Fantasy Football: How to Redeem Your Season After an 0-3 Start

The following is an excerpt from the latest edition of Yahoo’s fantasy football newsletter, Get to the Points! If you like what you see, you can subscribe for free here.

If your fantasy team is 0-3, welcome to Super Bowl week. You’re in it now. Mathematically, this may not actually be one must-win, but we don’t recommend losing for the fourth week in a row.

Way back in the preseason we mentioned the fact that fantasy teams that started 0-3 in Yahoo public leagues last year qualified for the playoffs only 12% of the time. You don’t even want to know what the odds are for 0-4 teams. As you might imagine, they’re, um… not great.

Of course, you don’t need an expert to tell you that it’s time to consider winning one of your matchups. The how-to is the tricky part.

Here are a few difficult truths – and an optimistic nugget – to consider if you’re a winless manager:

🤝Maybe it’s time to lose a trade.

Or better said, it might be time to take a long-term hit on a trade that increases your chance of winning in week 4. Different managers should currently have different time horizons depending on their position in the standings. An 0-3 team with an injured star like Christian McCaffrey or Puka Nacua (or AJ Brown or Cooper Kupp) on the bench should seriously consider any offer that increases its points projection in the short term. You don’t have the luxury of patience. CMC can only help you win the consolation prize.

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🚫 However, keep in mind that you don’t want the vultures to pick off your legitimately useful and healthy players.

Let’s not give away CeeDee Lamb in exchange for two or three mid-level guys. As a general rule, if you find yourself trading away the arguably best player in a deal, you’re wiped out.

💰 Empty FAB wallet quickly.

Ideally, we would have mentioned this before the waivers came into effect this week. Sorry. Keep in mind that you are no longer in a good position to save FAB funds for the late season. It’s late for you now. If a high-stakes player were to start for your team this week, spend whatever it takes to get him.

🤔 In a goalkeeper or dynasty league, it might be time to think about 2025.

After all, that is the advantage of playing in such a format. Again, different teams are focused on different timelines – and yours could extend beyond 2024. The players you deal away now are worth significantly more in terms of future assets because they have fourteen weeks of fantasy production ahead of them.

But clearly not each a winless team has to go into full tank mode because…

💪 You might judge yourself and determine that you can indeed still win this thing.

For some of us, that 0-3 start is really an accident of the power of the schedule. I have a super flex team with two good quarterbacks and Bijan Robinson on the roster that is still in the hunt for its first win despite scoring the third most points in the league. That team isn’t ready to tank, and it certainly isn’t handing out stars for other people’s leftovers.

I mean, if 12% of all 0-3 managers are still going to make the playoffs, why not us? (Keep in mind, though, that you can still sign up for another competition, just in case your luck doesn’t cooperate.)