Don't Worry About
Bye Weeks - 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 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:
|
Team |
Wins |
|
A |
7.98 |
|
B |
8.00 |
|
C |
7.99 |
|
D |
8.01 |
|
E |
8.02 |
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.
See the complete analysis |
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