WAIVER OVERVIEW
Waivers are the process by which owners can select from the pool of available players who are not on a team’s roster in the league. They may have been undrafted or dropped by owners. Owners can put a claim for that player, but must wait a specified amount of time until the waiver clears. The team that puts a claim on a player and has the better waiver priority number (closest to 1) will receive the player when waivers clear. An option of having waivers turned off is available, as well. All available players not on waivers are considered free agents.

After you have your Fantasy Football team established and a few weeks under your belt to properly gauge where you stand amongs the league it’s time to hit the waver wire.  By now you’ll have a good idea of who your key players are and who is just not performing.  Take a look at your ‘bottom feaders’ and compare there stats against players available on the waver wire.

If the wire players are averaging better than your bench then make the swap.  What really seperates two evenly matched fantasy teams is the bench.  Starting at week four, teams will start taking bye weeks, any week during the regular season in which a team does not play a game. Each NFL team will have one “bye week” during a normal season; this is placed on the schedule between Week 3 and Week 10.

What this means is your ‘stud’ players will suddenly not be available to play from one week to the next.  That’s where your bench players start earning your hard earned fantasy dollar.  Just because your opponent has Adrian Petersen on their team dosn’t do them a lot of good on week 9 when he’s on a bye.  All of a sudden you might stand a chance at RB  because your bench guy is better than your opponents.

Each week you should go out and try to ‘trim-the-fat’ and build the best bench a wire transaction can build.

All players not on a fantasy roster will be placed on Waivers, they will be individually locked at the start of their team’s game that week. Their status will change from “FA” to “Claim”.*

Players dropped by an owner reside on waivers for at least 48 hours before clearing waivers. At the clearance time, the player is assigned to either a team (if a claim was made) or the free-agent pool (if no claim was made). Unclaimed players not acquired during the waiver period become free agents and may be picked up on a first-come, first-serve basis without affecting a team’s waiver position.

If multiple claims are submitted for a particular player, the claims are resolved based on the waiver position of each team involved in the waiver claim. A team’s waiver position is the relative power you have when selecting a player off of the waiver wire. When more than one team requests a player in on the waiver wire, the player is awarded to the team with the better waiver position (closest to “1″). When a claim is resolved, the waiver position for the team that receives the player is changed to the lowest possible priority (10), and all the other teams move up a position.

*Courtesy ESPN.com