Okay, folks.  We’re in the thick of the Fantasy Football season.

Some of you might be diligent in your team planning.  By now, you should have gotten the jist of the game and are hopefully checking your players to see how they’re doing each week and making the appropriate adjustments.

Some of you might have forgotten about Fantasy Football completely.  You had every intention of playing and learning, but life just got in the way and you guiltily tell yourself you’ll check it when you can.  Trust me, it happens to the best of us.

At this point in the season, NFL teams are taking their bye weeks.  Each NFL team plays 16 games out of 17 weeks in the NFL schedule. The game that they don’t play is called their bye week, or “Open Date”. It is important in fantasy football to make sure that your starters and backups do not have the same bye week since one of the primary reasons for drafting backup players to have coverage during the bye week of your starter.

I went over how to use the Waiver Wire a few weeks ago, so if you need help adding and dropping players, you should get what you need from there.  I also put a YouTube video up of how to put players on the trading block, if any of you are switching players around.

As you might have noticed, this game is completely unpredictable.  One week, you have a healthy player bring you 20 fantasy points and the following week, that same player is pulled from the lineup because of an injury.

If you’re really into this, you’ll probably check your team every few days.  If you’re my husband, you’ll check YOUR fantasy team every day, twice a day and then gloat when you kick your WIFE’S ass the week of our match up.  Dink.

At the very least, be sure to check your team each week by Thursday afternoons.  I say this because as the year continues, we’ll start seeing games on Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, so you’ll want to be sure you have your starters all set.

That said, if you have any questions on the game, please leave them in the comments on this post so I can address them in the coming weeks.  We’re about halfway through the season and I love the enthusiasm I’m seeing with league players.  I’m already planning for next year and we’ve decided to have two separate training leagues – one all female basic training league and another couple league, where you’ll be able to compete against your significant other every week!  Ryan, I am gonna beat your ass!  WOO!!!