Week Five brings the first of five consecutive bye weeks for the NFL schedule, and with them the opportunity to augment your roster due to other folks poor planning.
You know how when it's draft time, there's a little column rarely paid attention to that details each player's bye week? Don't worry, if you ignored it, you're just like hundred's of thousands of other fantasy football GMs. What happens though, is that during the quick pace of a draft, and while watching your pet cats get snatched up two or three picks before you're on the clock, you lose track of the bye weeks for player's you've selected.
Now you're sitting there with four of your top seven players all on the bench for the week. So what do you do? Do you, for all intents and purposes forfeit this week? Some would, but most inevitably resort to the waiver wire to try and fill a few holes. If you aren't one of those unfortunate souls forced to employ these methods, their misstep could be your gain.
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In order to sign a free agent, someone on the roster has to be released (pure genius, I know), and there could be some interesting gems sitting on the trash heap for you to uncover. If you're the type of GM that only checks his roster on Waiver Tuesday and gameday, it might be in your best interest to do a daily sweep of your league to see who is getting dropped.
Now, savvy GM's will wait until the last possible minute to drop a player. There is normally a 48 hour waiting period in most FF leagues before a released player can be assigned to whomever tops the waiver order. Waiting until the last minute means that the player gets locked before the Sunday game and the possibility to resign said player as part of the next waiver wave.
When your opponents are saying good bye to those players they were stashing, it could be hello championship for you.
The bye week is also a good time to start targeting players that have intriguing matchups for Weeks 14-16. While it's still a little early to start trusting stats as projections, you can at least start to target a couple teams as likeable matchups. Find a player with an intriguing stretch run, and see if you can trade like player for like player.
In the rushing game, this means you'd want opponents that match up against Carolina, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Houston. Those are the teams at the bottom of Defensive DVOA rankings. Through the air, target matchups with Miami, Denver, Tampa Bay and Seattle. You should be able to accrue some good points.
With matchups against Miami, Arizona, Philly and Tampa Bay in four of their last five FF season games, Cowboys players should be extra attractive to everyone. See if you can wrangle one or two away from a fellow GM should they be feeling a bit loose over the next few weeks.
As always, use the Island to ask your lineup questions, trade possibilities and all, and the BTB community will offer you some advice in return.