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Fantasy Court - How fantasy commissioners, users should handle postponed games

Yahoo Sports' Andy Behrens explains what fantasy users should do when games get postponed due to COVID-19.

Video Transcript

- All right, I'm not going with the ridiculous wig on Fantasy Court this week, because we are dealing with a somewhat less than ridiculous topic. Obviously, what is dominating the conversation this week is what to do with postponeed games. We had one of them earlier in the week and now we have a second, obviously, Chiefs and Patriots, probably going to be played on Monday night. Eugene Bang and his question summarized this perfectly-- any suggestions for commissioners on how to deal with postponeed games?

Yeah, so here at Yahoo, as well as many other major fantasy platforms, what is typically happening, at least with the Titans-Steelers game, it's going to be played in week 7. Stats will not accrue for week 4. This effectively come becomes the bye week for both of those teams. Players who were placed on the official NFL COVID are obviously eligible for IR in your fantasy leagues.

We have not placed everybody involved in that game on the COVID list. We don't want to get into a situation where just a couple of teams, every player on those teams is eligible for IR during their bye, whereas most other teams, those players are not. There'd be an inconsistency there that we didn't want to live with.

So what to do if you're a fantasy commissioner? We have a lot of flexibility on Yahoo's platform, so I want to talk about a couple of ideas for fantasy commissioners. First, again, we're probably going to deal with more of these late week COVID issues later in the season. One thing you can do right now that you probably should have done in the preseason, we recommended it, you can add bench spots the fantasy rosters in season. Once you do it in Yahoo Leagues, it's permanent, but I would strongly recommend it this year.

Now this is, like, an isolated event. I would almost never suggest that fantasy commissioners make changes to settings in season, but this is 2020. It's a season unlike anything else we've ever seen. I think you should do it. You have to give players more options to replace injured stars rather than dropping them. We don't want to see roethlisberger on a waiver wire. We certainly don't want to see any of the major stars on Tennessee or Pittsburgh on waiver wires.

The other thing that you can do with respect to that Chiefs-Patriots game-- Yahoo offers the flexibility to do this-- a commissioner can go to the league and say, OK, designate a substitute. Just in case this game doesn't happen as it's been rescheduled, you could designate a substitute for a given player. So let's say I want to start Travis Kelsey, but I'm not sure he's going to go. I'm going to designate Jimmy Graham as my substitute.

Commissioners can go in retroactively and change those lineups if you absolutely have to. I'm in a couple of leagues where commissioners have decided to do this. It is burdensome for the private league commissioner, I hear you, but it is a reasonable alternative, again, as a substitute for actually dropping players who might be tied to this game.

So those are just a couple of ideas. I'm not really going to order anything in fantasy court this week except this one thing-- fantasy players, please be kind, be patient, and be respectful to your fantasy commissioners. They are dealing with some stuff that has never come up in fantasy history. Again, respect your commissioners. It's never been as difficult a job as it is right now.