Photo: Joe Rondone, USA Today Sports

When making difficult starting lineup decisions in the fantasy playoffs, one of the key angles to consider is how favorable the player's matchup is. In this article, we will provide you with the numbers and tools you need to help make those decisions.

The first way to judge the difficulty of an offensive player's matchup is to take a team-level view. A great way to do this is to compare each team's Week 15 team total (calculated from consensus lines and game totals from the top sportsbooks) to the team's performance in the rest of the 2023 season.

In the table below, you can see how many points each team is expected to score in Week 15 (Team Total) compared to how many points each team has averaged through the first 14 weeks (Season Avg.). The difference between these two numbers divided by the team's season average provides us with a strong baseline number (Weekly Boost) to judge how favorable the game environment and matchup is for our offensive players. For example, the Rams are 7.0-point favorites against the Commanders in a game with a total of 49. This means the Rams implied team total for Week 15 is 28.0 points. Los Angeles has averaged 23.0 points through the first 14 weeks. This means the Rams are projected to score 21.7% more points than normal (Weekly Boost), giving them one of the top matchups of Week 15.

Starting from a team level is a great start to our strength of schedule analysis, but we will also want to dive deeper and explore how each team's defense has performed against each position. For example, we know the Rams have a great matchup against the Commanders (21.7% Week 15 scoring boost), but how favorable is that matchup for each position? We can answer that question by looking at normalized positional defense. Normalized fantasy defense compares how many fantasy points each defense has allowed to opposing position groups compared to how those position groups would have fared against an average defense. Since Week 10, the Commanders defense has given up 8.54 more fantasy points per game (0.5 PPR) to opposing running backs than an average defense would have. If you have Kyren Williams, you want him in your lineup.

Custom Analysis

For PRO-level or above subscribers, the tool below allows you to do your own strength of schedule analysis. You can choose the scoring format of interest (Standard, 0.5 PPR, or PPR) and which time frame you want to look at by changing the Starting Week.