Fantasy Football 101: FAAB Strategies
Make sure to check out our other Fantasy 101 articles to get a full, well-rounded introduction to other important elements of fantasy football.
This article will dive into FAAB and how to strategize using the newer player acquisition system found in many leagues in the current era of fantasy football.
What Is FAAB?
FAAB stands for free agency acquisition budget. It is a substitution for the old standby waiver wire system with which many fantasy managers are familiar. In leagues that use FAAB, each manager is given the same budget of FAAB dollars to start the season. Throughout the year, you can use these FAAB dollars to blindly bid on players in hopes of outbidding your league-mates.
Of course, if you are outbid on a player, your FAAB dollars will be refunded back to your squad for future use. In the peculiar event of the same bid on a player among two or more managers, the player will be distributed to the manager who least recently acquired a player via FAAB, similar to the normal waiver wire.
Like any other currency, however, you only have a finite amount of FAAB and must choose to spend wisely. Once exhausted, there is no way to recoup FAAB outside of acquiring the currency via trade.
Though $100 in FAAB is the standard/default amount in most leagues, every league is different. Because of this, you will often hear the Ballers mention spending a particular percentage of FAAB on a given player rather than an actual amount.
Now that we know the basics, let’s consider some of the different strategies often found in the world of FAAB.
Go Big or Go Home
Nearly every fantasy season, an undrafted player shows out on Week 1 and becomes an incredibly valuable asset for weeks on end. Last season provided two great examples of this, with the early emergence of both Kyren Williams and Puka Nacua. In most leagues, both of these players went undrafted; despite this, both finished in the top 10 at their position.
Congrats to everyone who dumped their FAAB sack on Puka Nacua.
9 targets and 2 carries just after halftime. The team is doing everything possible to get the ball in his hands.
He is looking like every bit of the real deal.
— Dave Kluge (@DaveKluge) September 17, 2023
Acquiring a top-tier player via FAAB is easily worth 100% of your budget. However, hindsight is 20/20, and it’s not always easy to pick out the next Puka Nacua or Kyren Williams after one week of play. While both players were heavily bid on for well over 50% FAAB in many leagues, there were just as many highly sought-after players who didn’t end up panning out.
Like all of fantasy football, FAAB bidding is a gamble. If you’re confident in a player’s ability to maintain high production, you should absolutely be willing to spend most, if not all, of your FAAB in the preliminary weeks of the season.
Capitalize on Injuries
Like death and taxes, injuries are bound to happen every season. Each injury that sidelines a player for at least one game brings with it a major opportunity for the player(s) behind them. While your league-mates gamble for the next team-changing players early in the year, you can stash your FAAB for the players with clear paths toward opportunity and success after injuries.
One drawback to this strategy is the randomness of the injuries, potentially coming too late or too little. Another potential drawback is that some injuries may provide an unclear beneficiary. This can leave managers guessing between multiple options with the possibility of squandering FAAB on the wrong player.
Certainly makes the aggressive Ford add riskier. But the team barely used Hunt over the 2nd half last year and didn’t bring him back. So I still lean Ford is worth the add, but again, higher risk going huge FAAB. Still worth a priority burn. https://t.co/VQKzDkxEjN
— Mike Wright (@FFHitman) September 20, 2023
In 2023, patient managers were heavily rewarded when Nick Chubb unfortunately tore his ACL, MCL, and meniscus. Chubb was gone for the remaining 16 weeks after this Week 2 injury, and managers quickly entered a bidding war for Jerome Ford, who took over in the game in which Chubb was injured in front of a national audience. Ford went on to finish as the RB17 in half-PPR scoring, and managers with large amounts of FAAB were able to strike and acquire an incredibly valuable player midway through the season.
Zero-Bidding
Though your budget of FAAB dollars is important for outbidding your league-mates, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to put FAAB on the line to make a claim. Zero-bidding is pretty self-explanatory: you can bid $0 and still win a claim as long as nobody else bids on that player, or you win the tiebreaker over any other zero-bidders.
Especially in formats that give managers $100 or less to start the season, bidding $0 – or low amounts in general – can be a very beneficial strategy for acquiring players further down the board. Zero-bidding pairs very well with either of the previously mentioned strategies that can drain your FAAB rather quickly.
Streaming
Popularized in the normal waiver wire format, streaming “onesie” position players on a week-to-week basis is important in the FAAB format. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, streaming is often used to describe bringing in a player short term, sometimes only starting them for a single week. Streaming is easier in FAAB because it doesn’t require managers to burn their potentially high waiver priority and instead allows them to pay the exact amount in which they’re comfortable. In other words, nobody wants to use their early waiver position on a QB, TE, D/ST, or K they only plan on using for a few weeks, if that.
Zero-bidding can be a very effective way to stream, especially if you plan ahead and bid on players who have good streaming matchups one to two weeks out. In this case, you are more likely to walk away with your cheap player(s) uncontested.
Conclusion
FAAB bidding is the format of the future and is constantly becoming the new standard in many leagues, especially those on Sleeper, thanks to the incredibly user-friendly format. The format gives managers the unique opportunity to challenge their league-mates on any given player with exact prices. This provokes managers to adapt and seek out strategies that fit their ideals. Though reading and learning more about FAAB and its strategies is great for getting a better understanding, the most effective way to get a step ahead of your league-mates is by experiencing the format firsthand.