Would you ever trade a dollar bill for three quarters? If not, can you at least imagine a scenario where you would? If it wasn’t for charity or goodwill, but an actual self-serving purpose?
No? Well, try this one on. Maybe I’m driving my family in the station wagon cross country to Wally World and run into some unplanned misadventures along the way (1). Maybe I need to make up some time and drive through the night. I’m going to need an ice-cold Coke to keep rolling, so I stop at a rest stop and go to the vending machine. I only have one dollar bill but I also have one quarter. Stay with me, the analogy is only going to get worse from here.
* This guy made it to Wally World and so can you – true story
In this fable, an ice-cold Coke in a can (2) costs a dollar, and that said Coke is a stud fantasy player that will help me win a championship (Wally World). The dollar bill receptacle is broken and the only way to get the Coke is to have four quarters. There is no change machine and I ask around the rest stop (league mates) and nobody has four quarters for a dollar. But I do find someone that is nice and says they would give me four if they had it but three is all they can offer. I already have one other quarter in my pocket, so making this deal gets me an ice-cold Coke that gets me 500 miles closer to Wally World. Is it worth it? Of course, it is.
But “hold on,” you say, “a quarter of US currency is hardly comparable to a roster spot on a dynasty squad. Nobody is losing sleep over losing a quarter in real life.”
Let’s Scale-Up the Analogy
Yes, there is no perfect analogy and we can break it down any number of ways. But ok. Let’s at least try to do better. You would love to take the family to Wally World (someday) but you’re unemployed and have other issues to address before you can think about a vacation. You do somehow manage to have a very healthy savings reserve built up (draft capital and a couple of blue chips) and have received a job offer. It is 20 miles away and although you have hunted and looked at many closer options, this is realistically the best you can get in the short term and it allows you to make a good salary and then maybe after working hard for a couple of years and saving some money you can get that vacation.
But you need to spend a pretty good portion of the savings on a car to get you to work and back and although you have shopped around, your uncle is the only one that has a deal for you. In this analogy, the uncle is the trade partner that typically gets you over the barrel but always has the best shit. He will sell you a solid reliable commuter but you’re going to have to pay $5,000 for a car that is booked at $4,000. Do you do it? You have the cash, you would get the title that day, you can start work Monday, do you do it? Is it worth it? Of course, it is.
Or Would You Rather Wait Until Next season?
The moral of the story is that paying a premium can be worth it. Especially if that cost is negotiable and murky, to begin with, like a player on a fantasy football (FF) team would be, as opposed to a soda can. Used car prices are typically negotiated around a consensus range, similar to the values we will find on trade calculators and ranking averages when it comes to FF players.
You can probably tell I’m not the kind of FF manager that wants to wait until next season. And neither should you. It is indeed possible that your team is so bad that it has no chance of making the playoffs and that you need to realize that before you end up stalled out in a ditch in the desert 1,000 miles from Wally World, dependent on a crooked sheriff to “help” you out. But I think many owners are way too quick to give up and either sell their team or tear it down in a premature rebuilding effort. I’ve taken terrible orphaned teams and turned them into playoff teams in year one. The conventional wisdom in dynasty circles has long been that if you decide to rebuild, it should be torn down in year one, competitive by the end of year two, and dominant in year three. That’s pretty good advice most of the time, but in FFPC especially, you can turn it around in year one.
If it is really that bad, and sometimes it is, the traditional timeline is probably more realistic, but the way I play is to always play to win until I can’t anymore. I don’t ever have many teams that are truly bottom of the barrel and I don’t have many that hover around that dreaded middle-of-the-road mediocre level. My teams are almost always playoff teams, where anything is possible and variance favors the dominant lineups across formats. And once in a while I sneak a crappy team in and win something as well. In the FFPC dynasty format, rookie picks are determined by competition in the losers bracket, so tanking is extremely limited. I think that is the ideal setup.
I’ll Trade You What You Think Is a Coke for Three Quarters. All. Day. Long.
My goal is to develop lineups where I have First World problems. Where I have to sell Robert Woods for three quarters to get a real ice-cold Coke because time has moved on in this analogy and now Robert Woods is really a warm RC diet cola that has been sitting open in the console for a day or two, and should frankly probably be thrown out. Yet, there is likely someone out there with three quarters and they’re thirsty. We are all trying to manipulate and spin the cost of a Coke to each other and to haggle with what loose change and green bills we have sitting around.
* This isn’t the one you want but maybe that guy does
All other things being equal, I would almost always err on the side of trading five quarters for a dollar than to be trading down with a dollar for three quarters. But there is a time for the latter. There can be a time to liquidate your studs or your perceived studs for comparable value in aggregate, and hopefully, you fall more into the dominant category where you’re looking to consolidate assets, even if giving up a little value on paper, which is usually debatable and pliable (3).
The thing is, deals don’t happen in vacuums. All other things are never equal. It just doesn’t happen in nature. We all love Twitter poll player comps, top 10 lists, and that kind of thing, but the ultimate metric for deciding to do a deal or not isn’t the value on “paper”, but rather what does it mean to your franchise? Is it going to get you to Wally World? Or is it just going to look good on Twitter?
Our goal should be to get to Wally World, not to look good doing it. I can’t count how many sub-market deals I’ve made that worked out for me. In Parts 2 & 3 of this series, I will do a deeper analytical dive into some of these concepts and use some real-world trade examples from my squads over the last few years. Our goal isn’t to gain value in trade calculators but to dominate our opponents and stack ships. You might consider paying that crooked mechanic off. Your kids will thank you.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out to me to chat about fantasy football on Twitter @Ship_Chaser and follow along with me on my journey as I chase six-figure paydays! Look for my new articles soon!
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Upcoming Articles
Chasing ‘Ships and Flipping Pieces (Part 2) – Franchise Values and Vision
Chasing ‘Ships and Flipping Pieces (Part 3) – Liquidate or Consolidate?
A Deeper Dive on Antonio Gibson
Footnotes:
(1) Like trading for Thomas Rawls and then trading him away and then picking him up on waivers the next season and then dropping him and then trading for him again.
(2) A Coke in a can is preferable to a plastic bottle in soooo many ways.
(3) Selling high on a player and being right about their impending decline, for example.
