The 3 one-time audibles and when to use them

Article 3 told you the rule: 1 free move a week, and 10 points off your season total for the next one. Article 4 told you the other one: one captain, 2.0x, and nothing to catch you if he doesn't play.

3 times a season, you get to break one of those.

Rebuild rebuilds your roster. Trick Play rents you one for a weekend. Superstar turns your captain up to 3.0x. One use each, 17 weeks to spend them, and if you get to Week 17 with one still sitting there, congratulations, you scored 0 with it.

Here's what each one does, what each one is actually worth in points, and when to fire it. Including the part where I tell you what I don't know yet.

4 rules cover all 3 and they're quick.

One more that's easy to miss and will cost you if you do: Trick Play has to be fired before you make any moves that week. Fire it first, then shop.

One week where the moves economy stops applying. Unlimited moves, no hits charged, and every change is permanent. You're adding and dropping at the current Tuesday prices exactly like any other week. The only thing that changes is the bill.

Here's the math, because the math is the whole section. A move past your free ones costs 10 points. So a 4 move overhaul that would normally run you 3 hits saves 30 points. 6 moves saves 50. Rebuild isn't worth some vague amount, it's worth exactly 10 times the number of hits you'd otherwise have eaten, plus whatever the better roster goes on to score.

There's a quieter second benefit. Without Rebuild you can't really fix a broken roster in one week at any price you'd actually pay. 4 hits is 40 points, which is most of a good captain week. Rebuild is the only time a full teardown is affordable at all.

And here's why the thing exists, which is the most useful number in this article. I simulated a 108 manager field over a full season where nobody made a single move. The manager who drafted the perfect roster, using the actual finishing order from the season before, and then never touched it, finished 86th of 108. He was stuck with a back who got hurt and he missed every rookie who broke out. The whole moves economy is the answer to that problem, and Rebuild is its escape hatch.

When to fire it. I'm going to label this what it is: I'm reasoning from the mechanics here, not measuring anything. The window is 13 weeks wide and you can see the tension without a simulation. Early means the fixed roster earns for longer, but you're acting on 3 or 4 weeks of evidence and half of that is noise. Late means you actually know who's real, but there are fewer weeks left to bank it. What usually forces the call isn't the calendar anyway, it's a cluster: 2 or 3 roster pieces going wrong at once. Which is exactly the situation that costs 30 points or more to fix any other way.

Whether the median good manager fires this around Week 6 or around Week 10 is a season one question. I'll publish the answer when there's a season to publish it from.

Unlimited free moves for one week, and then your squad snaps back to exactly what it was before. You keep nothing and you owe nothing.

The framing that made it click for me: Rebuild changes your team, Trick Play changes your weekend. Same mechanic, opposite time horizon.

Fire it before you make any moves that week. That's not a formality, the revert is defined against your pre-audible roster.

Now, the pitch this one always gets, and why I'd distrust it. Everybody reaches for "save it for your worst bye week." My own bye numbers make that look weaker than it feels. I simulated a full season with no backup quarterback at all, and the week the starting QB was on bye scored 189.5 against a season average of 194.8. An entirely empty quarterback slot cost about 5 points. Meanwhile the peak bye week, 6 teams off, scored 203.0, which is 8 points above average. And the worst week of that whole season was Week 1, on ordinary matchup variance, with nobody on bye at all.

Byes matter, roughly 5 to 20 points on the week. They're just not reliably the week you score worst, and "save it for byes" quietly assumes they are.

So what's it actually for? Honestly, its ceiling is way higher than bye insurance. For one week you get to field a roster you could never afford to keep. Stack a slate, chase a full set of matchups, replace half your starters with guys who'd blow your cap any other week. The cost is that you're making 6 or 8 roster decisions off one week of information, and that's where you should feel the risk.

When to fire it, and this is reasoning again: a week where there's a big obvious edge you can't buy any other way. In practice that's usually a bye cluster and an injury cluster landing on top of each other, not a bye cluster on its own. If your honest count is "this saves me 12 points," you're spending a season long asset on a rounding error.

Your captain multiplier goes from 2.0x to 3.0x for one week. Flat, every position, same as the captain multiplier it's built on.

Article 4 established that under a flat 2.0x the captain bonus is exactly the player's raw score. Superstar just adds one more copy of it. Captain a 40 point player under Superstar and the slot pays 120 instead of 80.

Which means Superstar is worth the raw score of the guy you captain. Not a percentage, not a multiplier you have to reason about. One number, and you already know how to estimate it.

Some real weeks to size it against, from 3 seasons of scored data:

Now the comparison that puts all 3 of these in proportion, and I'd rather you have it than not. Across that same 108 manager field, first place to last was 812.5 points over the season, so one decile of the leaderboard is about 81 points. A great Superstar week is about half a decile. A good Rebuild is about half a decile.

These are real and worth playing well, and none of them is your season. I'd rather say that out loud than sell you 3 magic buttons.

The risk, once and hard: if your captain doesn't play, the captain bonus is 0, and Superstar returns nothing. No vice captain, nobody gets promoted. Article 4's bust rates are the number that matters here, and among high scoring players they run from 6.5% all the way to 48.8%. Firing Superstar on a guy whose injury report you're still refreshing on Sunday morning is the worst available use of a once a season asset.

When to fire it: a confirmed healthy player with a real ceiling case, in a week you can see coming. Not a hunch about form. The one structural argument for going earlier rather than later is that an unfired Superstar in Week 17 is worth exactly 0, and the odds you haven't seen a single good ceiling week by Week 12 are small.

And here's what Superstar really is: the loudest available way to say you're high on a player. Everybody in the pool can add the same guy you did, so adding him says almost nothing about how you feel. Starting him says a little more. Putting the C on him doubles his score and says quite a lot. Superstar sits at the top of that ladder and you get exactly one, all season. It's the single week where the field gets to see how sure you actually were, and the scoreboard settles it either way.

Short, because this is a bonus and not a pillar.

Rebuild and Trick Play weeks charge no hits at all, however many moves you make. Hits get counted per week and totalled at the end of the season, and fewest hits is the second tiebreaker, after captain points. So firing an audible in a week you were going to eat 3 hits saves you 30 points and quietly protects a tiebreak you weren't thinking about.

The captain bonus is the first tiebreaker, and in a Superstar week it's computed at the boosted multiplier. That week feeds your total and the thing that splits you from whoever you're tied with.

I won't oversell either of those. 2 managers tied on points across 17 weeks is rare. It's a nice detail, not a strategy.

Short section, and it's the reason you should trust everything above it.

Everything above about timing is me reasoning from the mechanics, plus what the backfill can tell us about roster construction and captain ceilings. It is not a measurement of the best weeks to fire these, because I haven't run one. The backfill deliberately simulated managers who never used an audible at all. Doing audible timing properly needs the price and moves economy running end to end, and that's a season one job, not something I can fake with the data I have.

I'd rather tell you that than hand you a number I made up and let you find out in November.

The first season is the experiment. The answers are going to come out of what 10,000 managers actually did, not out of a model of what they should have done. And I'll publish it.

-Rob, Move the Chains