Injury Advantage

Course No. CFB 103

Injury Advantage

If you thought injuries were difficult to peg for professional sports…to quote a famous classic rock tune, “you ain't seen nothin' yet!". However, as I mentioned in the introduction of this course, the lack of information can easily swing to your advantage.

Most college teams don't have exclusive beat writers, and newspaper/media people rarely tweet out injury related information with the urgency and reliability that us daily fantasy players need. So what are we to do?

1. Be aware of injury situations, and don't risk it when you don't know. If a player is listed as questionable, and we haven't received word in just hours before kickoff, forget about it. There are plenty of players in college football player pools, it's usually not too difficult to find a similar player for an equivalent price tag … Just don't chance it, because college coaches can flat-out rest their players in situations like this (or give them a fraction of their workload).

2. Google is your friend. Okay, that may be a somewhat ominous, arbitrary sub-headline, but it's the truth in this situation. Whenever I need more clarity on an injury, depth chart, change in play-calling, I always do a google search on that player/team. The results usually yield links to local newspapers and smaller blogs relaying the information. This is exactly what you want … For instance, Nebraska playmaking WR Pierson-El got injured in fall camp. He factored to be a huge part of the offense, so figuring out where that production would go was of DFS significance. I did a google search, and came to a local newspaper that noted Alonzo Moore would fill his spot, and looked amazing within that role in their last scrimmage. Instantly, Moore was on my of sleeper picks. He went on to score 2 TD's in the season-opener. You have to put the work in, but little nuggets like that can go a long way.

3. Most people don't bother with backups. This provides a huge edge in tournaments, as most people won't think about playing the backup running back from Wyoming. However, if you do your research as outlined before, and feel confident in a certain players value, you could find yourself way ahead of the back with a low-owned sleeper pick filling in for an injured player.

The bottom line is: when the injury situation is unclear, don't risk it for majority of your action. It's possible to gain a nice advantage in tournaments by rolling out a prospective backup with an increased opportunity, but this is mostly unnecessary for the bulk of your action. There are a ton of similarly priced players in every college football slate, that finding a reasonable pivot shouldn't be much of a problem.