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As it seems to be every season, Week 18 daily fantasy is all about finding the situations where teams and players are most motivated. It is probably the trickiest week of the entire season to play. For a deeper dive into each team’s motivation this week, Jeff Bell wrote a great summary explaining each team’s motivations earlier this week.

It is helpful to break teams down into categories based on some past research by Footballguys’ own Danny Tuccito, who found that teams generally fall into four broad tiers:

Fighting to Make Playoffs

This is the top tier when it comes to fantasy performance compared to season averages and where we ideally want to target teams. Unfortunately, there are very few teams that fall into this category on the main slate:

Pittsburgh stands out as a team with extremely high motivation and a team total comfortably higher than their season average PPG. We will talk about a couple of Steelers in our top plays. The Dolphins would be an obvious target for DFS but for the fact that the team is down to their third-string quarterback (hence the Vegas total being 16% lower than their season average). New England is going to be incredibly motivated, and some will be scared off them because of the tough matchup against the Bills, but this is a sneaky spot for some fantasy upside.

FanDuel has also included the Sunday night game on the main slate this week. Green Bay will definitely be motivated. Win and they are in, regardless of earlier outcomes. The 27.0 implied Vegas total is also much higher than normal. This is a spot we can look to for safety. Detroit is on this list provisionally. If Seattle loses earlier, Detroit is playing to make the playoffs. If Seattle wins, then Detroit falls down into the next group: teams that have been fully eliminated from contention.

Fully Eliminated

It will be a surprise to some, but historically, the second-best grouping of teams from a fantasy perspective is those who have been fully eliminated from playoff contention. While these teams have nothing to play for, they also have no reason to rest players.

As we can in the table above, nearly half of the teams on this main slate fall into this category. Many will quickly pass over these teams when building lineups but there is sneaky potential for fantasy goodness in this grouping. Denver stands out as a team in a great spot to have a better-than-normal showing.

Fighting for Seeding Only

This is a group where we need to be wary of falling into a trap. While improving seeding may seem to be highly motivating from the outside, this has historically been a group of teams that underperforms fantasy expectations in Week 18. It is easy for game script (or the scores in other games) to lead to key starters resting in the second half. The bottom line is that health is often at least as important as seeding, with some caveats we will discuss below.