There is a lot of advice given to NFL DFS players in the form of universal do’s and do not’s, but like anything else, it usually serves you well to do a little research to see how those unwritten rules of the game are holding up in actual play.

One of the things you will hear often is that, while it is ‘mandatory’ to pair your starting QB with his top WR, you never want to pair two receivers from the same team. While that might have been quite true four or five years ago, we all know that the game has become more and more pass happy.

Let’s take a look at how this rule is holding up in the 2015 season using FanDuel‘s scoring format. For each week of the season to date, I’ve looked at the top 15 WRs in scoring; what we see is quite interesting.

The data listed below is the week examined, player’s name, where he ranked for the week in WR points, and salary:

Week 1: San Diego: K. Allen #3, (7,900): S. Johnson #8, (4,700)

Week 2a: Oakland: M. Crabtree #10, (5,500): A. Cooper #11, (6,700)

Week 2b: New York Jets: E. Decker #14, (6,000): B. Marshall #15, (7,400)

Week 3: Cincinnati: AJ Green #1, (8,000): M. Jones #14, (5,000)

Week 4: Houston: D. Hopkins #5, (7,900): C. Shorts #11, (5,300)

Week 5a: New Orleans: B. Cooks #8, (6,800): W. Snead #11, (5,300)

Week 5b: Houston: D. Hopkins #3, (8,000): J. Strong #9, (4,800)

Week 6: Detroit: C. Johnson #3, (8,200): L. Moore #9, (4,500)

Week 7: Oakland: A. Cooper #5, (7,300): M. Crabtree #14, (5,900)

Week 8: New Orleans: B. Cooks #5, (6,800): W. Snead #9, (5,800), M. Colston #10, (5,100)

Week 9a: Dallas: C. Beasley #2, (5,200): D. Bryant #8, (7,900)

Week 9b: Oakland: M. Crabtree #4, (5,800): A. Cooper #10, (7,300)

Week 10a: Pittsburgh: A. Brown #1, (8,700): M. Bryant #4, (6,500)

Week 10b: Arizona: M. Floyd #2, (5,900): L. Fitzgerald #7, (7,400)

Week 10c: NY Giants: O. Beckham #6, (8,800): D. Harris #9, (5,100)

Week 10d**: Jacksonville: A. Hurns #12, (7,300): A. Robinson #15, (7,500)

**Note – Week 10 not yet complete, and with Cincinnati and Houston going tonight, the Jacksonville pair will certainly drop from this list, as A. Robinson is at #15 for the week.

It’s apparent from the above data that you certainly can pair your WR with great success, as there is not a single week this season where there is not a pair inside the top 15; there are even four weeks where multiple receiving teammates made the top 15, including three in Week 10 (not including Jacksonville). Now consider this data within the context of conventional wisdom and you can see how valuable this can be in a large GPP where so few of your opponents will dare to pair!

Another corresponding bit of conventional wisdom states that the times where teammate receivers put up big numbers are in games where they are way behind and accumulating garbage time yardage, as their QB is forced to throw. Is this true? As with many conventional nuggets, not really. Of the 16 times where teammate receivers have had top 15 scoring games, ten times they came in wins. In fact, on the one occasion where three teammates finished top 10 in scoring, it came in a win.

Equally as interesting as the story told by this data are the corresponding QB statistics. One would certainly believe that the times where a team had multiple top WR points days that their quarterback would be a top 5 scorer for the week, but that is not nearly the case as often as logic would dictate. Of the 16 times where a team had multiple top 15 receivers, only six times was that quarterback in the top 5 in his position in scoring.

In summary, never take conventional wisdom at face value no matter how logical it sounds on its face, without verifying it with some data. Receivers can and do share big days with their teammates, and although it doesn’t happen in every game, so far in 2015 it has happened in every single week, and often multiple times.

Your competition will be hesitant to pair teammates and that low ownership result, in addition to the fact that it is always affordable to do so, makes pairing your WR when you have sound game flow reasoning to be quite a powerful tool in your arsenal.