Waiver wire is important; Yahoo’s continuous waivers explained

You ever buy a new car and not maintain it? Things go bad quickly.

You don’t change the oil or rotate the tires. You don’t replace anti-freeze in the winter. You don’t even bother to clean off the brake dust.

Without proper care, you’ll soon find yourself stranded on a deserted highway screaming into a weak-signal cell phone for someone to pick you up before you get rolled up on by a group of Hell’s Angels.

In fantasy football, think of your team like a well (hopefully in your case)-oiled machine. Think of your draft as a brand new car delivered right to your driveway. It’s donned with a red-ribbon stretching from the trunk to the hood, shiny and brand new.

Cherish it while you can, because once your season gets underway, your going to have some dings and dents. If fantasy football has taught us anything, it’s that fortune can change on a dime. Injuries, benchings, bye weeks and tough matchups will force you to constantly manage your lineup if you hope to be competitive for an entire season.

The best two/three weeks of the fantasy football season are the two weeks before it starts. Like the interior of your brand new car, your team still has that new-team smell. You don’t even want to take them out on the road for a spin just yet. You want to savor the anticipation. You want to imagine just how effective they’ll be once they’re put into action.

But what you should really be doing is preparing for the problems you’re highly likely to encounter once the season gets underway.

Whenever your team needs a tune-up, the waiver wire is the way to go. It’s like Auto Zone for your fantasy team, except unlike buying a standard car part, all the parts have various degrees of effectiveness. If Auto Zone was the fantasy football waiver wire, you could buy a fuel pump that could last you for years or crap out in two weeks.

You never know how well it will work out, but in this case, doing nothing is a much higher price than doing something. Without thinking this way,  the U.S. would have never captured Osama Bin Laden.

Solving the waiver wire debate: Yahoo unveils ‘continuous waivers’

One of the biggest problems with the waiver wire is the frenzied rush to snatch-up players immediately after the waiver period ends. Depending on your league settings, most players clear waivers on a Wednesday or Thursday after a given week in the NFL. Fantasy owners do this so as not to waste their waiver pickup on a potential bust. Who could blame them? You don’t want to risk a waiver priority unless you know he’s going to be a game-changer (ex: Cam Newton in 2011.)

With Yahoo’s new ‘continuous waivers’ system, players are on waivers at all times (no free agents). When a player is dropped, he must remain on waivers for a set period of time as determined by the commissioner. This allows everybody to have a fair shot at picking up a player. If you’re a fantasy commissioner and use Yahoo for your league’s server, you can adjust these settings under the ‘edit league settings’ link in the ‘commish tools’ tab.