Surviving the Challenges of NFL Bye Week in Daily Fantasy Football

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By: staff Posted: October 12, 2009

Surviving the Challenges of NFL Bye Week

As of this writing, the NFL is closing its 5th week of regular schedule games. This means the bye week schedule is nearly half way. In case you're not familiar with the regular NFL schedule, the "Bye Week" for the team is their vacation from regular game schedule. In a 17 week schedule, each team gets to rest once.

Tony Romo - Dallas Cowboys

It's a very interesting scheduling for the NFL and this can be used by many fantasy players to their advantage. When done right, the weeks that schedule a bye week can result to a winning week.

Some Trivia About the Bye Week in NFL:

• The bye week was introduced in 1990. This was created to add more weeks to the NFL regular schedule games.
• In 1993, the NFL decided to shorten the regular season to 16 weeks but with two bye weeks.
• The bye weeks starts in Week 4 and ends in Week 10.
• This season, weeks 7-9 are weeks with most teams on bye week (6).
• This season, only two teams on Week 10 will have a bye week.

The effects of bye week can be devastating or fruitful for the fantasy player. For example, if the fantasy player's QBs are Romo, Manning and Chad Henne, your Week 6 game will never have any QB since they will be in bye week. It can even get worse when your roster is only based on few teams that have the same bye week. You could have one weekend with absolutely no score. This is the worst case scenario that could happen to a fantasy player and this is a possibility in weeks 7 to 9. Since six teams for three weeks will be on bye, the possibility of a non-performing fantasy roster is very likely.

This is a classic case of lack of research in order to have a formidable team in the upcoming season. The 2009 NGL Schedule was released last April which means fantasy players have nearly five months to analyze the schedule and adjust their roster. When the bye week is ignored, a week without any score can happen.

If this unfortunate event will happen to your fantasy team in the coming weeks, better act fast. Many fantasy players that have been affected by the bye week are already scrambling some ways never to repeat the same mistake. It's a little bit unfortunate to drop some key players in your roster but it's better to have low scores in one weekend rather that zero for a weekend.

But don't forget to factor the current injuries of players in your roster and during your frantic trades and waivers. You might be forced to trade your active player who will be on bye a few weeks later with a non-bye week player but is on the injured list. It's still a losing situation if you are forced in this trade.

It's a very messy situation when your entire roster will be on a bye week. But it should serve as a lesson for the upcoming season.