Week 9 Green Bay fantasy profile: Bye week pick-ups edition

With Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy and his team resting for the bye this week, we give you some replacement pick-ups that could help your fantasy team. Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports photograph

Disclaimer: For any fantasy scoring numbers, I will be using those generated by Yahoo! fantasy football. It is the system I have played a majority of my fantasy football on over the years – and currently play on. Other setups are fine – I’ve worked with ESPN and NFL fantasy football teams in the past – but seeing as I have the most experience using this scoring system, I’ll stick with using their methods of scoring.

Oh no! It’s a bye week.

It is one the Green Bay Packers definitely needed at a perfect time of the year, right in the middle to give everyone a rest for what should be an exciting second half of the year.

But what do the fans – and more specifically, the ones who rely on Packers players on their fantasy teams – do while our favorite players have the week off?

We keep going. The league – and fantasy football – aren’t going to stop for us, so we will have to march forward and survive a Packer-less week of games.

It won’t be all bad though; really, I’m excited.

One week every season we get a chance to look at all the other games occurring and players playing without worry of what is happening to Green Bay. This is a time of discovery, one where we can find ourselves a new, exciting young player to watch on a team we usually don’t see, or possibly discover a veteran somewhere making a positive impact that would have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Fantasy football players should be even more excited.

This is where you may find yourself a new starter or key flex player that helps you on your road to a fantasy championship.

It could give you insulation against an unseen future injury that could topple your team.

Whatever it does, if you go into this Packer-less slate of matchups with an open mind and hopeful intentions, you may just have yourself a fun weekend even without your favorite team.

Or at the least, help you manage to survive it until the Packers return next week.

For my parameters, the players I’m going to name at each spot are those that should be available in a vast majority of leagues. My thought is that if they are available in about 75 percent of leagues, you shouldn’t have much of an issue with grabbing them for your team.

Again, those numbers are based off Yahoo! league totals, so there will undoubtedly be some variance, but at the low percentage number should.

Let’s get to it, starting with the position usually manned by Aaron Rodgers: Quarterback.