The following is an excerpt from the latest edition of Yahoo’s fantasy football newsletter, Get to the Points! If you like what you see, you can subscribe for free here.
On Tuesday morning, when you launched your league homepage to scope out this week’s lineup decisions, you probably recognized the terrible predicament NFL schedule-makers created for us.
Six different teams are on bye this week, none of which are irrelevant in fantasy. We will be without our Falcons, Bills, Bengals, Saints, Jets and Jaguars.
Put another way: We are missing the overall QB2, QB4, RB3, RB4, RB6, RB8, RB14, WR1, WR4, WR5, WR9, WR10, WR21, TE6 and TE7, among other useful pieces. Just an absolute fantasy nightmare.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. But who are we to tell the NFL how to handle its business? Our role is simply to help you manage around the chaos.
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Whenever one of these mega-byes arrives — and another is ahead of us in Week 14, just so you know — it’s important to remember that amid the messiness, we can also find opportunity. Every active manager in your league placed multiple waiver claims this week, which of course means everyone in your league was dropping players. We happen to be in one of those weeks in which the second-wave of pickups might actually be better than the first.
Here’s a partial list of players who took a significant roster-percentage hit in Yahoo leagues when waivers ran overnight on Tuesday, each of them dropped by over 3,000 managers:
QBs
WRs
RBs
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Rico Dowdle
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Travis Etienne Jr. (OK, this one brought sweet relief to the dropper)
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Tank Bigsby
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Jonathon Brooks (ahead of his regular-season debut!)
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Tyler Allgeier
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Jordan Mason
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Raheem Mostert
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Ray Davis
TEs
D/ST
So, yeah, it’s a pretty great week to dumpster dive. Every name above is either playable or stashable, depending on your league’s specific format. We just mass-dropped most of the premium backup running backs and almost 50% of the preseason top-12 tight ends.
If you haven’t made a regular habit of reviewing the mid-week drops … well, it’s certainly not too late to start. There’s never been a better time, in fact. When trade deadlines are behind us, often the best way to fill a roster need is by sifting through other people’s fantasy trash.