While trying to select my start-up team for SC 2012, I've been finding it difficult to plan ahead for the bye rounds. I've been able to successfully navigate this over the past few seasons, but I am finding the new bye format particularly difficult. Interested to hear everyone's thoughts and ideas.
The 2 things making planning for this year's byes particularly difficult is the timing of them (mid season), and the sheer volume of teams missing each week. By the time they come around your team is likely to look quite different by then than it did at round 1. In all likelihood you will have cashed in some of your cash cows for upgrades. Splitting your start-up premiums and your newly acquired premiums over the 3 bye rounds is easy enough, but there is NO way of knowing which downgrade targets ar going to be available mid season. It is quite possible that the downgrade targets who are actually playing at that time will come from the same teams as your premiums, hence making the likelihood of copping zeros very real. The question you will have to ask yourself is; Do I go with the best downgrade target even if that means I can't cover players missing with a bye, and cop a zero? or Do I try to cover all missing players with perhaps inferior downgrade targets, either due to scoring potential or job security? I think that perhaps we are just going to have to change our attitude towards copping zeros, as I think we may all cop a few this year. In my opinion, the only useful planning that you can do for the byes is to spread your premiums over the 3 rounds. There is little point in worrying about which rounds your rookies have their byes, because they may not even be in your team by the time they come around.
cdcanman, exactly what i was thinking re not taking into account when you're rookies have byes. on the other hand, we will have to consider who we will be upgrading to if we plan on doing so before the bye rounds. i think there may be times when we might have to compromise and not necessarily go for our no1 upgrade target if that means too many potential 0's in one round. then again, it may mean we stock up on more rookies with r12 or r13 byes and do some of our upgrading after r11. we could target those premiums with the r11 bye, potentially avoiding a 0 in a line altogether.
Just a tip guys (if you don't know already) Wait until Walesy rolls the site over to the 2012 season, upload your team, and use the ticker to see where your issues are with the byes. Makes it alot easier with a visual tool.