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Proof That Bye Weeks Don't Really Matter - Summary

Draft Recommendation: You should only worry about bye weeks in leagues where you are not allowed to pick up players on waivers.

A question that many fantasy players ask themselves is whether or not they should worry about bye weeks when drafting. From experience, I usually try to make sure that my backups don’t have the same bye weeks as my starters, if possible, but I will not pass on a backup I like because he has the same bye week as one of my starters. Injuries will happen, players will surprise or disappoint and by the time your starter’s bye week arrives, you will likely have picked up another backup on waivers. Some people have asked me whether or not it matters if your starters are all off in the same week or if your starters should all have different bye weeks. My initial impression was that it did not matter enough to worry about but I decided to test it out.

Here are the five different strategies I tested:
Team A: All starters are off on the same week.
Team B: All starters are off on different weeks.
Team C: No starters from the same position are off on the same week; top QB, RB, WR and TE are off on the same week.
Team D: No more than two starters are off at the same time and none at the same position.
Team E: Four starters are off one week and three are off on another week.

After simulating 5,000 seasons, I averaged the number of wins for each team. Here are the results:

As you can see these numbers are all very close to each other and the biggest difference with the average number of wins is 0.02. That is the equivalent of one additional win every 50 seasons. You can see that team A which has all its starters off on the same week have the lowest number of wins which may or may not be a coincidence. However, the difference is so small that it is not worth worrying about.

In conclusion, as you can see, there is no advantage whether your starters all have their bye week at the same time or all on different weeks. As I had initially thought, bye weeks are not worth worrying about and you will be in much better shape if you draft players you like best instead of worrying about bye weeks. In leagues where you are not allowed to pick up players on waivers you will want to make sure that your starters and backups at the same position don’t all have the same bye week but other than that, forget about bye weeks and draft the best players.

Like our strategies but think you may have a tough time applying them all on draft day? Take a look at our Ultimate Draft Tool which combines all those strategies into one easy to use program. This program will suggest you who to select based on who other teams are drafting, all of our draft strategies and the player projections you choose.

See the complete analysis