Week 8 Fantasy Football Defensive Matchup Exploitation: QB

With six teams on their bye week and quarterbacks like Sam Bradford and Nick Foles going down on Sunday, there’s a good chance you need to do some lineup tweaking to get through Week 8. There’s no better way to do that than by exploiting good defensive matchups and avoiding bad ones.

Luckily, the quarterbacks facing the toughest matchups aren’t particularly startable. Mike Glennon, Chad Henne, Ryan Tannehill, Jason Campbell, Thad Lewis, Alex Smith, Geno Smith, and whoever starts for St. Louis are all being thrown to the wolves this week and should be avoided if possible. Terrelle Pryor has a touch matchup as well, especially against a defense that has only allowed 51 rushing yards to quarterbacks all season. They’ve held Jake Locker and Geno Smith to under seven fantasy points and gave up 11.46 to Jay Cutler and 13 to Joe Flacco. They’ve ceded a couple of solid games to quarterbacks against Andy Dalton (16.2) and Matt Cassel (18.42) but if you can avoid starting Pryor, you should.

Tony Romo faces a Lions defense that was tough early on but has allowed at least 16 fantasy points to opposing quarterbacks in four straight games, including one to Brandon Weeden, so Romo should be started.

On the favorable side, Matt Stafford, Michael Vick, Eli Manning, Aaron Rodgers, Robert Griffin, Colin Kaepernick, Tom Brady, Cam Newton, and, of course, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees have excellent matchups and should all be started this week.

Carson Palmer and Christian Ponder have favorable matchups too but they’re only startable in 2QB leagues and as sneaky daily fantasy plays.

Let’s take a look at all of the fantasy football quarterback matchups in Week 8.

Browse Matchups by Position: QB – RB – WR – TE

Highly Unfavorable, Unfavorable, Neutral, Slightly Favorable, Favorable

*Values based on Yahoo standard scoring.

Browse Matchups by Position: QB – RB – WR – TE

Igor Derysh

Igor Derysh is Editor-at-Large at XN Sports and has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sun-Sentinel, and FantasyPros. He has previously covered sports for COED Magazine, Fantasy Alarm, and Manwall.com. Follow @IgorDerysh !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');

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