Bye weeks, injuries and empty lineup slots

The cheapest points to lose are the ones from a player who never takes the field. A starter on bye, ruled out or left in an empty slot scores zero, and a zero is almost always avoidable.

This guide covers the three ways a lineup ends up with a hole in it, how Sleeper's lock rules give you time to fix it, and how often it really happens. The numbers come from the league behind the sample report: 12 teams, 14 regular-season weeks, 1680 starting spots filled in all.

Bye weeks

Every NFL team has one week off during the season, its bye week. Players on that team score nothing that week. In 2025 the byes fell between week 5 and week 14, with a few teams off each week. Sleeper shows the bye week next to each player and marks players on bye in your lineup, so this is the easiest problem to see coming.

The usual traps are a quarterback or tight end with no backup on the roster, and two or three key players who share a bye week. When you draft or trade, it is worth glancing at bye weeks so you are not left with half a lineup off in the same week. When a bye week is coming and you have no cover, a $0 or $1 waiver claim a week ahead is the standard fix; see FAAB bidding basics.

Injuries and inactive players

Sleeper shows the NFL's injury designations next to a player's name: Questionable, Doubtful and Out, plus IR for players on injured reserve. A player listed Out will not play. Doubtful usually means the same. Questionable is a genuine coin flip, and the answer often only comes when teams announce their inactive players, about 90 minutes before kickoff.

On Sleeper each player locks at the kickoff of his own game, not at the start of the week. That means you can wait for news on a late game and still change your lineup, as long as both the player you bench and the player you start have not played yet. A good habit for a Questionable starter in a late game is to keep a bench player from an even later game who can fill the same slot. FLEX slots help here, because a FLEX can take a running back, receiver or tight end; see FLEX and SUPERFLEX.

Injured reserve spots, when your league has them, let you hold an injured player without giving up a bench spot. The sample league had 2 IR spots per team, and at the end of the season 7 of its 12 teams were using them for 9 players between them. The dynasty vs redraft guide covers IR rules in more detail.

Empty slots

An empty slot is a starting position with nobody in it, usually because a player was dropped or traded and nobody was moved in to replace him. It scores zero, the same as a player on bye. Of the 1680 starting spots in the sample league's regular season, exactly one was left empty: a WR slot for Team 5 in week 5. Empty slots are rare in an active league, and almost always a sign that a manager stopped checking.

How often starters scored zero

We cannot see from the scores alone why a player scored nothing, but a zero is a good signal. In the sample league 56 starts scored exactly 0 points, 3.3% of all starts. 48 of them were at quarterback, running back, receiver or tight end, where a zero nearly always means the player did not play. Kickers and defenses can score 0 while playing a full game, so treat those with care.

Byes show up clearly in the timing. Before the bye weeks began, the league averaged 1.5 zero-point starts a week. During weeks 5 to 14 it averaged 5.0, and no week had more than 7. Receivers lead the table, partly because teams start more of them than any other position.

Could the bench have covered it?

For each zero at a skill position, we looked for a benched player on the same roster who could legally have filled that slot and scored points that week. In 36 of the 48 cases (75%) there was one. Those bench players scored 355.4 points between them, an average of 9.9 per missed start: points that were already on the roster.

The costliest example: in week 12, Team 5 started K. Johnson (RB), who scored 0, while D. Henry scored 21.8 on the bench. The other 25% of zeros had no useful cover on the roster at all, which is where a waiver pickup earlier in the week would have helped.

These are exactly the kind of mistakes a Shoulda Started penalty report calls, because the better lineup used players the manager already had. The start/sit mistakes guide looks at all wrong calls, not only zeros.

A weekly checklist

1. Early in the week: check for byes next week and put in waiver claims for cover.
2. Before the first game: look for Out, Doubtful and IR tags in your lineup and for any empty slot.
3. For Questionable players in late games, keep a bench option from a later game who fits the slot.
4. About 90 minutes before each game: check the inactive lists and swap if needed.

What it cannot tell you

• A zero does not say why. Most skill-position zeros are byes, injuries or inactive players, but a player can also play and score nothing.
• The bench check is hindsight. A bench player who could have filled the slot may have played earlier, before the news came out, so the swap was not always possible in real time.
• The 2025 bye window is used to group the weeks. Bye weeks move every season, so check the schedule for the year you are playing.