's NFL draft. This is the draft breakdown with other hosts from the Blog Talk Radio Fantasy Sports Network. Hosted by Jay "PodVader" Soderbergh, the BTR expert's league pits host against host. Doug represented DFSR and breaks down some of his picks along the way. You'll also get to hear hosts from Razzball, Fantasy Sharks, Her Fantasy Football and more. They draft a 10-team ESP standard league and discuss each pick. The DFSR crew kicks it off with Adrian Peterson at six. Listen to hear the whole draft. Subscribe to this podcast on...

NFL's New Injury Policy: The Effect on DFS In case you didn’t notice, on Saturday we released our brand new NFL DFS suite of tools including full projections, optimal NFL lineups and Player Lab which includes filters to help you create NFL lineups for FanDuel and DraftKings. It’s a robust set of tools; well beyond anything we’ve ever had and something we feel will help our users *ahem* tackle the NFL season. Using tools like these for the NFL season is crucial and you can grab a free 2 WEEK trial to test out yourself. START YOUR FREE 2 WEEK TRIAL! In the first run of our projections this is the optimal lineup our system is spitting out: This week the NFL released new rules concerning injury notifications for teams. The league’s done away with the “Probable” tag that used to accompany Tom Brady every week (and a bunch of other guys as well). A player listed as Probable was a comforting reassurance dude would suit up and take the field Sunday (or Monday or Thursday). But since so many Probable players were playing (95%+) the NFL in their infinite wisdom said, “Screw it, we don’t need that label anymore. Let’s just do ‘Questionable’ and ‘Probable’.” All well and good right? Wrong. The Questionable tag means a player is 50-50 to play the game and the Doubtful tag means he’s 90% to sit it out. The NFL keeps track of these percentages for teams to make sure they’re playing on the up and up with their injury designations. But here’s the thing: teams only need to have a 50-50 conversion on Questionable players in the aggregate. The NFL (I believe) isn’t looking at individual test cases. All of those guys who were probable (or a lot of them) will likely get a Q tag to even out the numbers with the Doubtfuls. More Doubtfuls will become Questionables. See where I'm going with this? I could see this easily becoming some numbers game among the teams as they look to withhold as much injury information as possible from the opponent. And sure, maybe I'm channeling my inner Chicken Little here, but it's just in each team's best interest to be open with information. So where does that leave us DFS’ers? In the dark. In the (almost) pitch black dark. The one thing we could (sort of) count on with the NFL, as opposed to say the NBA, was how forthright teams were concerning injuries. For the most part (though not completely) we headed into at least Sunday lineup lock all on an even information plane. We essentially knew who was playing and who was sitting. It’s what made setting NFL lineups, from...

Weekly Fantasy Football Optimal Lineup Week 1 9/11/16 - First Look In case you didn’t notice, on Saturday we released our brand new NFL DFS suite of tools including full projections, optimal NFL lineups and Player Lab which includes filters to help you create NFL lineups for FanDuel and DraftKings. It’s a robust set of tools; well beyond anything we’ve ever had and something we feel will help our users *ahem* tackle the NFL season. Using tools like these for the NFL season is crucial and you can grab a free 2 WEEK trial to test out yourself. START YOUR FREE 2 WEEK TRIAL! In the first run of our projections this is the optimal lineup our system is spitting out: Look, I’m nearly positive this will not be the optimal lineup come Week One of the 2016 NFL season (only a short three weeks away). But we can at least start looking to see if this lineup is passing the sniff test and what might stand to change as we get close to the first Sunday of NFL. I’ll go player by player and quickly run through how confident I am with playing him if the season were to start tomorrow (and man I wish it did).   Russell Wilson From a cash game perspective, this play makes total sense. The Seahawks are opening at a -10 over Miami and Wilson’s coming off a terrific fourth season. Two specific numbers give Russell such a fantastic floor for cash games. He was incredibly efficient last season, completing passes at more than a 68% clip (third in the league) and 553 rushing yards (3rd among quarterbacks). Efficiency through the air and the ability to pump out yards on the ground allows Wilson “safe” points in a couple of different game scripts. Though the Seahawks are early favorites, I get less worried about the blowout scenario for Wilson simply because he A: needs to play a big part in it to start and B: is less reliant on having to do one specific thing to hit value.   Lamar Miller Latavius Murray Both of these strike me as a bit speculative though for different reasons. Miller leaves the Miami Dolphins where many felt he was under-utilized and enters a situation in Houston where all signs point to him being the bell cow. If this narrative holds true then he’s a fantastic value. Chicago ranked 32nd in adjusted DVOA against the run last season and the Texans open as a -4 favorite. This is the exact situation we are looking for in a running back: his team is favored against a weaker defense. The only question is whether Lamar ends up taking the...