Fantasy Football Trade Strategy
5
For those of you who start out your season and find yourself at the bottom of the standings, and/or failing to keep up on total points, here are some recommendations for you to turn that ship around quickly.
Most people have a hard time trading away their first round draft pick, but many seasons this can be the recipe to get some depth and consistency on your roster to make that playoff push.
What does this mean? Trade your best player for two good players.
This generally means trading a RB (Foster, Rice, Spiller, Mccoy, Charles) and in exchange you’re looking to get a lower tier RB back, and a player who you see as being a solid Flex (a receiver who gets a lot of targets or a RB who is struggling).
Ideas: (Antonio Brown, Amendola, Cecil Shorts, Wes Welker, MJD, Ryan Matthews, Frank Gore)
Although it sounds intimidating, your weekly points will increase and give you a better opportunity to get back into the playoff hunt.
Going back to the QB theory, if you are one of the teams that drafted a QB high and are slim at your other positions, I STRONGLY encourage you to trade your QB away. The week by week point differential will not be as severe as you may think. Yes, your Peyton’s, Brees’, and Rodgers’ are going to have huge weeks, but on average you will help yourself by adding depth or fulfilling a weakness on your starting roster.
Just to give a idea, what I am suggesting is:
TRADING: Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers, Peyton, Brady
Return: Russell Wilson or Tony Romo and decent RB/WR like Mcfadden, MJD, Antonio Brown, Torrey Smith etc…
For those of you not struggling and look like a safe bet to make the playoffs you also need to keep your eye open for trades. I might sound crazy, but you need to start looking at playoff weeks and seeing if your studs are potentially going to be resting those weeks. Obviously, in order to win your leagues you need players who are going to play and that are not on teams that are looking like 15-1, 14-2 teams (Broncos, Patriots, Seahawks, Saints). Also, look to see who has a easy schedule at the end of the year during playoff weeks (Carolina, Chicago, Detroit).
This is a great chance to get ahead of your league. Trade for players that’s team will be on the borderline of making the playoffs. Look at the future and make sure your not one of the guys who was in first all regular season and get hammered in the playoffs for these reasons.
Trading is key to fantasy football championships. Always keep your eye on buy low candidates and looking to add depth to your team. Not only will this help you immediately, but when the playoffs start you want to be able to have options for starters.
Keep your mind open and don’t let your 1st round draft pick hold you back from making a blockbuster deal.
I’m still faster than you.
Do you currently have a way of taking into account rest of season projections when evaluating a trade? I use Footballguys’ rest of season value calculator, but I haven’t checked it to see if that the best way to do it.
Hi John,
In addition to being projection dependent, trades are, as you can imagine, league dependent in a variety of ways. First, the league rules matter. In particular the way the league is scored and the number of players in each position are very important. Next, the specific people on your roster matter. Third, your schedule matters. And finally, your opponents’ rosters matter.
I built a trade generator and evaluator application for my league. I did it by 1) asking the commissioner to make the league public (it was a yahoo league) and he did 2) scraping every piece of information I needed about our league using the public access. I updated it twice a week until the trade deadline. Its offline now.
What that application did was evaluate every possible one or two man trade between each team, determine the mutually beneficial trades (according to yahoo projections), and let my league mates browse trade opportunities. It also evaluated the projected impact of specific trades on the user’s upcoming schedule, assuming vacancies were filled from the waiver wire.
The first part of this process, evaluating every possible trade, is probably too computationally intensive to offer to the public at large. On my home machine, it took 45 minutes to generate and compare the few hundred million trades. The second part, evaluating specific trades, we can do. However, it will require quite a bit of input on your part.
How we build the evaluator will be dependent on how much information we think a reasonable person would be willing to input. Which of these pieces of information would you be willing to offer in order to use a trade evaluator?
Your (public) league ID
Your roster
Your league’s rules
Your oppenents’ rosters
Your schedule
Your league’s schedule
I would love to see or be able to use a trade evaluator. Is this something you can elaborate on or share with me?
Same. Would love to see this. Does it still exist? Could it be extended for the waiver wire as well?