FanDuel advice: Artificially limiting the player pool
There are a lot of teams playing Sunday. Let’s knock a few of the options out before we even start.
Sam Sharpe-USA TODAY Sports
It’s Week 17 of the 2015 NFL season, which means all sorts of confusion when it comes to picking FanDuel fantasy football players. To top off all the “will they or won’t they” questions, it’s the one week of the year when all 32 teams play on Sunday, giving fantasy players even more ways to be wrong.
When faced with such a wealth of options, the best place to start is with eliminating players. Some matchups don’t matter for the playoffs or for the teams involved. Losing is one thing, but losing because you picked a running back who played one drive? That’s even worse.
Below, I’m running through some of the teams I consider stay-aways this week in FanDuel. With 32 teams playing, eliminating a few of them is a heck of a start.
Stay Away
Washington
At 8-7, the NFC East champions have nothing to play for Sunday other than finishing over .500. They're locked into the fourth seed in the NFC, will have a home playoff game and will be an underdog in the game. With two of the team's top offensive weapons carrying a lengthy injury history (DeSean Jackson, Jordan Reed) and another already dealing with an injury (Matt Jones), I wouldn't touch any of them in daily.
Key names to avoid: Kirk Cousins, DeSean Jackson, Jordan Reed
The top seed in the NFC is technically fluid. And both these teams start their games at the same time. But the Panthers shouldn't have any real problem with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and if it looks early like they'll have the game well in hand, there's no real reason for the Cardinals to push things against the Seattle Seahawks. The inverse is true as well; if Seattle jumps out to a big lead on Arizona, Carolina might let off the gas in the second half. There are a lot of weapons here, but you might only have a couple quarters with them.
Key names to avoid: Cam Newton, Carson Palmer, David Johnson, Ted Ginn Jr., Larry Fitzgerald, John Brown, Michael Floyd, Greg Olsen
The Pats do have stuff to play for this weekend. With a loss, they could find themselves the No. 2 seed in the AFC, on the road at Denver in a theoretical conference championship. And yes, they'd like to avoid that. But either way, the team has a first-round bye, and right now, they need to be more concerned with roster maintenance than with clinching home-field in a game that might not even happen. The Pats are as banged up as any team among skill players, and any quick lead could result in a shutdown of the big names. And that all assumes the returning-from-injury guys like Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola even play, which is no guarantee.
Key names to avoid: Tom Brady, James White, Julian Edelman, Danny Amendola, Rob Gronkowski
My favorite team is technically still alive for the playoffs, in the same way that I technically could still become a big-league pitcher if I learned to throw an expert knuckleball, if my hands got bigger, if I lost a bunch of weight. Realistically, the Colts are done. Even if they aren't, there's a decent chance their quarterback Sunday will be Stephen Morris, which I thought was an NAIA school or something. A Colts team that needed to compete would be in trouble this week; one that's as good as eliminated is horrifying.
Key names to avoid: Frank Gore, T.Y. Hilton, Donte Moncrief
I'm just thinking that this is going to be a team on a new coach with nothing left to play for. They're facing the Giants, who, while they also have nothing to play for, seem at least more likely to be the kind of team to play angry (after Week 16's abomination, and with Odell Beckham Jr. back and reason to be angry about the 2015 what-might-have-been season, the easy argument is that the Giants have something to prove). The Eagles have no reason to do anything more than show up, and frankly, losing Sunday means they play the Rams and Saints or Buccaneers next year, and not the Seahawks and Falcons.
Key names to avoid: Sam Bradford, DeMarco Murray, Ryan Mathews, Jordan Matthews, Zach Ertz
Those are just a few of the names. With 32 teams going, I knocked out six of them from anything I’d personally consider using this weekend, which is a start.
Another thought: With all the teams playing this weekend, this is perhaps the week of the season most-suited to playing early- or late-slate FanDuel games. I haven’t discussed them much, but FanDuel does offer games that include only the 1 p.m. games, only the late-afternoon games, or only games that aren’t the 1 p.m. game (so late-afternoon plus the prime-time). This week, there are 10 1 p.m. ET games, five 4:25 p.m. ET games, six non-1 p.m. ET games. Those fields are all big enough to justify limiting your field so as to keep from having to deal with the aforementioned billionty-seven players.
Good luck in Week 17.
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