Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Funneling Fantasy Points: Week 15

CeeDee Lamb

CeeDee Lamb

Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports

It’s NFL season and that means you’ve got a chance at $100,000 with Sunday Night 7. Predict what will happen on Sunday Night Football and watch along to see if you’ll be the next big winner. Click here to get started with the NBC Sports Predictor app.

We want to know -- we need to know -- how defenses are being attacked.

Though it won’t translate perfectly from week to week, understanding which NFL defenses qualify as run funnels and which are pass funnels can and should change the way we create our daily fantasy lineups. Is a team’s stalwart run defense forcing opponents to the air at a remarkable rate? How about secondaries so dominant (or teams so bad) that opposing offenses are turning to the run more often than usual?

In this space, I’ll highlight which players may benefit from squaring off against a run funnel or pass funnel defense in a given week, along with run-back options on the opposing team.

Analyzing pass and run funnel defenses can often generate DFS stacking ideas, both team stacks and game stacks. I’ll highlight stacking plays -- for DFS tournament purposes -- where I see fit. I’ve found evaluating run and pass funnels is an excellent starting point for exploiting matchups and crafting correlated lineups. A tightly correlated DFS roster means you have to get less right, a welcoming prospect in a wildly difficult game.

I’m going to approach this column a little differently this week and going forward. Instead of painstaking deep dives citing a dozen metrics for every player, I’m going to profile matchups against the NFL’s three or four most extreme pass funnel and run funnel defenses, highlighting which players could benefit from their team leaning into the pass or the ground game. I hope that provides some more thought material for you, a DFS thought leader.

Jaguars (+4) vs. Cowboys
Cowboys implied total: 26
Jaguars implied total: 22

I wrote about an unspeakable Texans stack last week in their game against a quietly vulnerable Dallas defense. And guess what? It kinda worked. Dameon Pierce had a decent day (78 yards and a touchdown) before injuring his ankle and Chris Moore blew away our highest expectations with 124 yards on ten receptions.

We’re going back to the proverbial well, folks (that’s what they call it, the well?). Travis Etienne will have next to no rostership in Week 15 after a month of depressingly ineffective play and precious little pass game involvement. Etienne is still seeing plenty of opportunity though -- he has 61 percent of the team’s rushes over the past five games. That puts him in play as a volatile option against the Cowboys, the NFL’s most extreme run funnel defense. Without exception, teams lean on the run game against Dallas, even when Dak Prescott and company get out to a big lead. Neutral game script could supercharge Etienne’s Week 15 opportunity.

If this game is going to go off, at least two of Zay Jones, Christian Kirk, and Evan Engram are in play. Engram will probably have too much rostership for my liking after his out-of-body Week 15 performance against the Titans. Dallas has been nails against tight ends all season, allowing the third lowest yards per reception to the position. The Cowboys have given up the fifth fewest yards to tight ends in 2022.

Kirk will probably have far less rostership in Week 15 tournaments because Jones’ price allows for more lineup flexibility. We’ve seen Dallas’ secondary struggle against opposing slot guys, including Chris Moore in Week 14, Kalif Raymond in Week 7 (Amon-Ra St. Brown was injured), and Cooper Kupp in Week 5. Kirk, of course, is Jacksonville’s primary slot receiver.

Prescott and the Dallas passing attack are highly appealing this week against a Jaguars defense that ranks as the NFL’s sixth most extreme pass funnel. Just last week, we saw the run-first Titans log 39 pass attempts against these Jags. A down Week 14 against Houston could make CeeDee Lamb under-rostered option this week. Fifth in receiver expected fantasy points this season, Lamb could shred a Jacksonville coverage unit graded by Pro Football Focus as the league’s third worst.

The Jags allow the ninth highest rate of positive pass plays; only five teams give up a higher EPA per drop back. Lamb, quietly, is in an eruption spot unless the Cowboys get out to a massive lead via the run game and take the air out of the ball.

A back-and-forth affair would put Dalton Schultz and Michael Gallup -- who has a hefty 29 percent of the Cowboys’ air yards since Week 10 -- firmly in play alongside Prescott.

Bears (+9) vs. Eagles
Eagles implied total: 28.75
Bears implied total: 19.75

There are a bunch of chalky ways to attack this game, and not all of them are hateful in even the largest field Week 15 tournaments. Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, and DeVonta Smith? Yep. Hurts and one receiver along with Dallas Goedert? Sure. Justin Fields with Chase Claypool and/or Cole Kmet in what will likely be lots of negative script? Absolutely.

The pivot option in this game -- what the zoomers are calling a “potential barn burner” -- is Miles Sanders, whose lack of pass game opportunity and production makes him game script sensitive. Against Chicago, that shouldn’t be a problem. The Bears defense, allowing the highest EPA per play, the eighth highest EPA per rush, and the sixth highest rate of long rushes, can’t stop anyone on the ground or through the air.

The flexible Philly offense -- which shifts toward the pass or the run depending on their opponent’s weakness -- can do whatever it wants this week.

If they choose to bludgeon Chicago via the rush, Sanders could see upwards of 20 carries, as he did in the team’s Week 14 blowout win over New York (17 carries for 144 yards and two scores). The Bears, after all, are the league’s fourth most extreme run funnel defense. Nearly 42 percent of yardage gained against the Bears this year has come on the ground, the NFL’s fourth highest rate.

If you can’t jam Hurts into your lineup or want to fade him because he might be chalky, shift to Sanders alongside Fields and (maybe) one of his pass catchers.

Vikings (-4) vs. Colts
Vikings implied total: 26.25
Colts implied total: 22.25

I couldn’t resist a little Saturday slate analysis. The ideas here within will test the boundaries of your ability not to puke while making large-field DFS lineups. We are stacking Colts and we’re stacking them high, folks.

Minnesota is the league’s fourth most extreme pass funnel defense through Week 14; 71.2 percent of the yardage gained against the Vikings this year have come via the pass, the third highest rate in the NFL. If the Colts are going to move the ball and keep up with Kirk Cousins and Justin Jefferson, they’re going to have to do so through the air.

That makes Matt Ryan a potentially high-volume, low-cost DFS play. A 6.7 adjusted yards per attempt means Ryan will require upwards of 40 attempts to get there for our purposes. This game sets up well for such an outcome.

Jonathan Taylor will probably be a low-rostered option this week. He’s involved enough in the Indy passing game -- he has three receptions in each of his past three outings -- to correlate with a high-yardage day with Ryan. Taylor has played 90 percent of the team’s snaps since Nyheim Hines departed for Buffalo.

But as usual, we want to target outside receivers against a Minnesota secondary that has struggled all year against boundary guys. It’s why Alec Pierce is one of my favorite DFS options of the week, both for his low price point and his potential to thrive in a good scoring environment (this game has the second highest total of Week 15). Pierce has run 93 percent of his routes from out wide, and saw increased routes and targets in the Colts’ Week 13 demolition at the hands of the Cowboys. A growing role for the explosive rookie would make sense in the season’s final stretch. Pierce, leading all Colts pass catchers with 12.7 air yards per target, is a must-play if you’re stacking this game.

Michael Pittman, running 75 percent of his routes from outside, is another sensible option alongside Ryan. Leading all Colts pass catchers in yards per route run but seeing a low 6.9 average depth of target, Pittman would need to catch a bunch of short targets to make it worth your while.

Jefferson and/or T.J. Hockensen would need to be in any Colts-Vikings game stack. Dalvin Cook, facing the league’s sixth most extreme run funnel defense, would make for a nice contrarian stacking partner with Ryan and two of his pass catchers. Only four defenses have allowed a higher rushing success rate than the Colts since Week 10.