Word to the Winners: Fantasy Football Advice

Wrapping Up Your Championship -- By Russ Bliss

Life is good. Fall is in full bloom, we’re in the middle of another exciting NFL season, and fantasy football playoffs are looming on the horizon. Your team is good enough to get you into the playoffs, and once there, you realize anything can happen so you entertain dreams of holding aloft your league’s Championship trophy, owning bragging rights for a year, and reaping whatever other benefits your league bestows upon the winner.

But how close to reality are those dreams? Sure, you’ve drafted well, and you’ve started the right guys enough of the time to make you confident that you’ll make your league’s playoffs, but now is the time for you to take the final steps to bring that dream to a reality. Don’t rest on what you’ve achieved so far. There’s more you should be doing to ensure your best chances to be your league’s Champion.

As stated in a previous article, there are three keys to winning a championship in Fantasy Football. First you have to draft the right players. Second is to start the right players. Third is to acquire the right players through trades or free agency. Now that we’ve gotten through the first 8 weeks of the season, it is time to focus on acquiring those players who will prevent you from being an early playoff exit, and help you win a championship.

Who Wins Championships?

It’s a myth that the person with the most studs will always win a championship. Oh sure, it helps to have a more studs than anyone else, but there is simply no way to stock your entire team with them unless you’re in a league with idiots. And those leagues have become few and far between. The team that usually wins a championship is the team that has a balance of a couple of studs, and the right role players. The key to making your team the team that wins is to acquire those role players.

Let’s face it; you’re not likely to get a stud without giving up either a stud, or a collection of solid players. So trading for a stud is unlikely. You need to identify the role players that will fill out your roster and give you the advantage during your league’s playoffs. And sometimes, these players are fairly easy to acquire as they are not the marquee names other owners assign a higher value to. Every team has at least a couple of spots in their starting rosters where they either go with their gut feeling each week, or look for the guy with the best matchup, to decide which role player to start.

How to Find the Right Role Players

What you’re looking for are players who are starting for their team and have the right matchups. Get a copy of the run defense rankings and receive defense rankings from NFL.com and start examining which teams have the easier schedule during your league’s playoff weeks. The reason you use the receive defense and not the pass defense is that the receive defense is the actual amount of passing yards each team gives up to an opponent. The pass defense rankings uses the receive defense yardage numbers and then subtracts out the yardage each defense gets back when they make a sack. Since we don’t take the sack yardage and subtract it from our fantasy QB totals, the pass defense rankings are inaccurate to use for fantasy purposes when examining matchups for QB’s, WR’s, and TE’s.

After looking at the rankings, you’ll probably notice that you have guys on your team who have some tough matchup’s at the most critical time of the fantasy season for you (the playoffs). Now, I don’t advocate trading away solid players who are clearly good starts every week because of this, but if you’ve got a rotation of bench guys with poor matchups, and something happens to your solid, every-week starters, you’ll be stuck inserting a player into your starting lineup who not only doesn’t usually start for your team, but also has a poor matchup. This is the bane of a lot of championship caliber teams in fantasy football. Injuries happen, and can happen any week. Would you rather have someone who has a great matchup to exploit ready to start for you? Or a guy who may be a slightly better player, but has a poor one when you need him most? Frisman Jackson in week one and Ernest Wilford in week eight are just two examples of guys who got an opportunity and exploited their matchups that week. We’ve heard nothing from Jackson since that first week, and likely we’ll hear little from Wilford (despite what the Jags are saying) the rest of the season. But when you’re in a bind, you want to have guys who have those matchups to exploit.

After you’ve identified the players on your team that have poor matchups, you’ll then want to find the teams who have great matchups during your fantasy playoffs. Those are the guys to target. For example, Eddie Kennison is a name everyone is familiar with. He’s not a marquee player, and he’s very inconsistent week to week. Usually, the owner who has him doesn’t consider him to be an every week starter and plays him based on his matchup in comparison to other WR’s on his team. He’s probably amiable to trading him, if he can get a decent value in return (likely a comparable WR, or a decent RB).

Using Kennison as an example, here’s a possible scenario for you:

You have WR Roy Williams from Detroit. We know Roy is a solid WR when healthy, but he’s now shown an inability to stay healthy two consecutive seasons and while he puts up some occasional big games, he’s also put up some very mediocre ones. If you look at Williams opponents weeks 14, 15, and 16, you’ll see he’s playing receive defenses currently (after week 8) ranked 16th, 10th, and 7th. Not good, especially if you’re counting on him for your playoffs. The owner with Kennison might be willing to make a trade based on Roy Williams upside in comparison to Kennison’s. If so, you make this deal. Kennison, in weeks 14, 15, and 16, faces receive defenses currently ranked 14th, 30th, and 29th.

Neither player is likely a “must start” for you, but based on the matchups those important weeks, wouldn’t you rather have Kennison’s matchups to play as opposed to Williams? The same holds true at every position: identify the weak links amongst your roster for your playoffs, and try to get players who are comparable, with better matchups.

Now, of course, it’s only week 8, and the rankings for run and receive defenses now are likely to get shuffled around a bit by week 14. The system isn’t perfect. But most teams have played 7 games, and some 8, and that’s a pretty good barometer for what you can expect these defenses to do the rest of the season.

By making sure you look ahead to your playoffs and making the moves necessary to stock your team with guys who can not just fill a void in your starting lineup, but fill it and have a greater chance to produce bigger fantasy points for you, you increase your chances of being the guy holding the trophy at the end of the season.

Russ Bliss — fantasy football expert and radio host of "The Red Zone with Russ Bliss" on KDUS-AM — went head-to-head with the Line-Up Analyzer last year, and still wishes he had worn a helmet. Russ was so impressed with our predictive analysis engine, he joined the team at FantasyFootballStarters.com. Read more of Russ' article on our Word to the Winners homepage.

Copyright © 2005 Ready-Set-Go Fantasy Sports, LLC. All rights reserved.