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 squad sits at 0-3, welcome to Super Bowl week. You’re in it right now. Mathematically, this might not actually be a must-win, but we would not recommend losing for a fourth straight week.

Way back in the preseason, we mentioned the fact that fantasy teams starting 0-3 in Yahoo public leagues last year only qualified for the playoffs 12% of the time. You don’t even want to know about the odds for 0-4 teams. As you might imagine, they are, 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 one optimistic nugget — you need to confront if you’re a winless manager:

🤝 Maybe it’s time to lose a trade.

Or rather, it might be time to take a long-term hit on a trade that improves your probability of winning in Week 4. Different managers should have different time horizons right now, depending on their placement in the standings. An 0-3 team with an injured star like Christian McCaffrey or Puka Nacua (or A.J. Brown or Cooper Kupp) on its bench needs to seriously consider any offer that increases the short-term point projection. You don’t have the luxury of patience. CMC can’t help you win anything but the consolation bracket.

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🚫 Please note, however, that you do not want to allow the vultures to scoop up your legitimately useful and healthy players.

Let’s not deal away CeeDee Lamb in exchange for two or three mid-tier dudes. As a general rule, if you find yourself trading away the no-doubt best player in a deal, you’ve been fleeced.

💰 Empty the FAB wallet, soon.

Ideally, we would have mentioned this before waivers ran this week. Apologies. Just please know that you are no longer in a great position to save FAB resources for late-season leverage. For you, it’s late right now. If a player on the wire would start for your team this week, spend whatever it takes to get ‘em.

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

That’s the benefit to playing in such a format, after all. Again, different teams are focused on different timelines — and yours might stretch beyond 2024. The players you deal away now are worth significantly more in terms of future assets, because they have 14 weeks of fantasy production ahead of them.

But obviously not every winless team needs to enter full tank-mode, because …

💪 You might self-assess and determine you can, in fact, still win this thing.

For some of us, that 0-3 start is truly an accident of schedule strength. I’ve got a superflex team with two good quarterbacks and Bijan Robinson on the roster that’s still hunting for its first win, despite having scored the third-most points in the league. That squad isn’t ready to tank, and it certainly isn’t dealing away stars for other people’s scraps.

I mean, if 12% of all the 0-3 managers are still gonna make the playoffs, why not us? (But also please note that you can still sign up for another league, just in case your luck doesn’t turn.)