Spending FAAB money is easy to do, however, doing it the right way isn’t. You can blow your entire season with one or two bad choices that can lead to you missing out on key players when it matters most. There are also times when being too tentative can lead to you missing out on players early in the season that you’ll regret not spending enough on as the season progresses.
Here are the strategies that I follow every season when it comes to spending my FAAB, and if I stick to these principles, success usually follows:
1) The biggest thing I always advise is to be two or three weeks ahead on injured players. Not only do you get them cheaper because you’re picking them up before they’re active, but if you wait until one week ahead or the week of, you’re likely going to miss out completely. Even if the player isn’t scooped up by a savvy manager and is available to you when he does get activated, you will need to spend tons of FAAB on him because, at that point, all your league mates will be on him, too.
2) I mentioned that being too tentative can sometimes come back to bite you. You cannot be afraid to be aggressive early in the season on RBs, especially ones that catch passes out of the backfield. If you’re playing in PPR formats, this is especially true. If you’re not aggressive early, you may miss your chance to get a solid contributor, especially at a tough position.
3) I want you to remember not to chase TDs in FAAB from players at skill positions. Just because a player gets multiple TDs in a week or scores something like three TDs in a two-week span, it doesn’t mean it’s repeatable. Things like snap count, touches, carries, targets, and yards are much more indicative of how a player will perform moving forward than their number of TDs in a small sample size.
4) Pay attention to injury reports and the severity of the injuries of players who didn’t enter the week hurt. A player on the waiver wire can become very valuable when another player on his team gets injured, so even if the box scores and stat sheets don’t show that a player has been good over the past few weeks, it doesn’t mean they won’t become valuable due to the circumstances of their depth chart.
These are just some of the key strategies I like to use every season. Every week is different though, so it is critical to get into our discord channel and our team of experts about who you should be targeting and how much you should be bidding.
