Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I don't mean record-wise. Whatever your record is, you can still make the playoffs. There are no real streaks or slumps in fantasy football. Your team is a collection of players from a bunch of others teams, and they each have separate motivations, records and coaching staffs. So there's no reason your team can't start out-scoring your opponents, and the top teams in your league could start dropping games. So turning things around isn't as hard as it would be in, say, Cleveland.
One year I started slow before winning the final 10 games of the regular season. Can you believe that? A 10-game win streak! Of course, I was bounced in the first round of the playoffs. I think Andy Richardson might have won the league that year. But that's not the point! Wait, what was the point? Oh, yeah. No matter your record, you can still make the post-season. That's not what I mean about wheat and chaff.
I mean that week 5 is when you'll learn how many active owners you have in your league. You should have 12, right? Well, maybe you do. Or maybe you have 11. You might even have 10. Whatever the number is, you're about to find out.
Bye weeks exist to give teams a rest, stretch out the season a bit and help the league indulge in its silly London obsession. For us, it presents a challenge to work around roster restrictions and face opponents without some of our best players. We get an extra week of the season, but we get a few headaches as well.
We also get some insight as to which owners have abandoned their teams. If you see a squad with players from New Orleans, Atlanta, Denver or Washington in the starting lineup, your league might have a problem. There could be other reasons (emergencies happen), but if they're struggling, it's more likely that you have an orphaned team.
Good owners might see 0-4 as a disappointment, but a challenge as well. But bad owners don't even see 0-4. They see 3-1 or 4-0. Not in your league, of course. But somewhere out there, they're dominating a league. So they say to themselves, why bother with this one blemish when all these title possibilities could use that attention? And just like that, your league is an afterthought.
It's maddening to have an owner ruin the league just a few weeks into the season. But on the bright side, we're just a few weeks into the season. There's still time to avoid a year-long crisis. Week 5 might have a few lopsided matches, but if the commissioner is on the ball, that won't happen in week 6.
They'll need help, though. That's where you come in. I'm not going to ask you to remind your opponent that Drew Brees is off this week. It might be the right thing to do, but I understand the appeal of getting a little break in a challenging season. And the owner might actually update their lineup on Sunday morning. You don't really know what's going on until the games actually start. But after the game, you need to notify the commissioner that there might be an abandoned team.
I also don't think you should jump to conclusions. The Rob Gronkowski owner might not have known that he wasn't going to play Thursday night. Leaving him in might not be a sign of an abandoned team.
But if Julio Jones, Kirk Cousins and Michael Thomas are all in the same starting lineup in week 5 (I have all three on one team) you need to take good look at that owner. The league needs to establish if they're still active, and decide what to do if they aren't.
Some leagues might take a hands-off approach and leave things as they are. I think that's a terrible idea. In my mind, that owner needs to go. They're hurting the league, and you don't need them to keep the season going, anyway. You could find a replacement owner, you could have the commissioner start the highest-ranked player each week, or that team's opponents could simply play the league average each week instead of an actual roster. I don't think you should let a team drift through the season, doling out cheap wins across the schedule.
But whatever you do, you need to start now, at the beginning of the bye weeks. Things will only get worse. As teams go from 1-3 to 1-6, the risk will be greater. And each win or loss will mean more to bubble teams, so a gimme on the schedule will upset plenty of other league members. It's time to do something now.
Don't be afraid to cut ties with owners who have cut ties with you. Be vigilant now, and save your league headaches later. Good luck this week.
How does your league handle owners who leave bye week players in? Do they get penalized, could they lose their team or is it up to them whether or not they're active? Share your thoughts below.