AFL SuperCoach 2026 - How to Plan For & Attack the Bye Rounds.

Everyone knows by now that I am a meticulous Bye planner. One of my lessons from last season, where I had a horrible year, was that I probably focussed too much on byes in upgrade season and not enough on taking the opportunities to jump on fallen promos as they presented themselves.

What does that mean for 2026? 

Well I’m still definitely structuring my starting team to give myself the best chance of managing the byes best as possible, but I want to make sure I don’t let it dictate too much reactively.

As you will see from the structure I’m planning at the moment I’m aiming for a specific balance through the mid season byes with purpose, to enable what I think will be the most flexible upgrades along the way. So the players I select I have no doubt will change as the season draws closer but I am pretty happy with the bye structure I’ve landed on.

In this article I will share with you some of my thoughts and strategies to help you plan effectively, and I’ll use my current team as an illustration throughout to highlight some of the main considerations and possible traps of poor planning.

In 2026 there are more byes than ever before. Opening round has extended to 10 of the 18 teams, which means we have to navigate 8 teams with one bye and 10 teams with two throughout the SC year.

As a result, I think avoiding all of the early bye players is near on impossible this year, and the smart play is to understand what impact the byes will have on your team output and make calculated decisions on which combinations of players you want to select.

Here are a couple of general principles I like to follow when planning my byes:

Early byes

• Try to not have more than 3 premo / midpricers on the same bye, ideally 1 or 2 is even better.

• Make sure you have bench rookies that can cover most of your premos / mid pricers, total available should be 21+ in all of these rounds where we have better understanding of rookie starters. 

• I don’t generally worry about rookies on a bye because one rookie replacing another is net zero, but if you have too many players on one line on the same bye that reduces your total available. Yes it’s best 18 but better to be 18 from 23 (or 21-22 at worst) to allow a poor rookie score to not count.

• Don’t pick a non bye player you don’t really like just because the player you do like has an early bye. 

• If however, you are genuinely happy with two players and one has an early bye and one doesn’t, that is a no brainer to pick the non bye player.

Mid season byes

• This time I’d be ok with 4-5 on any one bye. Just be a little careful to give yourself some wriggle room and flexibility when choosing your starting squad because if you already have 5 players on one bye, then it really limits your ability to trade any more premos in, even if they present as great value.

• By round 12 you should have 4-5 less rookies on the field, so you can cover more bye players in your best 18.

• I still want to have 21+ players available if possible, so that I’m not forced to take the worst scoring players but it’s a lot harder to plan for this in your starting squad because it will be dependent on your rookie availability and the second wave of rookies is always much more volatile than the originals.

• Round 12 is the hardest bye to cover as you can’t trade in blokes to cover without them having a bye in the next 4 weeks.

• Target players off their bye for your upgrades so that by round 16-17 you have a full premo team.

• If you are full premo by round 16 , you can afford 5-6 on this last bye because the 17-18 you have playing should all be great scorers.

On face value round 3, 12 and 16 look the three most difficult. They have some pretty popular SC teams on them.

Above image courtesy of AFLRatings.

So let’s get into some strategy and calculations. 

If you are new to AFL SC or haven’t really worried about byes too much in the past this might help you as you start to choose your premos and mid pricers,

To help I’ll use my current team and the following 3 assumptions:

• Any premo I’m assuming will score 110

• Any mid pricer I’m assuming will score 90, we really shouldn’t be targeting any mid pricers that can’t score that 

• Any rookie (or inflated rookie like Coleman) will score 70

Now the above won’t always happen, some times your rookies will out perform and that really helps during bye rounds, and sometimes your premos will go massive, which also really helps during bye rounds. But, just for ease of maths, these are the assumptions I’ll use. It will help me demonstrate how the team score is impacted by the byes.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch my first team reveal video using the link below, but you’ll find I’ve already made a couple of changes to that and mainly they were because I did a little more bye planning and landed on the team in the image below as it stands at January 24th as I write this article :

https://www.youtube.com/live/gcvU1dbmjEA?si=2LND3o7n6w0YeOu-

My current overall team structure is :

• 10 Premos (I’m counting Flanders as a premo)

• 5 mid pricers

• 16 Rookies

So using my scoring assumptions, during best 18 weeks, if I had no bye players, my team would score the following:

1 Captain 220 + 9 premos 990 + 5 mid pricers 450 + 3 rookies 210 = 1,870

I’ll start with the early byes and because we haven’t started upgrading yet, I will show you how my team is structured and how my score will likely be impacted by the bye players I’ve selected 

This is harder to do for the mid season byes, because we will be well into upgrade season, so when I get to those a little later I won’t do the mathematical calculation, but I’ll still show how many of each category I’ve got on a bye and some of my thoughts on how these structures might influence my trading along the way.

Round 2 - 

• Missing 1 Premo (Baz) and 1 Mid Pricer (Draper)

• Should have comfortable 23 green dots to make up best 18 scoring 

• 1 Captain 220 + 8 premos 880 + 4 mid pricers 360 + 5 rookies 350 = 1810 

• (-60) as you can see having 1 premo and one mid pricer both being replaced by rookies has a net effect of 60 points. 

Round 3 - 

• Missing 1 Premo (Callaghan)

• Should have comfortable 23 green dots to make up best 18 scoring

• 1 Captain 220 + 8 premos 880 + 5 mid pricers 450 + 4 rookies 280 = 1830

• (-40) having 1 premo being replaced by a rookie has a net effect of 40 points. 

Round 4 - 

• Missing 2 Premos (Bont and Flanders)

• Should have comfortable 23 green dots to make up best 18 scoring

• 1 Captain 220 + 7 premos 770 + 5 mid pricers 450 + 5 rookies 350 = 1790

• (-80) having 2 premo being replaced by rookies has a net effect of 80 points. 

So my selections of Baz, Bont, Callaghan and Flanders as premos with an early bye and Draper as a mid pricer with an early bye have a rough impact of 180 total points.

I have generally tried to avoid early bye players in the past because of this, but here’s why, in 2026, I’m playing it a little differently. 

Of the top 19 priced midfielders,16 have an early bye. The only 3 that don’t are Dawson (9th), Brayshaw (10th) and Merrett (19th).

So I’m backing three things to happen this year:

• Everyone is going to have to select some early bye players, given the sheer volume of probable top 8 mids that have an early bye, so it’s not as big a risk as usual.

• If you avoid the early byes completely, it will create a huge issue in round 12.

• The early bye players I’m selecting, I believe, will outscore the non early bye players that are available. For example I’ll back Bont, Baz and Callaghan to outscore Dawson, Brayshaw and Merrett by enough across the season to make up the points lost. I am also way more confident that these 3 will end up top 8 mids at the end of the year. 

So just consider the above when planning your team.

If you prefer the look of Butters, Dawson, Brayshaw and Merrett with zero early byes over Bont, Butters, Baz and Callaghan with 3 of them having an early bye, then I completely understand your logic. 

Likewise if you look at that top 19 and feel like it’s an opportunity to structure differently and have 3 premos in the midfield instead of 4 and place your other premo on a different line where you like the non bye players better, that’s also an option.

There is no right or wrong, just have a good understanding of why you are going with the structure and selections that you are and back it with some kind of logic. That is all we can really do. None of us will ever get all of our assumptions right.

Now back to the bye structure and the mid season byes.

Round 12 - 

• Missing 4 Premos (Butters, Rozee, Sheezel, Thilthorpe) and 1 mid pricer (McKercher)

• This is my most challenging bye. Especially because I am hoping McKercher is also a keeper even though he is a mid pricer.

• As well as the above I’ve also got 4 rookies including 2 expensive rookies (Uwland and Marshall) on this bye.

• And I’ve got 3 defenders and 3 forwards on the bye.

• What this means is I will need to make sure the players I trade in along the way in upgrade season don’t have the round 12 bye and as a priority ensure my replacement rookies in those two lines have job security and are in other bye rounds

• This won’t be easy to navigate but the flexibility that going this way provides for the rest of the byes is worth it in my mind.

Round 13 - 

• Missing 1 premo (Callaghan) and 1 mid pricer (Lalor)

• Like most people this will be the easiest bye to manage with only 2 teams on the bye. Lalor might even be gone by now.

• It should be easy to have 23 available.

• This presents a great upgrade opportunity. Picking up a couple of GWS premos after their round 3 bye, will be very very smart.

Round  14 - 

• Missing 2 premos (Clark, Jackson) and 1 mid pricer (Young)

• It should be easy for me to have 23 available.

• Again this presents an opportunity to pick up some Collingwood, Carlton, Freo and Hawks premos in upgrade season to help make the byes manageable.

Round 15 - 

• Missing 0 premo and 2 mid pricers (Draper, Parish)

• Again it should be easy for me to have 23 available. In all likelihood even the two mid prices are probably gone by now.

• Again this presents a great opportunity to target some Brisbane, Essendon, Sydney and West Coast premos in upgrade season 

Round 16 - 

• Missing 3 Premos (Bont, Baz, Flanders) 

• Again it should be easy enough to have 23 available.

• And again I still have room to target a couple of premos from round 16 along the way as I would be very comfortable with 5 (or 6 at a stretch) on this bye because I would expect to be close to full premo by now.

So there you have it, there’s my bye structure and the thinking and planning that has gone behind it. 

I am close to the edge on round 12 byes, but if I do go with this set up I think it presents a really good opportunity in the upgrade season with basically all teams bar Adelaide, Gold Coast, Port Adelaide and North premos available to me between rounds 5-11. 

The one limitation I do have with my chosen structure is, Xerri, Nandos, Rowell or Dawson are off limits even if they became fallen premos during rounds 5-11. They will definitely be targets in round 13 though. A small price to pay for the flexibility I think this structure presents.

Note - If you play for leagues only, it’s not a bad strategy to load up on premos and midpricers from 1 or 2 of the byes and write those two weeks off and have an advantage through the other bye rounds. Obviously this means you are backing yourself to win enough games to make league finals with these 2 “write off” rounds being guaranteed losses. If you have a bad start to the season, this could backfire.

Final thoughts:

• Spend the time upfront planning who your team relies on for its bulk scoring and which bye rounds they will miss - use that to help you when you are making adjustments to your starting squad through the preseason.

• Use the “show byes” function in the SC app. 

• Be proactive in your bye planning when making in season trades, you don’t want to realise you have a round 12 issue in round 10, it’s too late to fix it then

• Overplanning can limit your decision making negatively, as I found last season. So I would recommend doing most of the planning before locking in your starting squad which should in theory allow maximum flexibility along the way.

• Make decisions based on how you like to play SC, it is just a game after all.

Good luck with your bye planning.

If you have any questions or want to throw some of your decisions my way to have a look at, feel free to jump into Patreon chat.

Hurls