Fantasy Football Trader's Alley Week 4: Players to Buy, Hold, and Sell

Sep 27, 2023

Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sports

Trading can be quite a frustrating task in fantasy football. It is seemingly impossible to put together an offer that makes both sides happy, and communicating with other league members can also be difficult. In the Trader’s Alley, I’m going to try and guide you through making trades in your league this season. Using 4for4’s powerful trade evaluator tool, I’ll highlight players to buy, sell, and hold each week, and also create some hypothetical trades based on what the tool tells us.

This article will assume the following starting roster settings: 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, 1 FLEX. Feel free to change the configurations to fit your league in the trade evaluator yourself.

Now that we have three weeks' worth of game data to inform our decision making, the fantasy football trade landscape really starts to become prominent. The 0-3 teams in your league are undoubtedly panicking and looking to make a move before their season is lost, which could be a great time for you to capitalize—for example, in one of my leagues, an 0-3 manager traded away T.J. Hockenson for Zack Moss and Roschon Johnson as he was decimated at running back and was willing to sacrifice a great deal of value to shore up the position. Without further ado, let’s get into some of the top buy, hold, and sell candidates after Week 3 of the NFL season.

Sell Najee Harris

On paper, Harris is a prototypical buy-low player. He has scored only 15.6 fantasy points through the entire season and is sandwiched between Chuba Hubbard and Ezekiel Elliott as the RB46 in fantasy football. In other words, Harris’ value is as low as ever, and he theoretically should be much better for fantasy down the stretch. Yet, I advise you to get rid of Harris for whatever you can get for him—I simply don’t think he’s good enough at football to be more than mediocre in fantasy. Backup Jaylen Warren looks to have exponentially greater levels of burst and juice compared to Harris, and it’s only a matter of time before the Pittsburgh backfield becomes a timeshare. The sunk-cost fallacy is a real thing and it will certainly hurt to give away someone you took as early as the third round, but the headache involved with Harris is just not worth it—he’ll continue to receive enough volume for you to delude yourself into starting him each week, but isn’t good enough to actually produce on those touches.