Preparing for Fantasy Football Playoffs

[ProfessorBen]

In one of my leagues, I've already passed through the rough stretch and have started thinking about the playoff matchups. I did some research that should be useful for SE. This league is quite deep at 12 team+Flex, so this might not apply to your leagues.

The table below shows favorable matchups for Weeks 14-16. Especially favorable ones are bolded, red ones are bad. While my football knowledge is limited, I did try to keep things specifics in mind such as Denver having a weak rush defense/strong pass defense, etc. I did this kind of sporadically so I may have missed some gold mines but I tried to list all players that had at least 2 favorable matchups.



The upper left section is my team, but the other 3 sections represent Kickers/Defs on Waivers, players who should already be owned, and QBs who will likely still be on the wire during those weeks. I left out RBs because any starting RBs should all be owned and WRs because you can simply look to their QBs for the same information.

A couple of notes:
[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]Some players who are already undervalued have solid matchups later. Rudi and Lewis come to mind if they come back healthy. Buy low! This makes their backups worth that much more as well.

[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]Akin to why we don't reach for them early in drafts, the QB position is deep come playoff time this year. If you're running a shaky platoon or face an injury later, don't panic! Lots of alternatives are out there.

[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]If you're in a money league, I encourage you to do some kind of analysis on your own team. You don't need to be this detailed, but find out where your holes are, not just now, but later in the season as well. With my team, I can conclude that I'm surprisingly set at WR with only 3 wideouts, Benson is trade bait, and that I'm still looking for another RB for those weeks when I'm trading.

[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]You may tell me "Cross that bridge when you get there" or that it's retarded to give up value in deals right now. However, this is similar to drafting with bye weeks in mind. It would be a terrible mistake to pass up the best available pick(trade) just so you avoid conflicting bye weeks(bad playoff matchups), but it's equally bad to have all of your RBs off the same week(bad playoff matchups the same week).