We enter as a young boy talks with his (dynasty fantasy football) friends. His friends are scolding him for only playing with toys that are “so last year”. The young boy says to his friends, “I love these toys, they are fun to bring out and play with every time. I bet I can beat your toys in battle with my win-now team”. The rest of his friends gasp in the way that sheltered kids do when they’re not sure if parents are around, and they want to be able to save face with them if they were listening to what their friend just uttered. The young boy replies, “What? Win-now is not a dirty word!”
I find myself playing dynasty much like this young boy likes to play with his toys. I see other owners celebrating players who have yet to break out like it’s a certainty that they do or entering start-up drafts while having no intention to win year one. I’ve been there, done that. Sometimes it works out well, other times you end up with a garbage roster full of post-hype players. Over years of playing dynasty, I’ve heard people talk about a three-year window or even a five-year window. I have found the most productive rosters I construct utilize a two-year window.
There are quite a few benefits to this theology. Here are some of my favorites:
Productive veteran players provide what might be the biggest competitive advantage in dynasty leagues
Owners are petrified to push the button in drafts on players who they believe only have one or two years of productivity left. When these types of players find themselves on rebuilding teams, the acquisition cost can be of insane value. Let’s take an example:-
Julio Jones represents a player that dynasty players and redraft players are very different on. Per June ADP on DFF, Jones has an ADP of 22 overall (WR9). On Fantasypros.com which aggregates many ADP sources for redraft, Julio has an ADP of 11 overall (WR4). A difference of nearly a full round in 12 team leagues. You can find players who have a bigger difference, but in my opinion, dynasty ADP should roughly mirror redraft ADP for at least the first couple rounds. My rationale for saying so is the point of fantasy is to win. If the redraft community says that he is worth a late first-round selection and there’s no good reason to say he won’t be able to roughly duplicate a likely top 12 WR season from 2019 again in 2020, this should be a player worth pulling the trigger on close to his redraft valuation.
I could go into his current contract dispute shedding light on the fact that he may find his way to a new team in 2020, but he’s still under contract for 2020 and I can’t fathom a world where he is a cap casualty at this point. Now you can quibble with Julio’s value all you want, but there’s more than just him slipping in dynasty drafts compared to redraft.
Benefits to prioritizing short term value of players
When I started out playing dynasty, I thought it was going to be a dramatically different experience than redraft. While that is true for the most part, I’d say dynasty in most leagues is set up like a string of one-year contests. Almost every dynasty league I am in that has a buy-in does not incorporate any sort of “sustained success” payout. Now there are plenty of leagues that have “Progressive” or “Empire” pots in which it benefits you set up your team to win multiple titles in either consecutive or in a close period of time. Those leagues are obviously immune to this line of logic. Free leagues also don’t really apply, because, in those, you just do whatever you get the most enjoyment from with regards to roster construction. For your common, small buy-in dynasty league, you should look at it as a series of one-year contests. Of course, the same rules apply as normal. Don’t blindly make deals only for today. Put a bigger emphasis on short term production and less of an emphasis on long term production.
Here are some factors that make emphasizing long term production risky, in my opinion.
The NFL is a violent sport, and the average career length is only 3.3 years across all players
Find more statistics at Statista
This may seem like a staggering revelation, but when you consider that the “average” NFL player is not a “starter”, this makes sense. Still, you should consider this when you’re filling your bench with stash players who might be selling homes for a living in 2023. In the graphic above, they also looked at career lengths of players for different “career milestones” so to speak.
If the player makes an opening day roster as a rookie, this is a good sign. It bumps average career length up to six years from 3.3.
If the player is drafted in the first round of the NFL draft, their average career goes up to 9.3 years. Hmm, draft capital matters. Who knew? We know that first-rounders are afforded a lot more chances than players that don’t have that draft capital.
Finally, if a player makes one pro bowl appearance, his average goes up to 11.7 years.
So let’s say we have player X who made his team’s opening day roster as a rookie, we’d then expect six years average career length for him. Six years, in some cases, is a rookie contract, and a second contract. Third contracts are mystical and a lot rarer than you think. Only the best players or starting quarterbacks stick around long enough to get third contracts.
The last thing, just because you can expect a six to nine-year career out of most players, doesn’t mean that you can expect all or even most of those years to be fantasy relevant. The prime age for many players is only a two to three year stretch in the majority of cases.
Free agency is far more often a detriment to a player’s value than it is a benefit, so keep player contracts as a part of your process
For every John Brown or Jerick McKinnon (from a value gained perspective, not that he was able to produce due to injury), there are far more players like Jordy Nelson or Eric Decker.
When you follow contracts more closely, you’ll notice that guaranteed money, and how it is structured within the deal is super important. One thing I learned over the last year or so, is that the most time you can spread guaranteed money over (signing money) is five years. What this means for our purposes, is that even if a player is signed for 10 years total, the guaranteed money will only be in the first five years and the remaining five years is not guaranteed to the player.
When I build my player database, I take note of both the maximum length of the contract and also my estimation of when the team and player could first part ways. Lots of times this can be much sooner than the maximum length. When building the core of my dynasty teams, I try to make sure that the core not only has good redraft value but projects to have a similar role in the upcoming year as well. It’s about impossible to predict two seasons in advance anyway. Predicting the next year is tough enough.
Even when players seem to be in stable contract situations, they can still hold out, demand a trade, get hurt, get suspended, or get in other precarious situations that are as of today unprecedented. All of these things lend credence to keeping an emphasis on what a player provides in the short term.
Hopefully, you enjoyed this free preview of what you can expect when you are a Factory Sports member. If you haven’t already become a Factory Sports member, we hope you will consider doing so. If you’re looking for a site that covers Dynasty, Redraft, IDP, Devy, and DFS you have found it. Sign up today for just $29.99 for a full year, and we’ll also give you the 2019 Factory Fantasy Redraft Guide, the Rookie and the 2019 IDP Rookie Guides (this special is ending very, very soon!). If you don’t want the guides, you can become a member for a year for just $19.99. Become a Factory Sports subscriber today! If you want to try us out for a month, you can do that too, right here. Each of these memberships also gets you instant access to our Factory Conveyor Belt Slack community, our upcoming Video Mailbag series, and much more to come!
For players at the top of dynasty ADP, it’s an uphill battle to even maintain their value two years later
For this, let’s look at DFF ADP from July of 2019 when compared to the top 20 players from July 2017.
[exceltable id=’48321′]
As you can see here, many of the top 20 fell out, while some virtually fell off the face of the earth. Only three players gained a significant amount of value over this period, and two players roughly maintained their value. The remaining 15 lost value over only two years. The average value drop was nearly 30 full picks lower. Median drop (takes out the significance of Jay Ajayi and Dez Bryant on the calculation) had more than a full round of value drop (16.7 picks).
Cash in, and finance your rebuild guilt-free!
The next reason I prioritize short term value for players is that with the way payouts are generally structured in dynasty leagues, the prospect of winning just one year of it can likely cover at least two to three years of entry fees. I have a much easier time pulling the ripcord and starting my rebuild if I know that I’m in the black in that particular league. Even some of the other secondary payouts can still often cover at least one year’s entry fees. It’s not unreasonable to see a scenario where you go into a start-up draft, you build a strong squad to contend in year one. In this scenario, even if you “mess up” or don’t quite get the value out of your team you thought, you still place highly in the league because of the emphasis people place on building a team that can sustain success over a long period of time, letting redraft value slide to your picks, and in trades. So if you don’t win in year one, you can go into year two with a good sense of when to pull the ripcord and start your rebuild, but with a little monetary sweetener to dull the pain. Also, if you are a strong dynasty owner, there’s nothing that says that a win-now team is destined for a rebuild if you can make the right moves in and around your team’s core.
It’s possible a substantial percentage of leagues don’t last five years
I’m probably going to catch some flack for bringing this up, but sometimes leagues don’t last forever. I’m also not saying that you should actively root for leagues to fold. I ran a poll on twitter recently asking “How many years would you say the average dynasty league lasts that you join?” Here are the results.
How many years would you say the average dynasty league lasts that you join? @MyFantasyLeague
— Mike2FFB (@DFF_Mike2) July 14, 2019
As you can see here, the majority of the nearly 900 responders said that their average is over five years, but 46% of responders said the average for them is lower, with 27% of responders saying their average was less than three years.
I love getting to know the people in my leagues, and I would never wish that a league would fold. But you can bet big money that I would wish I had prioritized short term value instead of looking to build a squad built to win in the future if a league does fizzle out. Having all my years of work building a juggernaut, and the associated entry fees, go to waste would be a tremendous kick in the pants.
Thank you all for taking the time to read my work. Hit me up on Twitter @DFF_Mike2 and let’s talk about why I’m probably wrong!
Hopefully, you enjoyed this free preview of what you can expect when you are a Factory Sports member. If you haven’t already become a Factory Sports member, we hope you will consider doing so. If you’re looking for a site that covers Dynasty, Redraft, IDP, Devy, and DFS you have found it. Sign up today for just $29.99 for a full year, and we’ll also give you the 2019 Factory Fantasy Redraft Guide, the Rookie and the 2019 IDP Rookie Guides (this special is ending very, very soon!). If you don’t want the guides, you can become a member for a year for just $19.99. Become a Factory Sports subscriber today! If you want to try us out for a month, you can do that too, right here. Each of these memberships also gets you instant access to our Factory Conveyor Belt Slack community, our upcoming Video Mailbag series, and much more to come!
