Game Info
Not a lot of Falcons/Saints games get a ton of interest, but this is a pretty sweet matchup for fantasy purposes.
There are a few different ways to calculate “pace”, but whichever one you use, you’ll see the Saints as the fastest team in the league. My dashboard uses play clock seconds per play. The Saints average just 25 seconds taken off the clock per play run, the fastest in football. The Saints move quick, and with Tyler Shough as a legitimate QB for them now, that creates a lot of scoring.
The Falcons got Michael Penix back last week and went off. They put up 7.4 yards per play, the second-most in the league last week. It’s a much improved team as they can now reliably get the ball in the hands of Bijan Robinson and Drake London.
I’d like to pump the brakes a bit here. Michael Penix was great last week (9.85 YPA, +0.37 EPA), but that is not what we saw from him last year. He took advantage of a bad Packers team last week and went for 256 yards. This isn’t the same matchup. I’m not saying it’s a really tough one, and you can see the high total, but the point is just that it’s a one-game sample from Penix this year that is getting the markets excited. He might still suck.
Atlanta’s defense has been stout. Just 4.8 yards per play allowed so far, one of the best marks in the league. The Saints have been in a couple shootouts, but their defense has been fine on a per-play basis (5.1 yards per play, which is right at the league average).
The Saints are without Travis Etienne now, which puts the ball into the hands of Alvin Kamara and Kendre Miller. Those are two inefficient rushers. Kamara has averaged 2.8 yards per rush and has all of 12 yards on six catches. Miller wasn’t even active in week two, which speaks to how they view him a bit, and he’s averaged 3.4 yards per carry with five receiving yards on two catches (3 targets). So a lot of this will be on the shoulders of Tyler Shough, who has just a +0.04 EPA this year and four turnovers.
So we have:
Doubts about Michael Penix
Doubts about the Saints run game
I’m on the UNDER 47.5 on Polymarket. And I have a couple of MLB plays in the MLB DW squad as well for tonight. Join that squad here for free.
But let’s get a handle on the DraftKings Showdown and go for a big score.
Book-Based Projections
I have a fancy schmancy Python scripts that takes the betting lines and turns them into projections. I’ve used these a lot this year for fantasy football decisions. It’s a pretty good approach, in my opinion, since the books have a lot on the line to get their lines pretty accurate. It should be stated that the books intention is not to get the numbers right, but to get the money evenly split on either side. But those two things mostly go together. Here’s what we have:
You can get those for every game and every (available) player on the NFL app, if you’re a paid sub here, you have the password for that in the Resource Glossary.
Falcons Side
Penix targets last week:
Drake London 10
Jahan Dotson 3
Zachariah Branch 2
Olamide Zaccheaus 2
Kyle Pitts 2
Bijan Robinson 2
Austin Hooper 2
So it’s Drake London and then a bunch of “who is that again?”
They ran the ball at a -3% PROE last week and gave Robinson 29 carries and two targets. It’s Bijan on the ground and London threw the air. Very, very concentrated stuff when Penix has been in there for this Falcons team, even dating back to last year.
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