While Salary Cap Sports fantasy football has the same basic strategy as other SCS games, football presents an especially difficult task of managing your trades properly. SCS football provides you with 12 roster spots (2 QB, 3 RB, 3 WR, 2 TE, 1 DEF, 1 Special teams), and only four trades per week. Based on simple math you could trade each player on your team and replace them once every three weeks. This may sound like an easy task, but while you're trying to increase your franchise value you'll find several players on your roster each week who have under performed and seem as though they need to be traded. Add in the enhanced risk of injury in football, and every player having a bye week at some point in the season, and you have a recipe for running out of trades and ruining your best laid plans.
There are a few strategies you can use in the preseason which may help you conserve some trades once the season begins:
- Pay very close attention to player’s schedules in the preseason. You may have your eye on a top tier quarterback who you think is going to be great this season, but if they're playing the best defense in the NFL on the first week, and another good defense on the second week, then you might be much better off with a lower priced, lower quality quarterback who has an easy schedule for the first four weeks. In the NFL it is true that defenses tend to be a little hard to predict from year to year, but with a little research you can certainly determine which weeks look like they're going to be difficult match-ups.
- Bye weeks in the NFL tend not to happen in the first three or four weeks, so perhaps you don't need to pay that much attention to bye weeks. But it might be a good idea to add a player or two who have bye weeks in week 12 or 13, have a reasonable price, and are historically durable. If you can just get a couple of roster spots locked in for the long term then you can use trades elsewhere.
- Another preseason strategy would be to look at a player who is considered one of the best in the league, like Patrick Mahomes, for example. His price tag might make him too expensive to fit on your roster at the beginning of the season, but let's say, for example, that his bye week is week 6. This means, given that most rosters will have enough money by week 7 to afford Mahomes, that you should plan now to buy Mahomes on week 7. What does this mean? It means that you shouldn't be drafting a quarterback in the preseason with a bye week in week 5. It would be much better to buy a quarterback who you think you can hold for the first six weeks and then plan to just switch straight into Mahomes on week 7.
- You may think that you can choose an NFL defense and just stick with that defense for the whole season in an effort to conserve trades. This certainly will conserve trades and perhaps it's not a bad strategy, however, in SCS a defense often will be the highest scoring “Player” each week. Look at the schedule of a higher priced or better defense. During the periods of time when they are playing three or four poor offenses in a row, they probably will score a very large amount of points and have nice player price increases each week. During the season you might want to spend a good amount of time thinking about which defense you want and making sure that you have enough trades available to buy this defense and also to switch to another when necessary.
- While NFL defenses are high scoring and often predictable. NFL special teams are a little more unpredictable, and perhaps offer the opportunity to buy and hold to conserve trades. As with all players though, if you buy a special teams unit with a bye week in week 6 then you're going to be spending a trade early in the season (or just eating the point loss for the week that your special teams unit is on bye).
- Should you buy any player with a bye in week 5? If you own a player that has a bye week in week 5 then you pretty much have to trade that player after week 4. This may fit into your plans but whoever you trade into on week 5 is going to also have a bye coming up. With this in mind, it seems that players with bye weeks further into the future are more desirable for maximum roster flexibility.
SCS games have a lot of different angles to consider, those are just a few on how to approach SCS football preseason. Good luck!