Hello to my people who like the fantasy football! We have a very strange Wednesday night season opener, which means it is SHOWDOWN TIME.
Let me set the groundwork here, first. You haven’t seen anything from me about fantasy football yet, but it starts this week.
What I have:
NFL Data Tableau Dashboard
This is probably the most useful thing I offer. It has the stats you want and gives you a fantastic research hub all in one place. That will be published tomorrow after we get this game’s data.
NFL STREAMLIT APP
This thing has player grades that I programmed last year, it grades and ranks players based on some math I put together using the stats I think are the most important.
I also have an Expected Fantasy Points model, which is very useful. That looks at the opportunities each player has and gives you their expected value for each game. Great way to identify over-performers and under-performers, and I will talk a lot about those numbers in my write-ups.
WEEKLY NFL PROJECTIONS
These are still coming together. I do not hype up the projections. They are not like my MLB projections. Basically I’m just aggregating from other free systems that are out there with some tweaks I’ve made through the years. If you really want solid NFL projections, I would point you to one of the more legitimate sources like Establish The Run or Fantasy Points. I have those projections for my own use, but obviously I cannot share them to other people since I’d be effectively selling someone else’s work. Not going to do that.
I’m not even 100% sure I’ll have stuff ready to go for week one, but by week two we’ll have something to use.
BOOK-BASED PROJECTIONS
I developed this last year because I thought it was a good idea. There are a ton of NFL player props out there, and with an API and some math, we can turn those into projections. So if a QB is over 250.5 yards at -110, you can turn that into a projection of 245 passing yards or so. Repeat that process with running backs and receivers and you have some projections.
Showdown and Main Slate Write-Ups
This stuff is still second priority to baseball, and I’m also very limited in what I can analyze without at least a couple of games worth of data. I will get short articles out for the showdowns tonight, tomorrow, and Monday, and there will be some form of a week one slate preview, but again, I’m very limited in what I can use to research right now, so it won’t be my most useful or best work.
Basically I’m just trying to say that this is not the same quality as my baseball stuff. I don’t claim to be one of the best or more helpful fantasy football guys. I do it because it’s fun for me, I often don’t know what to do with myself with no baseball, and it helps me keep some subscribers in the winter.
So that’s the setup for this season. Let’s do what we can on this showdown tonight.
Patriots at Seahawks
Game Environment
The game environment doesn’t matter much for showdown, because there’s only one game. A 44.5-point total would not be attractive to us on a main slate.
We have implied totals for each game. That comes straight from the sports book. A 44.5-point total with the Seahawks a three-point favorite turns into 23.75 implied points for the Seahawks and 20.75 for the Patriots.
Because 23.75+20.75=44.5. So that’s the game total and the spread both taken into account. Again, much more useful on multi-game slates.
Let’s look at how these offenses played last year:
The Seahawks liked to run the ball last year with a -7.3 PROE%.
WHAT IS PROE%
That is pass rate over expectation. Every down and distance has an expected pass or run rate. 3rd and inches, you expect a run. 3rd and 6, you expect a pass. You get it.
So we see what the teams did on each play and compare that with what was expected from an “average” offense, and that gives us a good feel for their offensive philosophy.
Average should be 0%, but the league likes to run more lately than it did in the past when the models were being trained, so you’ll see a lot of teams below zero here until those models get re-trained (which I assume they would have been this offseason, we’ll see if that’s the case in the 2026 data that comes through).
The Patriots were slightly pass-heavy, but they’re right in the middle of the pack. They can do both, and obviously they had a lot of success last year since they’re playing in this Super Bowl rematch on Opening night.
A three-point spread implies that the teams are evenly matched. The home team is typically given three points for being the home team.
The expectation then is a close game, and that’s relevant for DFS. We like to take passing game pieces from big underdogs, because they’re likely to be playing high-paced catchup late in the game. The reverse is true with big favorites - their RBs will typically get more work as they try to run down the clock in the fourth quarter. But there’s no angle like that for this game with that three-point spread.
The rosters have changed a bit in both cases. Two big changes on both offenses.
SEAHAWKS RUN GAME
The Seahawks let Kenneth Walker go, replacing him with rookie Jadarian Price. A big point to make is that Zach Charbonnet is starting the year on the IR. Charbonnet takes a lot of pass-down snaps and goalline work, but he’s out of Price’s way for the beginning of this season. We think they plan to use George Holani on pass downs. From what I’ve seen and read, nobody thinks Price is a three-down back. We also have Emanuel Wilson on the roster. You would think Price would get the goalline carries, but we just don’t know what they’ll do early on. Oftentimes you see rookie RBs get eased into it.
PATRIOTS PASS GAME
It’s a new receiving core for the Patriots. It’s AJ Brown and Romeo Doubs as the 1-2 now for them. That’s an upgrade to the wide receiver room, and with Drake Maye finishing runner-up in MVP voting last year, it’s reasonable to think they could lean on his arm even more this year.
It’s also very influential that TreVeyon Henderson isn’t playing in this one. That pushes more work to Rhamondre Stevenson, who is thusly underpriced and will certainly be in the optimal lineup for this showdown.
Book Based Projections
We are limited in the players we project with the gambling lines, because we don’t get lines for the tertiary options in each offense. We don’t have anything for George Holani, for example, so I can’t make a projection for him.
Here’s what we have for the main pieces of the Patriots offense.
Drake Maye: 32 att, 232 yds, 0.7 int, 1.4 pass td, 25.6 rush yds, 0.2 rush td
Rhamondre Stevenson: 15.5 att, 58 yds, 3.4 rec, 24 rec yds, 0.62 td
AJ Brown: 5.3 rec, 63 yds, 0.47 td
Romeo Doubs: 3.4 rec, 37 yds, 0.29 td
Hunter Henry: 3.2 rec, 34 yds, 0.3 td
DeMario Douglas: 2.2 rec, 20.1 yds, 0.15 td
Any decent QB who runs with the ball is a must-play in Showdown. QBs have the highest floors by far. They don’t have the highest ceilings, but most optimal showdown builds put both QBs in there since the median projection will usually lead the team.
Drake Maye is not a guy you fade in the Showdown. He is implied here for 17.9 fantasy points.
Rhamonde Stevenson will have to stay on the field for some extra third downs with Henderson out, and he’s the “base down” back in the first place. So 15+ touches should happen as long as this game doesn’t get wildly out of hand in the Seahawks favor.
AJ Brown is an unknown with a new team, but we can feel pretty good about him being featured. He’s not been the highest-floor stud WR in the league the last few years, but that could change in a new offense. The Eagles loved to play slow, run the ball, and they scored a ton of rushing TDs with that tush push thing going on. It’s an upgraded spot for Brown, and the ceiling is super high on him as always.
Moving over to the Seahawks:
Sam Darnold: 30 att, 229 yds, 0.7 int, 2.5 rush, 5.3 yds, 0.1 rush td
Jadarian Price: 12.5 att, 53 yds, 1 rec, 7.9 yds, 0.54 td
Smith-Njigba: 6.5 rec, 83 yds, 0.54 td
Rashid Shaheed: 2.6 rec, 32 yds, 0.27 td
AJ Barner: 3 rec, 25 yds, 0.31 td
Cooper Kupp: 2.9 rec, 29 yds, 0.35 td
Last year’s Seahawks stats sorted by xFP:
It was the JSN show. He had a ridiculous 36% target share, a 33.2% target per route run rate, and he averaged 3.74 yards per route run. He was the best wide receiver in the league.
I think a lot of that has to regress this year, but they didn’t bring anybody else in to help out. Cooper Kupp is another year older; Rashid Shaheed, in his career, has been a deep-ball guy who struggles to see more than 3-4 targets per game.
The Seahawks’ passing game is pretty easy to figure out. They won’t throw a ton usually, but when they do - it’s going to JSN along with a couple of deep balls and designed runs to Shaheed through the game.
The running back situation is tougher to figure out. We don’t know how they’ll handle Price, but it’s clear that he’s not projecting super well with the information we currently have.
The Projection Optimal
I don’t want to go too far here and get everybody thinking that there’s easy cash out there for us tonight. BUT, I have cashed the first few main showdowns every single year by playing the optimal lineup with the projections in those huge tournaments.
We have a million dollar contest tonight:
That big prize pool but the hype of a new season gets 132,000 lineups into it. The people who are going for first place and know what they’re doing are extremely focused on not having highly duplicated lineups. So they get weird with it.
The projected optimal lineup gets to the cash line with ease, or at least it has every opening night for as long as I’ve done this (probably 4-5 years). And it makes sense that it would. It’s a high-floor lineup that gets as many of the best players into it as is possible to afford.
You probably can’t even 4x your money with the optimal lineup. It will be duplicated hundreds of times. There's legitimately a 0% chance that, with this lineup, I’ll play winning the million or even winning more than $100 or so on the $20 entry. But the chances of turning that $20 into $40 are very, very high.
But I’m going to keep it behind the paywall! Sign up today for $11.99/month to get all of the fantasy football stuff this year.