Despite the hours and hours we put into our preseason research, player rankings, and draft boards, the reality of the majority of fantasy football leagues is that your season isn’t won or lost on draft day. That isn’t to say you can’t put yourself in pole position with a great draft, or be on life support with a shocker, but where you win or lose your fantasy league in any given season, is astute management of your roster during the season.

So, what does that mean? What should we be doing as fantasy owners to maximize our chances for end-of-season glory? Well, the first port of call is having a strong grasp on your roster management, supported by some smart waiver wire play. You also shouldn’t underestimate knowing your leaguemates, and using that to your advantage when it comes to trades. Finally, come the second half of the season, you need to be planning for the playoffs.

In-season advice runs rampant for regular fantasy leagues. Below, let’s look at the best in-season strategies for your IDP league.

Roster management

When it comes to managing your roster it’s good to have a very clear idea of how you want your roster to look. By that I mean, how many backups and bye-week replacement players you hold at any given position. For example, if your league allows you to start two defensive linemen, I would recommend rostering just three, unless you have very deep benches that allows you to stockpile. The caveat to this advice is that you would want to have at least one fairly secure weekly starter, being a dependable DL2 or better. If you passed on D-linemen on draft day and have taken a streaming approach, you would potentially need to carry two benchwarmers. The logic here is, if you have a insta-start at a position, you need less in the way of depth because there are fewer starter spots to compete for on a weekly basis.

It’s worth adding that you want to make your gameday decision-making as simple as possible. Remember, fantasy is supposed to be fun, and if you’re giving yourself a headache every weekend with your choices because you have three or four very closely matched players vying for one or two starter spots, you’ll end up over-analyzing everything. Whether it’s team matchups, individual player matchups, stat crew tendencies, etc… you’ll then get frustrated by the inevitable wrong selection because of the natural variance in scoring and player production. The fewer decisions you have to make, the less likely it is you’ll make a bad decision that costs you a win, and also less likely you leave a big score and potential game winner on the bench.

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