When should you move on from players in your fantasy football league? What should you make of unsettled running back situations? How about handling bye weeks? PressBox fantasy football analyst Ken Zalis shares his midseason advice.
PressBox: How early is too early to move on from players who are not performing to their predraft expectations?
Ken Zalis: It all depends on what your record is right now. If you [got off to a bad start] and you don’t want to deal with the Chargers situation or you’ve been trotting out Kyle Pitts and waiting for him to have a moment or a game and turn into the quality tight end that he was, I think you’re at that point. You really can’t afford to wait for those guys. If you [got off to a .500 or better start], obviously you have a little bit of leeway to wait on those guys. We’re getting there. We’re going to be at the midway point of the season in fantasy football [soon]. It’s early, but it’s getting late.
PB: Should fantasy football managers be more active than they typically are ahead of the trade deadline?
KZ: Most leagues, somewhere around Week 10 or Week 11 of the NFL season is probably where your trade deadline is. I play in a lot of dynasty leagues, but in the redraft leagues I wish more people would be more active with trades. It’s always a good time to try to improve your team. I always say that people sometimes get scared to make trade offers because they think that people are going to feel they’re stupid if they think it’s a bad trade offer. There’s no such thing as a bad trade offer. It’s really easy to hit the reject button or the counter button of what it would take for the players that somebody’s asking for. We all value players differently. We did that in the draft season. That’s why we have hundreds of experts on things like FantasyPros that do rankings, and they’re all different. That’s why we do our weekly rankings. We all have differences of opinion. I wish more people would go that route.
PB: At what point of the season should managers have a feel for the running back situations that were unsettled heading into the season?
KZ: It depends. Seattle’s a perfect example. Based on that draft capital that they used on Jadarian Price, we thought that was going to be their answer for losing Kenneth Walker. It wasn’t. We saw right away that George Holani was very involved from the start. Even though we really liked how Price looked before he got hurt, it was a shared backfield. We knew at some point that Zach Charbonnet was going to come back. Now it looks like Emanuel Wilson is a thing there until Charbonnet is back.
There are situations that we thought were going to be very clear. We thought that Omarion Hampton for the Chargers was going to be a bell-cow running back. That hasn’t been the case. Maybe that’s because that offense is going through growing pains with a new coordinator, but Keaton Mitchell has seemingly been a better fit in that backfield [recently].
Washington has been a mess with Jacory Croskey-Merritt and Rachaad White. We thought White was going to have a really big role, and then he gets injured. Austin Ekeler, who nobody had on their bingo card at the beginning of the season, comes in and becomes the third-down back.
Some may never get settled this year, but then you look to a place like Jacksonville. They move on from Travis Etienne, who’s in New Orleans. We thought Bhayshul Tuten was the de facto guy, but they bring in Chris Rodriguez and he has a role. You’re starting see a bigger role week in and week out for Tuten, and it’s starting to get clearer by the week that he’s going to be the bell-cow guy there. I think every situation is different, but you can start to see some trends and get a couple things settled.
PB: Bye weeks run through Week 14 this year. How should managers plan around those?
KZ: When you’re looking at the waiver wire, how much sense does it make to get a guy that’s going to be on bye next week and may not have the starting job when they’re back after the bye because people return from injury and things like that? You have to take a little gander ahead. I don’t think it’s overrated. I think it’s smart. I also tell people to think a week ahead. Look at who you’re going to have on bye [two weeks from now] and maybe make a late waiver-wire move for somebody that may be useful to you because you know you’re going to get hit with a bunch of teams on bye the following week.
It’s just smart. It’s how the game has to be played. You cannot live week to week and start half a lineup because most of your team is on bye. It’s smart to look ahead. One to two weeks is probably what I would recommend to people looking ahead for your bye weeks. Don’t go crazy. Don’t drop somebody that’s going to be valuable to you for the majority of the season. Sometimes you have to take an L just to take an L, and it’s OK. But you do have to look ahead and not just play for the moment at this point.
PB: When do managers know what matchups to target if they’re streaming defenses?
KZ: Right now, if they’re facing backup quarterbacks you’re targeting them. We didn’t realize before the season how good the Vikings were going to be defensively and frankly how good Atlanta was going to be defensively. I think it’s a week-to-week thing. You find the matchups. I’m a big believer in Vegas knowing more than we do sometimes. You go after the teams that are going to be in the lowest-scoring games and try to them stream them. … Especially with bye weeks, defenses and kickers get dropped that shouldn’t be.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox
Issue 301: October / November 2026
Originally published Oct. 14, 2026