As the calendar flips to September, many DFS players will scrap Daily Fantasy Baseball in favor of Daily Fantasy Football. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, and is perhaps something you should consider.
Why? Because there are plenty of reasons why you should have an easier time winning in Daily Fantasy Football than in Daily Fantasy Baseball.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at seven of them.
More Time to Research Each Week
When dealing with DFS Baseball, you rarely get more than a 12 to 18-hour window from the end of one set of games to the beginning of the next set. While it’s true that most DFS sites post the next day’s slate of games at the beginning of the previous day’s games, there’s still less than a 24-hour window for you—or anyone else—to do your research on player values and fill lineups.
With football, you have at least three days between sets of games, starting from the end of the Monday night game until the beginning of the Thursday night game.
One QB Easier to Track Than Five Starting Pitchers
If you’re diligent, you can learn more and more about quarterbacks, a very important piece to the DFS puzzle, since there are generally only 32 of them to know about from week to week. In baseball, however, you’re looking at a minimum of five starting pitchers for 30 teams (150 SPs), and that’s not even including all of the spot starters and minor-leaguers coming up into the rotation.
Luck Not Affected By Weather as Much
Obviously, Andrew Luck isn’t affected by weather—he plays in a dome for all home games! But I’m actually referring to regular ol’ luck. Lady luck. The kind of luck that kills your Daily Fantasy Baseball lineup because a random storm swoops in and cuts your starting pitcher’s day off at just three innings pitched.
Football players play through most weather situations outside of major lightning storms or blizzards. But those delays usually don’t affect Fantasy play the way a delay affects Fantasy Baseball play.
Plus, bad weather can actually be beneficial to many offensive players, because the offensive player knows where he is going on every single play, so his cuts are sharper, even in inclement weather. A defensive back, for instance, isn’t going to be able to stay as close to a wide receiver after a sharp cut, and a linebacker will have a tougher time tackling a juking tailback.
More Players = More Unprepared Players
For every Fantasy Baseball player, there are four Fantasy Football players. That stat holds true for yearly leagues, and as Daily Fantasy Football continues to grow, millions of more seasonal players join the DFS games.
Consider that this NFL season, there will be more Daily Fantasy Football players than at any point in history, and you realize that a lot of new players are jumping aboard every week.
That’s very good news for anyone that has already learned the differences between Daily Fantasy Football and traditional yearly leagues. They’ll be easy prey for you, at least in the early going.
Smaller Stacks Changes the Variance
In Daily Fantasy Baseball, your stacks are usually trios, quadruplets and quintuplets, depending on which sites you play on. You might have a leadoff hitter, followed by the two- and three-hitter, with the cleanup man behind all of them. That gives you the greatest chances of compounding any of the points each of those players puts up. If the first two batters get on base and the three-hitter hits a single to score one of them, then that one swing essentially adds Fantasy points because of the runs scored from his teammates. And a home run by the clean-up hitter means everyone tallies extra points because of his one swing.
Stacks in Daily Fantasy Football, however, are shorter—usually just a pairing or a trio, like a quarterback and wide receiver, maybe with the Fantasy kicker thrown in to boot (literally). So one touchdown pass can score you double the points for two players, basically, with an added extra point by your kicker.
The fact you can only use mini-stacks means you’ll have to look elsewhere to fill your other spots, which means there’s likely more variance for Daily Fantasy Football tournaments and leagues. More variance is your friend, as you can set your team apart from others by choosing the right sleepers.
Baseball Experts are Real
When you read articles based on Daily Fantasy Baseball, you can be assured that most experts are people that study the game really well. They know home/road splits, and they know righty/lefty splits. They understand peaks and valleys in a player’s 162-game season. They know xFIP, ISO, BABIP, wOBA and LOB%.
For Daily Fantasy Football, you’ll hear experts say stuff like, “This player has good body lean” and “this player has game speed,” and other nonsensical terms. These are often writers that like football, watch football, but have gotten caught up in the talking-head coach speak that has no real value in DFS play.
So if you can filter out the good from the bad Fantasy Football writers, then you’ll have a huge leg up on your competition that’s unable to filter out the noise.
More Athletes Score Bigger Points in Football
In Daily Fantasy Baseball, it’s more likely than not that a hitter is going to score one or fewer points (reaching base once or twice in four or five at-bats equals just a couple points). Sure, a starting pitcher is going to have a chance at 20-plus points, but the other eight lineup spots have to defy the odds to come close to just eight Fantasy points.
In Daily Fantasy Football, rarely is someone posting negative points (outside of a defense here or there), unlike in Daily Fantasy Baseball. But the rest of the players are going to score more points than in baseball, and there’s not just ONE position that’s expected to carry the entire team, like a starting pitcher.
The average Fantasy Football player scored 7.5 points per contest last year—that includes skill positions, kickers and defenses. The minimum score you want to target in FanDuel 50/50 Football games is 111.21. That means each player scores on average about 6.7 percent of the minimum score to cash in a 50/50.
The average Fantasy Baseball hitter scored 1.89 points per contest through midsummer. The minimum score you want to target in FanDuel 50/50 Baseball games is 31.32. That means each hitter scores on average about 6.0 percent of the minimum score to cash in a 50/50. Pitchers, meanwhile, are responsible for about 26.2 percent of what you need to score in 50/50 games. Being able to piece together successful hitters with lower averages is tougher than putting together successful football players with a higher percentage of 50/50-game-winning ability.