Draft season is important, but savvy fantasy football managers know that fantasy football start/sit strategy is the key to winning games. The way to triumph in this weekly fantasy football start/sit struggle is be to both smart and strategic.
This review will walk you through various smart strategies, starting with the core principles of how to decide who to start in fantasy football. It will then guide you through how to use weekly fantasy football rankings to determine your start/sit choices.
Finally, we'll give you additional start sit tips and direct you to various RotoWire tools that can offer you the best lineup advice every week of a fantasy football season.
Master the Core Principles of Start/Sit Strategy
The best way to master the core principles of start sit/strategy is by reviewing matchup quality. You can do this with the Who Should I Start tool. This is a state of the art NFL lineup optimizer that allows you to compare five players. This comparison goes through 25,000 simulations in seconds and lets you know which of these players fared best in those simulations.
There are also fully customizable player projections available once you subscribe to RotoWire. You can either import your leagues into this system or manually type in your league's scoring setup. Once you do that, this system give you detailed scoring projections for every player. This includes defensive players for those in IDP leagues. You can then sort through these rankings by position or do a customizable search.
There are also ceiling and floor fantasy football projections available in Projections category at RotoWire. This is extremely useful if you need to find a high ceiling or high floor player for a particular matchup that calls for that type of starter.
One other useful tool is the NFL injuries report. Use this in conjunction with the NFL weather report to identify other important elements that may impact your start-sit decisions in a given week.
How to Use a Start/Sit Tool Effectively
The best place to start with a start/sit tool is to see what your team needs are in a given week. If you do this early in the week, you can identify positions that might need an upgrade via the NFL waiver wire. You can find the RotoWire Waiver Wire report in the Featured tab on the Fantasy NFL pulldown menu.
Once you have acquired the best players on waivers, you should then look at your upcoming matchup projection. If you are projected to win by a large amount, you may decide to go with high floor players when picking between start/sit options. If it looks like you may lose this week, you'll want to put as many high ceiling players into your lineup as you can. The aforementioned ceiling and floor projections tool is made to assist you with this type of decision.
You may also decide to go with a hot hand or target favorable matchups. RotoWire has tools to help you in both of these areas. You can also get granular with data. A great example of this is the TE route data tool. This will show you which tight ends are running routes on a high percentage of plays and which ones are staying in to block.
Figuring Out Who Should be Your Flex Starter
Here's a real-world example of how you can use RotoWire's Who Should I Start tool to pick your starting wide receivers. Let's say you have Davante Adams, Michael Pittman Jr. and Rome Odunze as your options and you can only start two.
A recent search in this tool showed that Adams was the highest scorer among these three in 38% of the 25,000 simulations this tool ran. Odunze was second at 32.7% and Pittman third at 29.3%. This shows that Adams and Odunze are probably the best start options on the board.
Set Your Lineup in Minutes
One of the best parts of the Who Should I Start tool is how easy it is to use. Once you have finished one review, it's easy to clear the players out and start over with a new set of players.
You could do this for all of your leagues in minutes and know that you are getting state-of-the-art insights that are invaluable in putting together the best fantasy starting roster.
