Waiver wire before Week 1: how to rank claims before anyone has played

The problem with the first waiver run

Every waiver guide tells you to read the box score. There is no box score yet. The first waiver run of the season, in most Sleeper leagues, processes before a single regular season snap has been played, and the claims you file this week are priced on nothing but rumor and roster news. That is why the first run is where FAAB goes to die. The bids are the biggest of the year and the information is the thinnest.

So the job before Week 1 is not to find the breakout. It is to rank a short list of players by how much real information sits behind each one, and to spend in proportion to that information. Three signals exist right now, and they are not equal.

Signal one: an opening on a depth chart

The strongest thing a preseason claim can have is a starter ahead of him who cannot play. Nothing else this week is close to it, because an opening is a fact about who will be on the field, and every other signal is a guess about it.

The injury report on the Parlae board, as of Sep 3 at 7:11 PM ET, lists Josh Jacobs of Green Bay as Out, James Conner of Arizona as Out, Isiah Pacheco of Detroit as Out, and Zach Charbonnet of Seattle on the PUP list. Those are the platform's designations, not ours, and each one creates a job that somebody else will do in Week 1.

The Packers case shows how the market prices an opening. On the board movement page, Jacobs slid from an average pick of 32.0 to 55.8 between the two board days on file, and MarShawn Lloyd moved from 139.3 to 125.1, earlier by 14.2 picks. That is drafters, thousands of them, paying more for the back behind an Out starter. When a claim has an opening and a price move that agrees with it, that claim goes to the top of the list.

Signal two: a price move without an opening

The second signal is the draft market moving on its own. Consensus ADP, refreshed daily from thousands of live drafts, is the fastest public reaction to roster news that exists. When a player moves more than about ten picks in a day, drafters know something, even when no designation explains it.

On Sep 3 the board movement page showed two risers: Lloyd, above, and Justice Hill of Baltimore, from 173.3 to 165.6, earlier by 7.7 picks. The fallers were Jacobs, Chig Okonkwo of Washington from 165.2 to 173.0, and Brian Robinson of Atlanta from 155.8 to 162.7. A faller is a claim you should not make, whatever his name recognition. A riser without an opening is a claim you can make at a low price, because the market has said something without saying what.

Signal three: an add spike on an unpriced player

The weakest signal is the one that looks loudest. The waiver wire page is built from add and drop events across real leagues, 1,000 wire events over the last 168 hours as of Sep 3 at 8:23 PM ET, and its most added list is led by three running backs who show as undrafted: Jacob Saylors of Detroit, Malik Davis of Dallas and Roschon Johnson of Chicago. Lloyd is fourth, with a late round draft cost of 125, and Devaughn Vele of New Orleans is fifth at 163.

An add spike on a player the draft market has not priced at all means your league mates are reacting to a headline, not to a price. Saylors is a real story, since Pacheco is Out in Detroit and Sione Vaki, another Lions back, is eighth on the same list. But the market has not put a pick number on either of them, and that absence is information. An unpriced player with an add spike is a watch, not a bid, and if you must bid, you bid the minimum.

The ranking, in one table

Source: Parlae waiver wire, board movement and injury report pages, Sep 3 2026.

Why every preseason bid stays small

The Parlae FAAB model carries one rule for this week that it carries for no other. Before any regular season snaps, and with no opening on the depth chart, no bid exceeds 2.5 percent of the original season budget, no matter where the board ranks the player. In a $100 league that is $2 or $3. The reason is simple: a preseason price with no snaps behind it is a guess, and a guess is not worth a tenth of a season's budget.

An opening lifts that cap, because an opening is not a guess. The model promotes the claim one rung on its ladder, and a back who was priced as a speculative add becomes an emerging role bid, 14 to 18 percent of the budget. That is the Lloyd case, and it is the only case this week where a double digit bid is defensible.

Remember the auction you are bidding in. On Sleeper the default budget is $100, the minimum bid is $0, bids are blind, ties go to rolling waiver priority, and unused budget does not roll into next season. Regular season waivers clear on what Sleeper calls Tuesday After Day, 12:05 a.m. Pacific on Wednesday, and free agency runs from Wednesday morning until each player's game starts. So a claim filed this week resolves before Sunday's games, and whatever you learn on Sunday cannot change it.

What Monday changes

Monday, September 14, is the first day the third signal exists: snap counts from sixteen real games. A back who played 60 percent of his team's snaps has a role, and the bid ladder moves up two rungs. A back who played 30 percent and scored once has a highlight, and the ladder stays where it was. Every preseason claim you make this week is a bet that Monday's snap share will justify the price, so make the bets that need the least justification.

What to do with this

1. Open the injury report and list every Out, IR and PUP designation on a starter. The player directly behind each one is your claim list, before you look at anything else.
2. Check each name against the board movement page. A backup whose price moved earlier by ten picks or more, behind a starter who is Out, is the one claim worth a real bid this week.
3. Bid the minimum on everything else, and write down the snap share you expect on Sunday. On Monday, compare. The claims that missed their number get dropped before the second waiver run, not the fifth.