To this point I have written mostly about dynasty baseball, but not today. With the Super Bowl coming up and dynasty football becoming more popular, it’s time to delve into it in detail, not leastwise because it kicks ass.
If dynasty football is arguably better than dynasty baseball, it’s for two reasons. The first is that it’s a lot easier to trade, because the state of the league is changing so often, and people are thus a lot less precious about their NFL stars as they are about their baseball stars, and with good reason. Second, the randomness of the playoffs does not feel like a game apart from the regular season, as it does in dynasty baseball, fantasy baseball and real baseball, to some extent. Second place in baseball is a cause for celebration. Second place for football is a cause for sadness, so you trade to ease the pain. You do not generally worry about tedium.
I play in two dynasty football leagues, one a relatively standard 12-team Superflex (roster in which a single flex spot can be filled by a quarterback), which is popcorn fun, and the other a 14-team Superflex IDP (in which you draft individual defensive players instead of team defenses), which is so good it’s hard to know where to begin. If you are reading even this far into a newsletter about dynasty football, you will probably be interested in IDP. Not only is it easier than it sounds, it makes both fantasy scoring and watching football twice as fun, and is a huge opportunity to get an advantage on less aggressive opponents, to boot. And while I was very sad at the time to finish second, I can already say I’m a big liar and, at least in this case, it was a cause for celebration.
But okay let’s get to the meat and potatoes as I field questions from an imaginary press corps:
Antagonistic reporter eager to ask the first questions: Mr. Joiner, why do you think dynasty football is better than redraft? Isn’t all this a redirection of the frustration you felt when you lost the championship two years ago by five yards on the last play of Monday Night Football? And, since you’ve complained about it so much in front of your leaguemates, you needed to create a newsletter to find a new audience to complain about it anew, which you now have, through my voice?
Me: No.
Antagonistic reporter eager to ask the first questions: Cool, no further questions.
Alright let’s ditch this bit and get to it.
I have never played dynasty football before. How does it differ from redraft, and what should I know heading into my first draft?
Dynasty football differs from redraft in that you keep your players “forever,” should you choose. Like baseball leagues, it has an initial draft (or two initial drafts, one of current players and the other of incoming first-year players), and you maintain control of your picks for generally the next two years, which you can use as currency.
For the startup draft, despite the Mike Trout photo, most of the tips in my last post, about startup drafts, apply to football, except perhaps the caution against whipsawing back and forth in the draft to get players you want. While it is probably not the best strategy, it can work, and work spectacularly, if you just pick the right players. Which is sort of like saying you can win the lottery if you just pick the right numbers, kind of, in that I suggest you do both of them. It’s probably easier in fantasy football is all.
I don’t want to read your last post but I do want to know about Superflex, which I’ve never played. How should it change my strategy, if at all? Can I still do Zero QB?
These are The Big Questions imho, and there’s not really a right answer, just different ways of building a team.
In general, I think the accepted wisdom in Superflex is to have one “good” quarterback and one or two lesser ones, but this can take many forms. Unlike a redraft or even just a pre-Superflex dynasty league, the best quarterbacks will go at the top of a draft. Here is the 2020 ADP for the first six picks of standard leagues per FantasyData.com:
And here are the first six picks in our 14-team draft:
Can you see why the second approach is better? It yields results far more in line with how good with think football players are, in general. To that end, yes, their players got hurt, but the teams who drafted Christian McCaffrey and Saquon Barkley in our league did not make the playoffs, and all the other four of the top six, who took QBs, all made the playoffs. In fact, Baltimore traded up to get Lamar Jackson (wouldn’t you know it?) and ended up beating me out for the title by a comfortable margin. When I say I know that the scattershot approach can work in football, it’s because I’ve seen in work.
My team was built the exact opposite way as the Ravens, though, and yielded similar results; I won the regular season by about the same number of points he ultimately beat me by in the playoffs, so we effectively played to a draw, or at least that’s what I tell myself at night to keep from sobbing. This draft was probably my best ever, and I took chalk all the way down, starting with Dalvin Cook and DeAndre Hopkins at the 14/15 turn. You can imagine how it went from there. Beyond that, my round-ending picks meant I had the first pick in our separate rookie draft, and I took Joe Burrow, who I eventually dealt for Tom Brady and a bag of cash, basically. And beyond that, I turned D.K. Metcalf, T.J. Hockenson and Ke’Shawn Vaughn (whoops!) into Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill, all before a single game was played. And, yes, I lost, but not by much and not really at all in the aggregate. And I did it with Brady, Philip Rivers and Alex Smith as my quarterbacks. In the Zero QB vs. Superstar QB battle, the superstar came up when it counted.
Hold up, Brady’s not a superstar? He’s Tom Brady! He threw 40 touchdowns! He’s a “Zero” QB?
Yes, he is. You will be shocked at how disposable any quarterback over the age of, like, 28 is, the exceptions (Aaron Rodgers chief among them) proving the rule. You will similarly be shocked by the speculation price in young quarterbacks, Burrow being a perfect example. I think he will be a fine NFL player and great for fantasy, but in any given year that’s true of like 15 QBs to whom people aren’t really attached, and the dream of Burrow is so big you may find yourself, as I did, ready to charge the dream price. I am much more of the mind that you mulch your QB value when you can if it’s not going to interfere with a winning season. Brady performed better than Burrow in every way after I made the trade, both in that his stats on a per game basis were better and that he played at all.
But this isn’t really why Brady is a good illustrative case. He’s a good case because his perceived value was already in the toilet when I started playing dynasty three years ago, and even in his bad year(s) in New England he was a perfectly fine Superflex quarterback. The same was true until very recently of Rivers, Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger, who were fine, for fantasy purposes, until they fell off a cliff (and in Rivers’s case, he never really did). You can say, “Yeah, but they fell off a cliff!” and that’s fair, but my adherence to the Zero QB system owes to the idea that you should still be able to piece together a decent lineup for the small amount of time you’d have to deal with them before moving forward without them, and by that time there’s a new crop of Olds to pilfer, ideally.
Back to the dynasty stuff… do the same general rules of engagement apply as they do in baseball? Like, do people undervalue players at their peaks or just on the other side of their peaks in search of speculative value?
Yes. Baker Mayfield was taken 11th overall in our draft, which was almost exactly a year ago (the league was forged in the fury of early quarantine).
And that team made the playoffs.
I suspect good redraft players tend to do very well in the early seasons of leagues because they take the best players regardless of age, something I don’t even do in my “chalkity chalk chalk” approach. Chalk is based on perceived value, just as seedings are, like, entirely made up. There’s a huge class of player in every dynasty sport who is perpetually undervalued, even after the exploding dynasty sports information industry makes it a cause célèbre. The best examples of this have been, like, Russell Wilson, Raheem Mostert and Allen Robinson, but there are many, many examples.
Two questions:
1) My startup draft as a separate First-Year Player Draft. How do I do it if I don’t know anything about college football?
2) My league has lots of weird bonus point rules and they’re hard to keep track of. How do I know who they benefit?
I grouped these because they have related answers. They both involve looking stuff up.
The FYPD is entirely about perceived value, so you don’t need to know much about the specifics of your league to Google “FYPD NFL values 2021” and sort through the results to get some clarity. Some sites even have Superflex Dynasty FYPD rankings, which is just fantastic. Basically every draft is going to play out like this:
1: Top QB
2, 3: Second QB/Best RB
4, 5, 6: Third QB/Second RB/First WR
7, 8, 9: Fourth QB/Second WR/Third RB
10, 11, 12: Third WR/Fourth RB/First TE
You can go wrong, but you can only go so wrong. The guys who are going in the first round are the guys going in the first round. But OK, you still don’t know who to pick. I do! No one. Trade that sucker. The closer to draft day, the more the pick is worth, and if you’re disciplined enough to wait for the Draft Day spike, you can reap incredible rewards.
As for the bonus points and whatnot, the best way to project what player will be good in the system is to wait for the system to project what the player will do, and tell you. Fantrax, the site on which we run our leagues and with which we collectively have a love/hate relationship, does owners the favor of ranking players against each other, with the top-performing player in the league earning a “100%” ranking, so you don’t even have to do any thinking about who is good and who isn’t. My advice in both cases is to let someone or something else do the thinking for you. If you follow football at all, you should be able to be pretty good by not overthinking things.
Sadly, I don’t have a startup draft. I’m taking over a team and it’s bad. How long is it going to take me to rebuild? How do I even start?
I’m going to do a “How to Rebuild” post at some point soon, but the short answer here is that you’re in luck. Football rebuilds happen fast—if you’re trying. Unlike both dynasty baseball and basketball, it is possible to sit around and draft high and be miserable over and over because the draft picks miss or the rest of the team is garbage. If you take the opposite approach and sacrifice a season to squeeze value out of every asset, you might be winning games before that season is even over. This is not a theoretical situation: In the first year of our 12-team league I drafted a “win-now” team and decided after week one I wasn’t gonna win and, besides, wanted to focus on my baseball league, where I was facing a team-defining playoff matchup I’d ultimately lose 11-0-1, so, you know, time well spent all around and all, but the fact is I traded everyone away and surprised some people late—myself, most of all. The NFL landscape changes so fast that if you simply set a target date to compete no fewer than three months away and no more than a year in the future and just wait, you can expect the impatient owners in the league to do your rebuilding for you. Any time you put into it beyond that would be good money after good, so to speak, and well spent.
This post is getting long. Sell us on IDP in a short paragraph, and save else anything you might have missed for a follow-up post.
IDP is easy to gauge by using the “look it up, dummy” approach above. Look up your league settings and see who scores a lot. Draft them and pick them up, and drop the players who are not as good. Do this a couple times and you’ll get the hang of it, and when you watch football, you will start watching your defensive players, and it will open up football watching in new and fun exciting ways that you can easily exploit against the leaguemates who still just set it and forget it on defense, and are happy to throw what they consider an expendable defensive player into a deal at little to no cost.
Hmmm. I have questions.
Save ‘em for the IDP post.