About WaiverBuddy

WaiverBuddy answers a question every fantasy football manager asks between Tuesday and Sunday: “who is everyone picking up right now, and should I care?” Instead of tabbing between a league app, a news site, and three insiders’ feeds, you get the market’s live behavior — the most added and most dropped players across hundreds of thousands of real fantasy leagues — with the reporting that explains it, in one place.

It’s free, it doesn’t require an account, and it works the same on your phone at the bar as it does on a desktop at your desk.

The trending lists are built from add/drop activity on Sleeper, one of the largest fantasy platforms, measured over the last 24 hours. We snapshot that activity every day, which lets us add our own layer on top: trend velocity. A player being added 4,000 times is interesting; a player whose adds tripled since yesterday is a story. The NEW and ⚡badges you see on the lists are computed from those daily snapshots — they’re our read on acceleration, not just volume.

Headlines come from Google News, ESPN, and CBS Sports; the live insider wire mirrors the Bluesky posts of reporters like Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero. Every item links to the original source — we aggregate and annotate, the reporting belongs to the people who did it.

Each trending player carries a short generated explanation — “why he’s trending”— produced by a language model that reads that player’s latest headlines and summarizes the situation in two sentences. It is grounded in the articles shown right below it, and it regenerates only when the underlying news meaningfully changes.

What it isn’t: a projection system, a rankings oracle, or a substitute for your own judgment. It’s a fast orientation — the thing a well-informed friend would tell you before you decide whether to spend your waiver claim. Verify anything important against the linked sources; models can be wrong, and injuries develop faster than news cycles.

If you’re new to waiver strategy, start with our waiver wire guide — it covers how waiver systems actually work, how to read crowd behavior, and when to spend big. The short version: the trending list tells you what the market is doing; your edge comes from knowing when to follow it and when it’s already too late.

WaiverBuddy is an independent project — no network, no paywall, no affiliation with the NFL, any team, or Sleeper. It exists because its maker wanted this exact page to exist and couldn’t find it. The site is supported by unobtrusive ads.

Questions, corrections, or feature ideas: maniferrari@gmail.com. For how we handle data and full source attribution, see the privacy & credits page.