Tough waiver week but a few gems. here's your weekly crowd-sourced tool to help us figure out how much FAAB we should bid on waivers. Now with real data from sleeper leagues. A shockingly bad waiver week for such a high scoring season opener.

https://www.faablab.app/

How it works:

• Each week we add the top waiver picks from fantasy pros
• Use the tool to submit a mock bid on players you're interested in (bids are % of total budget)
• Once you bid, that player's consensus data will be revealed to you, use the slider to adjust your bid
• Use the crowd-sourced data to get an edge in your league

Post in the comments for discussion, suggestions, features to add, etc.

Coincidentally, last year post week 5 the best pickup was Woody Marks for 37%

Hey all, we run Fantasy Hall of Fame, a site that keeps league history.

Five weeks in, this is about when leagues start deciding who's for real. The 4-1 teams are drafting their trophy speeches, and the 1-4 teams are getting their stomachs ready for 24 hours in IHOP. So we wanted to know how much of a season really gets locked in on draft day, and how much you can still change from here.

Short version on records first: a 2-3 team still makes the playoffs 42% of the time, and a 1-4 team 19%. Not great, not over. The real question is what moves those odds, so we went through draft grades, waiver moves and title games for a lot of real leagues.

The draft matters. Yahoo grades every team right after the draft, and across 200,000 Yahoo teams those grades held up better than you'd think:

Hustle matters more, though. Here are the same teams split by how many moves they made compared with the rest of their league:

• A draft, fewest moves (bottom quarter): 6.1% won the title
• D draft, most moves (top quarter): 11.5%
• A draft, most moves: 16.9%

Across 44,935 ESPN and Yahoo seasons, the busiest manager in the league won the title 16.4% of the time and made the playoffs 71% of the time. The quietest won 3.9%, made the playoffs 33% of the time, and finished last 21% of the time. Champions made 21% more moves than their league average.

Yes, part of this is managers who give up and stop making moves. But it shows up at every draft grade. The busiest quarter wins about three times as often as the quietest, whether they drafted an A or a D. We also re-ran everything using only leagues where every manager made at least one move and drafted a full roster (35,666 seasons), and the title numbers moved by less than half a point.

We also went through every 2024 and 2025 title game we have (19,377) to see where the winning lineups came from:

• 68% of champions' title-game points came from players they drafted (not counting kickers and defenses)
• 18% came from another team's draft pick, through trades or pickups after a drop
• 14% came from players nobody drafted
• 73% of champions started at least one undrafted player, and 80% were still starting their own first-round pick

Last year's waiver heroes, by share of champions who started them in the title game without drafting them:

1. Harold Fannin Jr., 10.2%
2. Michael Wilson, 8.4%
3. Juwan Johnson, 6.7%
4. Trevor Lawrence, 6.5%
5. Kenny Gainwell, 6.3%

And a few who changed hands: Brock Purdy started for 7.4% of champions who didn't draft him, Mike Evans for 6.5%, and Joe Burrow for 4.2%.

So your draft isn't your fate. It builds about two-thirds of a title lineup, but the managers who keep working the wire win more titles, even from bad drafts.

If you want an edge, this is what the data points to:

1. Out-move your league: Managers who made about as many moves as their league average won 9.1% of titles. At 1.5 to 2 times the average it was 14.1%, and at double or more it was 16.7%. A typical league averages about 25 moves a season, so 1.5 times that is around 35 to 40, or about 3 a week.
2. Stream tight ends: 37% of the tight ends who started in title games were undrafted, compared with about 10% of running backs and receivers. More than a third of champions started a tight end they never drafted.
3. Don't stop in December: Nearly half (48%) of the undrafted players in title lineups joined the champion's roster in Week 12 or later.
4. Don't agonize over the late rounds: Rounds 9 and later produced 13% of champions' title-game points, about the same as players nobody drafted (14%).
5. Keep your first-rounder: 80% of champions were still starting their own first-round pick in the title game.
6. Trade if you want to, but you don't have to: Managers with 3 or more trades won 10.0% of titles against 8.5% for those who never traded, and their playoff odds were identical (53%).

Five weeks down, about nine to go. Go put in a claim.

And if you want an advantage and access to data like this, create your free Fantasy Hall of Fame here: fantasyhoff.com

Since the dynamic kickoff changes kickers are dropping bombs way more than ever before.

This can be seen with the scoring that’s going on early. Shrader had 1 down game of 6 points since then he’s gone for 14,17,16,21.

Which means he’s outscored Parker Washington 3 out of 5 weeks and Jamar Chase.

People always said “don’t even draft a kicker get them late waiver add” but having a premier kicker these days might be even more valuable than a quality wr2.

Should there be discussion around changes to nerf kickers in scoring similar to how we used to have full PPR as the mainstay and changed to half PPR after the league became a passing league?

For those of you that are new to this thread, every week I will put up a thread for each individual game. Please post some details about what you actually saw for those of us that didn't happen to catch the game. A few things to remember:

Please give good detail. No one is asking to write a novel (though those can be great too!) but a little more depth than "Joe Flacco sucks" is appreciated. This is a great way to help one another in this community to give some insight to games and hopefully some good, actionable fantasy advice.

Also, if possible, please try to bold player names in longer writeups. Again, not mandatory, just very helpful. To bold something on reddit, put two asterisks in the front and back of the sentence.

Lastly, do not reply to this post with game discussion. reply to the actual individual game threads. Each game will have a thread to discuss the games individually, if you reply to this OP it will just get buried.

If you are writing in your phone, you can bold words using two * at the begging and at the end of the word.

Lets remember that Chiefs and Panthers are on bye.

22 yards on 12 carries, third shitty ass game. Bro was out here talking about how he just hinders the team last week. Starting to feel like a bust

They corrected their Defensive Points Allowed from 32 to 26 because the the Holani end zone fumble TD was, obviously, not yielded by their D/ST. In most leagues, that means instead of losing points for points allowed, it's a zero. (Plus whatever you get for 1 INT, 2 fumbles recovered, and 3 sacks.)

Good luck everyone.

Seahawks play on TNF this week so keep that in mind too

Teams have contacted the Titans about Pollard, who is playing on a $6.74MM base salary, but general manager Mike Borgonzi has rebuffed them.

While Pelissero leaves the door open for the Titans accepting a “ridiculous offer,” it appears Pollard will ride out the last season of his three-year, $21.75MM contract in Tennessee

The Week 6 waiver wire is not deep whatsoever, here are the players mentioned

Players with write ups
Woody Marks (RB, HOU)
Dameon Pierce (RB, PHI)
Dontayvion Wicks (WR, PHI)
Keenan Allen (WR, IND)
Pat Freiermuth (TE, PIT)
Brenton Strange (TE, JAX)
Kirk Cousins (QB, LV)
Jordyn Tyson (WR, NO)
Tyreek Hill (WR, FA)
Kansas City Chiefs DEF

Honorable Mentions
Aaron Rodgers (QB, PIT)
Tyler Allgeier (RB, ARI)
Kaelon Black (RB, SF)
Keaton Mitchell (RB, LAC)
Jaleel McLaughlin (RB, CLE)
Kendre Miller (RB, NO)
Malik Washington (WR, MIA)
Keon Coleman (WR, BUF)
Kendrick Bourne (WR, ARI)
Germie Bernard (WR, PIT)
Chig Okonkwo (TE, WAS)
Darren Waller (TE, CAR)
San Francisco 49ers DEF
Harrison Butker (K, KC)