Early season bye planning, is it a waste of effort?

[Gigantor]

Whats everyone's thoughts on early bye planning this year?
I just re-did my team but am currently rocking a 2/14/14 bye structure, I was a bit devo as I absolutely love the structure of my current team.
I starting thinking that the byes are 3 rounds later this year and I could potentially use 12-16 trades before rd 11. That equates to a big change in your team structure leading up to the byes.

Last year I didn't really think about the byes until about round 6 and with some shrewd trading and a bit of luck, did really well and shot up the rankings.

Any way would love to hear some feed back from the pros as last year was the first year I got really serious about the byes.

[Ringo]

Some preplanning is a good idea.  Basically the idea is to ensure you have 18 players on the field each round of the byes.

If you are to shoot up in the rankings one strategy is to ensure you have an even spread of premium players over the byes. eg Round 12 is shaping as a stinker but if you have say 4 round 11 prems and 4 Round 13 prems in your team you stand a good chance to advance.

At the moment my team has a 7/10/13 bye structure but of the 13 in round 13 8 are rookies so plan is they will continue to fatten and I will be able to upgrade during byes.  But as we know best formed plans can go out the window quickly with injury.

[shaker]

Yes some planning is required but you also have to have the players you want in your side ,I try and set mine up so I dont have to do any trades in the first bye round then adjust the team after that but like Ringo said injury can change plans , any trades you can save in the bye period are gold at the end of the season  ;)

[Money Shot]

This is a hard question and although some planning is required I wouldn't want to change your team dramatically over it as your team is going to change before the byes anyways. So I tend to look at premium bye structure more as they are not going to change and if that is pretty close I would be happy then, in saying that this year is going to be a stinker when it comes to the round 12 bye.

Hope that helps.

[RaisyDaisy]

2/14/14?

Wow, never heard of someone actually having such a lob-sided structure  :o Only 2!

In terms of planning, I tend to do mine as the season is progressing. I usually have a 3 week rolling plan of what I plan on doing, covering certain situations that come up and obviously the byes

I wouldn't worry about your structure too much including the rookies, but I think it doesn't hurt to spread out your starting premo's

Round 11 is clearly going to be the best scoring round for us, so this year in particular I will be hoping to get max value of my 3 available trades before rd12 commences. Ideally I would have milked a few rookies in the weeks leading up to then, and hopefully I will be able to bring in not one, but two rd11 premiums to really give me good coverage in 12

[Gigantor]

Thanks for the replies
Premos are currently 1/6/6 (only simmo rd11) which is a concern.
I'm thinking if I focus on rd 11 premos as my first upgrades it could work
Burgoyne/Gibson/Birch/Smith in Defence
Beams/Rocky/Danger/Sloan/Lewis in mids
Lids/Dusty/Roughie in forwards

But seeing that the common response is I need a better structure I'll probably wuss out and swap Priddis for Beams and Buddy for Dusty to make it 3/5/5 which is a lot safer.