Shawn Siegele breaks down every relevant player from the NFL Divisional Round and helps you plot strategy for the FFPC Playoff Challenge 2.
The Wild Card weekend gave us a fantasy football bash for the ages, almost as though a year’s worth of excitement had been saved for the postseason.
For participants in the FFPC and Underdog playoff contests, the intensity was ratcheted up a notch by fantasy fever. Our strategy sessions hit on the first weekend, and we’ve built more Underdog teams for the new round of drafts.
In today’s piece, I’m going to take a quick look back at the Wild Card round through the lens of FFPC tournaments before presenting 3,000 words on the Divisional Round. I’ll be using the Game Level Similarity Projections, Advanced Team Stat Explorer, Passing Matchup Rater, Stealing Signals tool, Game Splits app, Strength-of-Schedule Streamer, NFL Stat Explorer, NFL Pace tool, and Team Splits app in an attempt to build similarly productive teams this week.
If you’re playing a different contest, these team-by-team notes should help for those tournaments and DFS as well.
The FFPC Playoff Eruption
One of my favorite parts of working in the fantasy industry is co-managing teams with some of the brightest minds in football. At the $200 level, I played nine teams and got to pick the brains of Ben Gretch, Colm Kelly, and Conor O’Driscoll to create the lineups. I also played four additional $35 level teams with Colm and Bjorn Yang-Vaernet.
Four of the nine FFPC teams are in the top 500 (out of 7,800) and two of the four FPC teams are in the top 400 (out of 16,000).
The results boil down to a combination of two basic plays:
- T.J. Hockenson with Saquon Barkley in a Giants upset.
- D.K. Metcalf as potentially the highest-scoring player among eliminated teams.
Metcalf ranked second on the week in air yards (179) and fourth after the catch (45), finding the end zone twice for 35.6 fantasy points. Barkley paired two rushing TDs with five receptions for 56 yards, easily leading the RB position with 27.9. Meanwhile, Hockenson’s 10 receptions translated into 15 TE Premium points, and he finished with the third-most points from any flex-eligible player.
These were taken from the FFPC Blueprint, a playoff approach built with insights from the tools. The contest now shifts for Playoff 2, and our strategy must reflect the new environment as we enter the Divisional Round.
