Bye Week Management

[madmike]

What's your strategy for managing bye weeks? Do you just fill in the holes as best you can or do you trade anyone to avoid the fall off?

Reason I ask is one guy in our league is always trading players, even big names. Seems he rarely takes a hit off bye weeks.

[Yianni2112]

I enjoy filling in my roster on the bye week with free agents it's fun guessing which one is the better play that week. And there is no better feeling than adding a free agent that turns out a great week like R.Caldwell for example.

[IRON CHEF]

Bye weeks are annoying, I try to avoid considering it during the draft because I think it can hurt your team's value if you take it too seriously.

Depending on free agency and backups is what I do whenever a bye rolls around. Sometimes, it will suck and you will lose for the week, but other times you will hit it big and feel mighty proud of yourself.

Last night, for example, I was up by a few very insecure pts facing the guy with J Lew. Besides Lewis all of his players were done, and only one guy was left for me to, sucked that he was a bye-week filler. But lo and behold, it happened to be Randy Hymes. Now for someone I scrapped off free agency a couple days ago to basically win the game for me I have to feel pretty good.

[mad benjamin]

I try to anticipate bye weeks during the draft so I don't get stuck. I did fairly well with it, but got stuck during week 3 with Henry and Davis both being off. I was forced to use only Taylor and Lamar Gordon but had 3 solid WRs (Wayne, Jackson and Mason) to make up the difference. I made sure I had strength at another position for a flex start to cover my backside (believe it or not, I won in week 3 with those 2 Rbs).

Also, max out the ww. If you have enough bench spots and your league isn't too deep (ours is 10 team), then you can usually find a couple hidden gems there or guys to take a flier on. My ww. pickups so far have been Gordon (dropped), Wayne, Pittman, Daniel Graham, Falcons D, Gannon (dropped), Warner, Pinner. I'm hoping this week to pick up Chester Taylor and Plax, Morton or Evans. Depending on Vandy's situation, I may have to pick up a kicker.

I have not had to make one single trade so far and none of my guys have buys this week, but I have a guy in my league who lost Garner a week ago and now has Holmes and TJones on bye weeks. This is the point where some guys will have to get desperate enough to trade or suck it up and take the loss, hoping to make it up in later weeks. If you are 4-0 or 3-1 at this point and playing the league cream-puff, don't make any trades you'll regret. If you are below .500, take some chances.

Luck has played into it, too, where my guys have been relatively healthy and I can trade because I choose to, not because I have to. Believe me, that's the best situation to be in. Let everyone else be desperate.

[Confucian Scholars]

If you don't have that NFL bye week schedule with you at draft time, then you are asking for big trouble. This season Yahoo went so far as making the bye week numbers visible during live drafts.
There's simply no excuse to draft 2 quarterbacks that have the same bye week and you should seriously consider bye weeks for your star running backs and wide receivers at draft time, not mid-season. It's simple to draft a good team that does not have any bye week conflicts but if you did somehow get stuck with Randy Moss, Roy Williams and Darrell Jackson as your 3 WRs then you should probably be making trades during the first 3 weeks to try and acquire an equal replacement for at least one of them. Find the guy in your league that has a similar problem and you can usually take care of it quickly.
I would never trade a star player with a bye week just to fill a vacant position. Taking a chance on free agents is useful only when those players on the waiver wire are replacing an injured legitimate starter in the line-up, like Aaron Stecker or T.J. Houshmandzadeh.