Your New Day Job: Managing Your Team Week by Week
After you draft your roster and talk trash about your league mates’ picks while proclaiming your dominance, you can’t just sit there and do nothing with your team. If you do, you’ll be the one on the butt end of the jokes. If you want to win your league, you have to be proactive and manage your team each week. This section briefly covers the important pointers to remember when managing your team on a weekly basis. Chapters 10 and 11 give you a rundown.
Setting your lineup
The most important responsibility a fantasy coach has is to field the best possible team every week. Even if the real world demands much of your time or your team has a losing record, your league’s integrity depends on each coach playing to win for the entire season.
Injuries: Injuries happen in the NFL each week, and they’re part of what makes fantasy football challenging. If your best player gets knocked out for the season, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a worthy replacement. However, with a little research and by counting on your draft depth, you can insert capable players into your lineup each week.
Matchups: Each fantasy team has a core of star players that must start every week when healthy. But when making choices at your other lineup positions, you need to consider each NFL game and which of those Matchups are more likely to give your fantasy players the best chance to produce. Researching Matchups is the key to making the best possible lineup choices every week. (For more on playing the Matchups, see Chapter 10.)
Bye weeks: During the season, each NFL team has one week off (its bye week); you need to bench a team’s players during its bye week in favor of active players on your bench. If you prepare for your draft correctly, these open dates won’t come as a surprise, and your bench players will be ready to contribute.
Performance: Athletes tend to play in streaks, either hot or cold. When making the tougher lineup decisions, you can check the stats for the last few games and see who’s playing well and who needs to take a seat on your bench.
Making changes to your roster
The squad you draft won’t be perfect. It may not be balanced, and your players probably won’t stay healthy for the whole year; therefore, you need to make roster changes during the season. As a fantasy coach, you’re more like a virtual general manager in this way. Of course, the real question is when to change your roster in order to improve your team. The following sections let you know your basic options for changing your roster during the season.
Adding and dropping players
During the season, you can add or drop players to replace injured players or to upgrade at positions of need (where your draft left you thin or where players are underperforming). You can add or drop players in one of two ways (see Chapter 11 for more):
The free agency pool: In Yahoo! default leagues, all undrafted fantasy players begin the season as free agents, which means they’re available to be added to your roster at any time. You can swap any player on your roster for any free agent player, using your league’s list of available players. Simply create an open roster slot by dropping one of your current players and then adding the new player. Many free agent pickups will surprise you and become staples in your lineup, so making good adds/drops is one of the keys to fantasy success.
The waiver wire: If another team drops a player, the player goes on waivers for a limited time before becoming a free agent. This means all coaches have a set amount of time (usually two days) to decide if they want to add him to their teams. In order to add a player on waivers, you must make a waiver claim (by selecting him and a player on your roster to be dropped) and wait until the waiver period has expired. If you have the highest waiver priority — set in reverse order of your draft at the start of the season — you’re awarded that player. After a claim is awarded, your waiver priority drops to the lowest number.
Trading with other coaches
If your team needs help and you can’t fix it via free agency, it may be time to make a trade offer. Of course, making a good trade is easier said than done, because you have to give up someone good in order to get someone good (which is one of the reasons drafting for depth is so important). Closing a deal can be tough, but proposing a deal is a breeze.
Thanks to online technology, you just select the players you want and the players you’re willing to give up, and your site automatically submits the trade to the other coach. That coach then accepts or rejects your proposal or makes a counteroffer. Your opponents won’t always agree with your assessments of the players involved, so always be diplomatic and listen to what they have to say. Trade negotiations that become ugly almost never end well. (For more on trade scenarios and for trade advice, check out Chapter 11.)
Striving for the fantasy championship
As the professional football season marches on and fall becomes winter, the NFL separates its pretenders from the contenders. The same transformation occurs in fantasy football. When the NFL’s best teams are fighting for playoff berths, most fantasy leagues begin their postseasons. The formats vary for deciding fantasy championships, but most leagues use a single-elimination tournament among the best teams in the leagues. At the end of the standard fantasy postseason, two teams battle for the league’s crown in the championship game. They battle for glory, for trophies, for cash, for bragging rights, or for the love of the game. May the best team win! (Chapter 12 covers what you need to do to succeed in the fantasy playoffs.) The following sections introduce the different facets of the fantasy postseason.
Weeks 15–17: The fantasy postseason
The fantasy playoffs take place towards the end of the NFL regular season