With the massive amount of information to process each week, any good daily fantasy football player knows it is crucial to develop a pre-game routine. Different players will have their own favorite resources to call upon during their preparation, but they will all focus on similar factors that unquestionably have an effect on expected performance. These factors include point spreads and point totals, weather, anticipated game flow, team performance against specific positions, and individual wide receiver versus cornerback matchups.

Needless to say, the accumulation of data needed to make the best roster decisions can seem daunting, but a routine acts as a virtual checklist of information to compile as well as a tool to keep the DFS player from feeling overwhelmed.

There are many great sources of information out there in addition to any mentioned here, but by reviewing some major parts of my routine, a player can pull from it what he likes and use it to help mold his own.

– Las Vegas point spread and game totals. The first thing I like to do in my preparation is take an early week look at the Vegas lines on the games and use them to calculate the expected points total for each team. So, if you have a line of Green Bay -8 over Chicago with a total of 46, the powers that be in Vegas are forecasting a score of Green Bay 27, Chicago 19. Once you pull the individual team scores from each of the lines, it starts to become apparent where you should start looking for players and for defenses.

– Take a look at how each team has fared against the opposing players at each position. I like to pull this information from a combination of sources. Football Outsiders has a fantastic weekly chart updated on Tuesdays where they rank defenses against different types of receivers – #1WR, #2WR, other WR, TE, and RB – using Defense Adjusted Value Over Average, or DVOA.

By scanning through the chart, you can spot strong defenses against particular positions as well as exploitable matchups. The chart also more heavily weighs recent performance, giving the rankings a great deal of legitimacy. There is some gray area when determining some teams’ WR1 or WR2, but sites such as RotoWire have depth charts as well as information on how many snaps and targets each player has accumulated each week.

Next, I like to look up the fantasy points given up in recent games to each position by a particular defense. RotoGuru is a great tool for this research, as you can see what a defense has given up each week to each position for DraftKings, FanDuel, and DraftDay.

– Here is where I start to get an idea of the players I might want to roster on Sunday and so I put together a spreadsheet listing each player by position and their salary on each site I will be playing on in a format such as this:

The use of a spreadsheet serves multiple purposes: it allows me to have one central location to work from when considering players I might want to use, or subtract as I go forth, and allows me to see which site to go heavy on a particular guy for value. If I love Jordan Reed this Sunday, I’m going to focus my heavier exposure to him on DraftKings, where he’s seventh priced TE, as opposed to FanDuel, where he’s the fourth most expensive.

– Get the early weather forecasts. RotoGrinders has a football forum where a meteorologist gives an early forecast and updates it pre-game. It’s nice to know there’s 40mph crosswinds in Oakland before considering a Carr/Cooper stack.

– Once I have the spreadsheet put together and scanned the early weather projections, I like to delve a bit further into the game matchup analysis. Pro Football Focus has a subscription service that includes access to charts ranking the WR versus CB matchups each week. If you are a serious DFS player, this is well worth the investment. Everyone knows Josh Norman is a lockdown corner, but it’s the more hidden gems that really yield an edge in terms of exploitable matchups that fly under the ownership radar.

– With these steps completed, I wait out the Thursday kickoff and run back over to RotoGrinders for their Field Report feature, where they give a breakdown of ownership percentages taken from the Thursday-to-Monday tournaments on FanDuel. This is a great edge a Sunday-to-Monday major tourney player can exploit to get an idea of who will be too highly owned and who is being ignored. If you are coin flip unsure of separating two players on Sunday, a GPP player will want to lean towards the lower owned guy.

– After re-evaluating all the players I’ve put on my spreadsheet, I spend the next couple of days tinkering with my various lineups and getting my rosters entered. I usually find myself going back to Vegas at this time. I like to have the bulk of this step completed on Saturday so that Sunday morning I can look at them with a clear head and make adjustments if needed.

Late injury and weather information is available on multiple sites such as RotoWire, RotoWorld, and RotoGrinders. Now you can relax for a few minutes and await kickoff, where the hard part begins.

Take what you’ve learned and head to DraftKings, where you can get a 100% up to $600 first-time deposit bonus. Also check out FanDuel, which has a 100% up to $200 deposit bonus.