Pull it together.
Yes, you lost. Yes, you specifically lost to that co-worker who lets his 8-year-old set his roster and who picked a defense in the second round. Yes, you lost even though your opponent’s kicker got carted off the field following the opening play of the game. It happens.
Thankfully, there is no week in the fantasy football season where wins and losses are less significant than the first one. Don’t get me wrong-to be sure, a win is always better than a loss. But building a winning team is a process and you are only at the beginning of it.
#1 – It matters less where you start than where you finish.
There is no reason for you to give any thought whatsoever to your league rank before you get into the bye weeks. If your league is like most, there are probably only a couple of teams that won this week that you would even need to pass to secure a playoff spot. And some of the owners above and below you are likely to succumb to apathy if they aren’t able to right their ships quickly.
Aside from bragging rights, there is actually very little to be gained by finishing any higher than the last playoff spot in most fantasy leagues. Because of changing matchups and the impact of injuries, there is no way to predict which teams will be strongest come the playoffs and therefore which playoff seeds will be the most advantageous. Just win enough to get in, baby.
#2 – Fantasy football is all about making informed guesses, and this is the least informed your guesses will be all season.
No matter what your opponent might have said in the throes of gloating, he or she had no idea how good your respective teams were. While past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future results, you should be able to rely much more on performance seen in real games than what you may have seen during the preseason. Your sit/start choices are only going to get better over the course of the season.
#3 – However good or bad everyone’s rosters are right now, those are not the rosters your teams will feature come crunch time.
While you can and should be able to avoid freaking out, not everyone is going exhibit the same restraint. This presents a huge opportunity for you. Rarely is the waiver wire more flush with value than in the first couple weeks of the season, as impatient owners unload early round draft choices in pursuit of attractive free agents. I can’t count how many times I’ve turned someone else’s cast off RB2 into a serviceable bye-week replacement-sometimes even a starter.
The key is ultimately to continue building the best possible team over the course of the entire season. If you follow that rule, the wins will come and you may very well find yourself in a much better position in Weeks 15 and 16 than some of the teams running victory laps tonight.
Save the tears and the champagne for December.