A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

BENCH MANAGEMENT: Next in our series of lectures on Fantasy Football Theory and Practice is the following from our own J. Bowman, with whom I've been competing in FFL leagues for over a decade:

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So your draft is done, and your starting lineup is capital-A Awesome. You’ve got elite talent at every position, the handcuff to your top RB, and that big sleeper receiver you wanted. Nothing to do now but sit back and collect Ws, right?

Not so fast. If you just leave your team alone for thirteen weeks, you’ll likely be heading into the consolation bracket, wondering what happened to your unassailable fortress of a team. Nothing is certain in football. Players get hurt (and not just the “skill” positions; losing a left tackle can have a detrimental effect on a quarterback’s production). Close position battles remain battles into the season; just because Justin Forsett is starting this week, doesn’t mean he’ll be the starter all year (or even that he’ll be the best RB on his team this week). Someone will take the combination of opportunity, improved skills, and good fortune to “come out of nowhere.” Last year’s “out-of-nowhere” stars will regress towards the mean. Talent in the NFL is fluid, and your bench needs to be fluid, too, as you hunt for the best spare parts for your particular situation. Successful bench management requires balancing two almost-contradictory concepts:

1) Points scored by bench players are points wasted.

2) A team with depth is more likely to win than a team with stars and scrubs.

Pull up ESPN’s game-day chat Sunday morning, and you’ll see a dozen questions along the lines of “I can only start two of Adrian Peterson, Ray Rice, and Steven Jackson. What do I do?” The answer is almost surely “trade one of them.” Very few teams couldn’t benefit from downgrading that third RB to get an upgrade at one or more other positions. It moves some of those points from the bench to the starting lineup, and also leads to less stress Sunday morning as you agonize over which of your top-10 backs to bench.

If, on the other hand, that team’s RB stable consists of AP, Jackson, and Chester Taylor, that team needs to do more about improving their backups; there will be at least two weeks when they’ll have to bench one of those starters, and running backs are more likely to get hurt than the other positions. Of course, that’s the situation right now; if Taylor ascends to a starting job, suddenly this team looks pretty solid. Talent is fluid.

What should you be looking for to fill your bench? It depends a lot on your league, but I have some general opinions.

Quarterbacks:

I find backup quarterbacks to be overrated in a lot of cases. If you have Aaron Rodgers, why hold on to Eli Manning? You’re only planning to start him once, and if Rodgers goes down, Eli’s not going to save your season. This actually fits in nicely to the concepts above; the backup QB’s performance is wasted on your bench, but he rarely provides enough depth over what’s freely available on the “shared bench”that is the free agent pool. The exceptions are if you are in a deep league (14+ teams and/or at least as many bench spots as you have skill position starters, or b) drafted Ben Roethlisberger. Really, if your backup is that good, you should probably just trade him.

Running backs:

Here’s the deal with backup running backs: if you draft one, you’ll only benefit if a) he plays (because the starter is injured/ineffective) and b) actually produces enough to be a starter on your team. Herein lies your conundrum. Backup running backs usually make up the bulk of your bench, but they need to be able to step in to your starting lineup (or be trade bait) if/when they get the opportunity. This will largely be a function of your “first-string” bench players. If you’ve got an Arian Foster sitting on your bench, you’ve got a lot of flexibility to pursue high-upside backups like Kareem Huggins and Donald Brown—guys who could be legitimate RB2 options given the opportunity. If your bye-week replacement is Fred Taylor, handcuffing your own top guys becomes a better option, because they’re more likely to help if the guy ahead of them goes down.

Receivers:

Receivers aren’t totally random, but they are hard to predict, and very matchup-dependent. This means, much more so than other positions, you’ll likely be benching your “starters” more than once per season. Most teams will put several backup receivers on their bench. The typical pattern for the backup receiver is:

1) WR has a huge game in the first three weeks of the season, and gets picked up by a team looking for WR depth.

2) WR averages three catches for 17 yards for the next three weeks and is dropped.

3) WR has 85 yards and a TD the next week and is promptly picked up again. Return to step 2.

What should you look for in a bench receiver? Consistency is great if you can get it, but Hines Ward and Wes Welker are probably in starting lineups. I like to look for #1 receivers with low expectations—think Laurent Robinson or Kenny Britt—and try to match their good matchups with my receivers’ poor matchups. These guys also tend to be good “breakout” candidates (Mike Sims-Walker would be a good example from last year). It’s more art than science. But it’s better than carrying three bench receivers who score 2 points for weeks at a time, hoping that the week you have to start them is the week they’ll put up their 20-point game.

Defenses: if you’re playing matchups, there may be occasions where you’ll need to pick up next week’s defense this week. These occasions shouldn’t come often. If you need to pick up a bye-week replacement for another position, you should definitely not have a second defense.

Tight Ends: If you need a backup to fill a bye week, that’s one thing. Otherwise, it’s really unlikely that a backup TE is going to be so much better than the free-agent replacements that he’s worth keeping.

Kickers: No.

While being able to make those tough start/bench decisions is valuable, a well-constructed bench minimizes those decisions, without being so weak that it eliminates them completely. Happy hunting.