Fantasy Felony helps you hijack your fellow owners.Bye weeks are a seriously annoying hazard of fantasy football, but if you plan correctly heading into your draft, they're not a huge deal. For instance, you didn't have to spend much to CYA for your Drew Brees absence in Week 5: Matt Hasselbeck, Kyle Orton, and Chad Henne all did just fine, thank you very much.
However, bye week issues don't end after your players are done. No sir. In fact, if you believe that, you've failed at a heightened opportunity to pry something away from your fellow owner. Fortunately, I'm here to help you out before it's too late.
You see, the trade deadline for "real football" is Tuesday, which means your league's trade deadline is probably looming sometime in the relatively near future. And if your team is in even remotely decent shape (think .500 or above, and/or 1-2 games within your division lead), I want you to stop what you're doing right now -- seriously, stop it! -- and head over to your standings page.
Find guys in your league that are absolute bottom of the barrel (read: utterly and totally desperate for a win to stay relevant heading into November) and look at who've they got headed on bye in the next two weeks.
OK, back now? Good. Now look at your own roster. First off, what positions do you have locked? Like, as in, absolutely locked -- having Ryan Grant as one of your two starting running backs doesn't count (trust me). Because let's say that, theoretically, you have Frank Gore, Ronnie Brown, Glen Coffee and Cadillac Williams (a very, very reasonable group of backs given the way most drafts played out). And then you have a wide receiving corps that involves the words "Eddie Royal."
Well, because the majority of fantasy owners don't obsess over bye weeks, here's what you do -- you go out right now and you trade Caddy for the best wideout you can get from a RB-needy owner. Don't think twice. Just do it. Look, yeah, if Brown goes down, you're screwed, but Williams is playing well right now and has a substantial amount of value in the fake football world.
And you, my friend, have already moved passed the bye weeks for Brown and Gore. They are your horses for the rest of the season -- that's why you drafted them so early. Besides, in this (sort of) hypothetical case, both of these guys have relatively strong schedules the rest of the way, particularly during the playoffs. At this point, you're not looking for the deepest team, you're looking for the most complete starting lineup.What can you get for a Cadillac-type of back that's been over-performing on the bench? Well, unless you package a WR (and bear in mind, this is entirely possible against a team who's struggling mightily and needs more breadth of players in their lineup) with him, you're probably not pulling an upper-level wideout.
But start out giving old 2:1 a shot and see where it goes from there. Worst-case scenario is that you end up doing a swap for someone like Nate Burleson. Actually, I take that back: worst-case scenario is that you end up having a starting running back wasting points on your bench week after week while constantly searching for a wideout to fill the hole that drafting Braylon Edwards created at the start of the season. And doing the latter isn't what wins championships, being aggressive is.
