With two waiver runs in the FFPC Main Event – one on Wednesday night, and another 48 hours later – there’s an underused strategy that’s pretty effective if you can take advantage of it: When everyone else has presumably started their weekend, sneak a guy onto your roster with a low bid on Friday night.
This is the ploy that John Lapinski and I employed to near perfection last Friday while submitting waiver bids for the FFPC Main Event team we run together. We had picked up Teddy Bridgewater, our third quarterback, on Wednesday, and we decided to drop him for someone else on Friday. The problem was the lack of many appealing free-agent options. I put in for J.J. Arcega-Whiteside, because I keep trying to make JJAW happen.[1] John suggested Tee Higgins. When he messaged me, I was picking up my family’s takeout dinner and assumed he was putting in for Higgins. Indeed, he was. Except for one thing: The waiver system works only when you save your bid group, which John later discovered he failed to do when he saw this was still displayed in an open browser tab the next morning:
Which made this line all the more painful:[2]
Alas, getting Higgins for $1 would have been a steal in a week where the Week 2 injury apocalypse led to free-agent spending sprees among Main Event bidders. Mike Davis was added in 119 Main Event leagues at an average winning bid of $659, or almost two-thirds of the bidding dollars that each team gets to start the season. That’s insane. You would have had to believe rather firmly that Davis would inherit a comparable workload to the injured Christian McCaffrey, the guy he’s replacing. For this week, at least, it was true: Davis turned 22 touches into 91 total yards, eight catches and a touchdown.
On the other Main Event team I help run, we were outbid by nearly $400 for Davis, so we settled for Jeff Wilson, a fill-in for our top starting running back Raheem Mostert, who was inactive. With an average winning bid of $144 – we got him for $132 – Wilson was a fine spot starter Sunday, scoring two TDs.
After Week 3 is in the books, the 11-game Main Event regular season will be more than 25% complete, and the desperation to stay in the hunt was evident in the bids that were placed last week.
