Waivers in fantasy football put a temporary freeze on players who are not on any roster, so every manager has time to claim them, and when the freeze ends each player goes to the claiming manager with the highest waiver priority, according to Yahoo's waivers overview. ESPN's Waivers Overview describes the same process: a claimed player is awarded to the team with the highest waiver priority that made a claim.
On Yahoo, the commissioner picks a waiver rule and a claim priority. The waiver rule decides when players are on waivers and for how long. The claim priority decides who wins when more than one manager wants the same player. The times at which claims are processed on each platform are in when fantasy football waivers clear.
How a waiver claim works
- A player becomes unclaimed. On ESPN's standard system, players go on waivers immediately after the league's draft, from the start of the first game until a few hours past the end of the last, and when another team drops them.
- Managers put in claims during the waiver period. Every team can claim any player on waivers.
- The period ends and claims are processed. The player goes to the claiming team with the highest priority, or with the highest bid in a budget league.
- Players nobody claimed become free agents. On ESPN they can then be added by any team first come, first served, and on Yahoo's weekly waivers the remaining players go to the first manager to claim them.
Waiver priority: who wins a contested player
Yahoo lists four claim priorities that a commissioner can choose from.
| Yahoo priority | How the order is set | After a winning claim |
|---|---|---|
| Continual Rolling List | By the draft, and never reset | The manager drops to the bottom |
| Reverse Order of Standings | Reset after each regular season week, lowest team in the standings first | The rank does not change |
| Weekly Rolling List Based on Standings | Reset each week the same way | The manager drops to the bottom |
| FAB (Free Agent Budget) | Highest blind offer wins | The offer is deducted from the budget |
In the first three, the starting order comes from the draft. Yahoo said that in live and autopick drafts the last draft position gets the first rank, and in offline drafts the last manager to register gets it. Under Reverse Order of Standings the list stops resetting when the playoffs begin. The playoff dates are in when the fantasy football playoffs are.
Under ESPN's standard waivers, the team that wins a player moves to the end of the waiver order, and processing continues until every claim has been handled.
Free agent budget: bidding in place of a priority list
A free agent budget, which Yahoo and ESPN both label FAB, replaces the priority list with bidding. On Yahoo, each manager gets a budget for offers on players who are on waivers. Yahoo said the default budget is $100, that the commissioner of a private league can adjust it, and that budgets range from $1 to $999.
An offer on Yahoo can be anything from $0 to what is left of the manager's budget, and offers are blind, so other managers cannot see them. The manager with the highest offer signs the player and has that amount deducted. When two offers tie, Yahoo uses whichever of the other three priorities the commissioner picked as the tiebreaker.
ESPN has two budget systems. In both, a team offers the amount it is willing to pay, offers are processed in batches one or more times each week as the league settings specify, and the highest offer is subtracted from the winner's budget. The difference is what happens to players nobody bid on. Under "Free Agent Budget (FAB) (Continuous)", every player not on a roster is always on waivers, so managers cannot make game time additions. Under the plain "Free Agent Budget (FAB)" setting, unclaimed players become free agents after offers are processed. ESPN keeps a tiebreaker order for budget leagues, and a team that wins a claim moves to the bottom of it.
Waiver rules: when players are on waivers
Yahoo offers three waiver rules.
| Yahoo waiver rule | What it does |
|---|---|
| Weekly waivers | Unclaimed players go on waivers at the start of each week, and waivers end after 11:59 p.m. PT Tuesday |
| Continuous waivers | Unclaimed players are on waivers at all times, and a claim starts a timer, 2 days by default |
| None | Waivers are off, and unclaimed players go to the first manager who adds them |
The default weekly setting on Yahoo is "Game Time - Tuesday", which places an unclaimed player on waivers as soon as his first game of the week begins. Under continuous waivers, the commissioner of a private league can set the timer anywhere from no waivers to 7 days, and a player can never be added on the same day the claim is made.
ESPN lists four acquisition systems: Standard Waivers, the two budget systems and No Waivers, in which every player can be added at once as a free agent. ESPN locks this setting at the start of the draft. Its page said most leagues use waivers because the No Waivers system "is often deemed unfair."
Conditional claims
A manager can place more than one claim so that a backup is ready if the first choice goes to someone else. Yahoo gives the example of three claims that all drop the same player for three different targets: if another manager wins the first or second target, the third claim can still go through. In Yahoo's example, a later claim is voided when the player it would drop has already been dropped by an earlier successful claim.
Who sets the rules
On Yahoo, the commissioner picks the waiver rule and the claim priority from the "Edit League Settings" page of the "Commissioner" tab. A Yahoo league also decides before its draft whether players left undrafted can be added at once or go into waivers first, and that choice cannot be changed after the draft. Trades are covered in when the fantasy football trade deadline is.