The Thursday Scramble: Round 16

Thank god that is all over!  Bye rounds are done and our teams are all perfect now and we can sit back and relax!  What? we can’t? Well there is no surprise, if you are like me (and Calvin) you probably still have a pesky rookie or two on board that we need to move off the field! Sounds like time to Scramble!!

Priorities for this week

Well it is pretty simple. Get those last rookies off field and you can now target those guys that had their bye last week. We have been staying away from them for quite a while now and we have no restrictions anymore. So they should be our priority. But this doesn’t mean you only can bring in those guys from last week’s bye. I am sure that Jordan Dawson will be on plenty of shopping lists this week and rightly so!

The difficult part now will be getting the cash together to make these upgrades! But is there an easy answer to this? Well probably not but let’s look at this logically. We have 9 weeks to go and you have two choices to make. One is whether you take a lesser priced player that you may not be totally keen on but they fit your budget and you think they are going to average you a 95 for the rest of the year but the player you want is going to get you 105 for the rest of the year, a difference of 90 points. The other option is that you let a rookie or two mature for another week and get you that extra bit of cash that you can then use which will then get you to your target guy. Then your player you get next week will average you that 105 for the rest of the season. Now, let’s say going this second method you have to play a rookie on the field for one more week and that player scores you a 45. You have cost yourself 50 points this week but you have gained 80 points for the rest of the season (since we are getting the better player in with only 8 weeks to g0) so net you are up 30 points for the overall rankings.

Now that is a bit of a simplistic example but it does show that even the smallest differential in weekly averages can mean it may be worth taking a little bit of pain now for long term gain. The key to this strategy though is that the later in the season it gets, the bigger that differential in average between the “settling for this guy” and the “this is the guy I really want” needs to be.

What I wanted to get across here is that just make sure you are not compromising your team for settling for someone you really don’t want.

Oliver and Yeo!

Gotta say that Clarry’s hamstring is one of the biggest mystery that we have had in recent months in footy. We keep hearing from Melbourne that he is close and good to go probably next week only for us to get to next week and find that once again he is out. This has been very frustrating for those in the limited trade forms of the game as many people held him thinking he would only miss one or two. If you are in that boat in those games then unfortunately I think that you have held this long it is probably in your interests to keep holding as you are probably down below 5 trades remaining now which will mean that if he goes big over the last 7 or 8 weeks of the season he will be a great unique for you.

Another frustrating player this season has been Yeo! He was a lock for sides at the start of the season and then got injured but he finally comes back in and is cheap as chips while busting out a 95 average over the last three games, has risen nicely in value and looked like a great option for those that are cash strapped only to now have a hip injury that will see him out for 3-4 weeks. Given this is a new injury and we have a definitive timeline it is clear that we must trade him and as a result we need to move him on unfortunately, the issue is of course that his price isn’t up there with the premiums so the best option would be to use him in a one up one down scenario unless you have a heap of cash to go straight up to someone in the top 6 in Roy’s Rollin 22.

Question of the week

Blue Diamond @bluediamondJim3 has one rookie on the ground and asks whether it is worth looping Sheldrick and Johnson while upgrading a mid pricer like Worpel or cash them in and go to a blue chip promo.  This is a good question and one that many of us will face. For me the key to this question is what are the two rookies likely to provide you over the coming weeks. We know that we are unlikely to keep them til the end of the season but is now the right time to cash up. In this particular instance I would be looping them on the field and upgrade your mid pricer like Worpel. The reason being that Sheldrick has delivered some good scores and has a -39 BE while Johnson also has the capability to provide a great score and has a 20BE. So based on this, cashing in now would see you lose a lot of cash generation and by keeping them both for a few more weeks you will be able to get yourself to a much better player and possibly have some cash left over.  If both these guys had BE’s around the 50 mark and hadn’t been delivering good scores I may have gone the other direction.

Things to Remember

• Go through your team with a fine tooth comb and then do it again. Too many times we see teams coming off the bye who forget to put a player who was on the bye last week back on the field or they have the captain on someone from last week’s bye and forget to move it. This is a rookie mistake and one that we must avoid.
• Get your rookies and mid pricers off the field before you look to do your side swapping of premiums. You are likely to benefit more if you can get a rookie up.
• Don’t destroy your bench completely. Yes it is ok to have a few permanent red dots on the bench to get some money but there will come a time when you will need to rely on that bench cover and you may just not have it!

Have a great weekend everyone and how good is it to have 9 games back on!  We only have 9 more rounds to the end of the season which is amazing as it seems like we have only just gotten started. This is where you need too make sure your team is well set up as you will start to push past others in the rankings that have let their teams go a bit during the byes or side swapped their way through rather than improving their teams.
Catch you all next Thursday!