Photo: Steve Mitchell, USA Today Sports

Introduction

Monkey Knife Fight is one of the fastest growing daily fantasy sites and offers a unique product that is a lot of fun. There are no salary caps and you do not have to compete against DFS pros. Instead, you simply find the combination of player props you are most confident in and pick more or less . Since each combination (two or more players) are playing in the same game, we can use correlation to our advantage. For example, if we know that one starting quarterback throws for more yards than projected, the opposing quarterback is more likely to throw for more yards also.

In this weekly article, we will count down the five best props of the week.

Week 1 Note

The deeper we get into the season, the more picking prop winners becomes a game of grinding the data. In Week 1, the process is much different. Sure, we can look back at 2020 stats to get some baselines to work off of. However, teams change too much every season to take too much from past numbers. Instead, Week 1 is when we need to read the tea leaves about expected player usage and relative team strengths. For those who have been paying close attention to all of the reports coming out of training camp, there can be an informational edge early in the season. We hope to exploit that advantage in Week 1.

5: Balanced Passing Offenses

Antonio Brown MORE than 58.5 Receiving Yards

Michael Gallup MORE than 51.5 Receiving Yards

• The angle here is a belief that the Dallas and Tampa Bay passing offenses both end up being extremely balanced, with each of the three starting wide receivers being productive. To put it differently, the prediction is that by midseason, we are projecting each of the three starting wide receivers on both teams for 60+ receiving yards.
• There is a strong argument that tonight’s game features the two best receiving corps in the league.

Tampa coach Bruce Arians on Amari Cooper, CeeDee Lamb, Michael Gallup: "It's a huge challenge. They're loaded, and they all do different things. I think that threesome might be the best. I'll argue that ours might be, too. It's a hell of a challenge when you have that many guys."

— Jon Machota (@jonmachota) September 5, 2021

• In the case of Antonio Brown, should we even feel comfortable labeling him as Tampa Bay’s WR3? Matt Waldman, who covered the Buccaneers throughout the preseason for the Footballguys training camp updates, regularly noted that Brown was the skill position player drawing the most rave reviews in camp.
• Despite coming in cold after basically missing a season and a half, Brown still averaged 60.3 receiving yards per game for Tampa Bay last season.
• Brown is likely to draw Anthony Brown in coverage, which is a favorable matchup for Tampa Bay considering that Brown was amongst the worst-graded corners in the league last season by Pro Football Focus.
• In the five games Dak Prescott started in 2020, Michael Gallup averaged 69.6 receiving yards per game.
• In 2019, Michael Gallup averaged 79.1 receiving yards per game with a median of 72 yards.