5 Hidden stats to boost your daily fantasy football

5 Hidden stats to boost your daily fantasy football 2016 images

5 Hidden stats to boost your daily fantasy football 2016 images5 Hidden Stats to Help Kill it with your Daily Fantasy Football

Do you have ten hours a week to research every single fantasy football stat category?

Are you a super genius at math, capable of creating algorithms that even Albert Einstein would find confusing?

If you can’t do either of the above, then you need to find a better way to improve your odds on DraftKings, FanDuel, and Yahoo! DFS. It takes either a ton of time or a ton of brainpower to win serious money in daily fantasy sports.

If you’re short on both resources, maybe trying the road less traveled will help. At least in big money tournaments, where there is luck needed and some oddball picks to set you apart from the field of 100,000 other fantasy football nuts.

Some stats get overlooked when most guys are picking their lineups. It’s easy to check out who the best passer is week to week…congrats Matt Ryan. And it’s hard to miss the most dominant defense, Minnesota. So it’s easy to avoid picking offensive players going against the Vikes.

But there are other stat categories that can give you some good insights on how the games might go. Winning 50/50 DFS games or H2H matchups is about picking with the herd mostly. But to win a big tournament you need a different approach if you can’t spend $500 to enter a ton of lineups like some pro DFS guys do.

Thinking outside the box will give you a shot against the big boys who are playing on a entirely different level.

Just remember that anything can happen in a tournament. Rookies have won big money in the past.

finding those hidden stats to kill it with daily fantasy football

Here are five stat categories that may help you narrow the teams down from which you will draft from week to week.

5. Number of kick returns. If a guy leads the League in the number of kick returns he’s handled, what’s that say about his defense? They’re getting scored on early and often. A quick glance at this stat can let you know you need to consider players that are facing this defense, since touchdowns are how big fantasy point totals are racked up.

FYI, Carolina’s defense has fallen into the gutter in 2016. Just ask Ted Ginn, who is working overtime in the kick return game with 15 on the year.

4. Starting field position is a big deal. Shorter fields make an offense’s job much easier obviously. You can look at a hundred spreadsheets and not find a simpler stat that correlates to offensive production.

Give a second rate QB the ball at the 50 and his chances of finding the endzone are close to the same as Tom Brady starting at his own 20.

3. Anyone with a smidgen of fantasy knowledge knows to check the injury report each week. But it goes beyond looking for guys that may be listed as “out.” It’s a roll of the dice, but drafting a backup can pay off if the “questionable” starter only makes it for a few plays before calling it a day.

It helps to read between the lines of local beat writers’ injury news.

2. Time of possession. Easy stat right. Totally logical. If guys you roster are on the field more than the rest of the League, then they have more chances to score right?

A simple stat that most fantasy players never even notice.

1. You can look at a lot of offensive stats that will leave your head spinning. If you want to keep it simple, just look at which teams punt the most. That is a quick way to know which offenses to avoid altogether.

You don’t want a team that is giving the ball back to the other team on a regular basis.

At the same time, it would make total sense to pick offensive players from the opposing team that will be receiving all those punts.

Take a guess at who leads the NFL in number of punts this year? If you said Bradley Pinion or “whoever the hell punts for the Niners,” you were correct.

These five stat categories are no guarantee to riches. They are however, a good way to save time on research and make your lineups stray from the normal rosters that may win you just a few dollars.

Unusual stats can lead to weird picks that could cause something even weirder to happen, like snatching $50K from the DFS masses.