Maybe someday I’ll walk through how I built that team. (There was an awful lot of luck involved!) I already wrote about how stockpiling future first round draft picks was a crucial part of the process, though the price of future picks has risen substantially over the last year or so and I’ve pivoted away.

But I have a second dynasty team that I don’t talk about as much. Not because it’s bad or anything, it’s just… not as good as that one. I want to talk about that team now, and use it as an example of why I track my dynasty rosters like this, what insights it gives me, and how I act on those insights.

Step 1: Committing to a Rebuild

In 2013, several Footballguys staff members got together and started a dynasty league. I’ve done reasonably well in it. In 2013 I opted to load up on young and injured players and shoot for the 1.01 in 2014. I finished 3-10 in my first year and 6-7 in my second. Despite this, my team ranks 3rd in total wins and 2nd in playoff appearances over the life of the league, taking home a title in 2017.

But I’ll admit that I wasn’t really putting in the effort. I was kind of letting the team coast along in the “good-but-not-great” range, hoping to squeeze another year or two out of my competitive window and maybe luck into a bit more success in the process.

Some numbers to quantify this neglect: in my “primary” dynasty league, 60% of my roster was filled with players I have acquired via trade (18/30), and 90% was filled with players who I had acquired within the last two calendar years (preseason 2018 through preseason 2020). In my “secondary” dynasty, just 29% of my roster was acquired via trade (7/24), and just 66% of players had been acquired in the past two calendar years. I just wasn’t putting in the sustained effort to keep pushing the market.

Because of the neglect, trying to ride out the roster to whatever success I could squeeze out of it wasn’t a great idea. In 2014 I earned the 1.01 rookie pick, in 2015 I had the 1.06, and my success since then means I’ve been relying on late picks to sustain my roster: 1.08, 1.08, 1.12, 1.10, and 1.10. 

With headwinds working against me in the draft, there’s much less room for mistakes, and in the few trades I made there were a couple big ones. I traded Davante Adams for Dion Lewis in 2015, I traded Calvin Ridley and Mark Ingram for Leonard Fournette and Brandin Cooks, and I traded Baker Mayfield and Noah Fant for O.J. Howard.

The league has incredible bonuses for tight ends. Functionally, it’s roughly equivalent to 2.2 points per reception for TEs vs. just 1 PPR for everyone else. So trading away a pair of Top-10 wide receivers and a Top-10 tight end with nothing substantial to show for it blew a major hole in my roster.

Here’s where my team stood before the season. I was hoping to ride potential Top-12 finishes from Kamara and Fournette, get another solid showing by DeShaun Watson, and maybe even luck into a Top-12 finish or two from my deep stable of dart throws at Tight End to earn myself another playoff berth and hope for a lucky run.

When making decisions like this, I like using Footballguys League Dominator, which has a “power ranking” feature that estimates how many points each team will score in the coming year. (The League Dominator is supposedly a tool for managing your redraft teams, but I find it incredibly powerful for managing my dynasty teams. In addition to the team quality estimates, the rest-of-year player rankings are a huge part of my process, as I’ll detail in a bit.)

With Fournette in tow, my team was in the 4th-5th range, though there was a substantial gap between me and the top two teams. Typically, Top 4 or Top 5 is my threshold for focusing heavily on competing, so I ignored the size of the gaps and committed to 2020 with the following roster:

This was a bad plan, and when Fournette got cut from the Jaguars I could no longer delude myself into believing it was otherwise. My team rating fell down to 8th or 9th, my total lack of depth was exposed even before opening kickoff, and my path to a title basically evaporated.

The biggest warning signs for this roster, though, were already visible in the EYR (or Expected Years Remaining) column, and the ratio column right next to it. EYR is based on a formula I use to estimate longevity based solely on age and position. Once it turns pink, it means players are at heightened risk to start losing dynasty value in a hurry.

The ratio column simply calculates the ratio of the redraft average to the dynasty average. (Technically, it’s Dynasty Average + 4 divided by Redraft Average + 4. The +4s are added mostly so that an average ranking of 1.1 in redraft and 1.8 in dynasty doesn’t look like a higher ratio than an average ranking of 20 in redraft and 30 in dynasty.)

The bluer the ratio column, the more a player’s value is tied up in the 2020 season. The yellower it is, the more a player’s value lies off in the future. Some blue is totally fine; in fact, most teams that are competing for a title should welcome a little bit, since blue players are the guys who are helping you win right now. But a lot of blue suggests once again that your team’s value is going to start declining precipitously.

So I could tell at a glance that my team was starting to reach a point where its value was going to be falling a lot in the coming years. This would be fine if I had a realistic path to a championship, but once I decided that was closed to me, this makeup was a giant red flag.

Surveying my squad, I decided that a dramatic rebuild was in order. And since this was to be the first actual full-on, strip-to-studs rebuild of my dynasty career, I figured I’d document the process step-by-step so y’all could see what I did and, more importantly, why I did it.

It’s important in dynasty to know your strengths. If I have an area of relative advantage, I’d say it is this: the understanding of how dynasty and redraft are linked.

Making projections for dynasty is really, really hard. I don’t know how good a player is going to be in 2025. That’s the fundamental challenge of the format. 

People have various different methods for getting around that challenge. Some use a 3-year window, essentially just projecting production over the next three years. This leaves a more constrained space, which makes the task easier, but value in years 4+ still exists and it’s bad process to just ignore it wholesale.

Another method (and the one I used to use) considers something I call “exit value”. You try to estimate how much someone will produce over the next three seasons, and you also try to estimate how much that player will be worth in trade after those three seasons. It’s superior to the 3-year window because it doesn’t just ignore a huge component of player value. But the reason I don’t do this anymore is because I’ve found estimating exit value three years out to essentially just be psuedoscience.

Some have taken the exit value concept to its logical conclusion. If it’s hard to project three years out, and it’s hard to guess trade value three years out, why not just do it over one season. In other words, a player’s dynasty value is a function of how much he produces this year and how much he’s worth after the year is over. Because you aren’t looking as far out, both items are much easier to estimate. (For what it’s worth: I like this system a lot.)

I do something similar to that. Projecting one year out is difficult, but redraft players have gotten quite good at it. I then ask myself “given everything we know about this player, if he performs to redraft expectations, what will he be worth after the season?”

If a 24-year-old wide receiver is projected to finish Top 10 this year, and he lives up to those expectations, he would easily be a Top 10 dynasty wide receiver a year from now. On the other hand, if a 28-year-old tight end is projected to finish 15th at the position, a dynasty ranking in the Top 12 makes little sense.

When I am being more rigorous, I attempt to quantify this process. Previous research of mine suggests that players don’t really improve or decline. Instead, they tend to quickly ascend to their productive peak (usually within a year or two of first reaching fantasy relevance), then tend to just fluctuate around that level indefinitely until they suddenly and unexpectedly fall from relevance. A receiver who adds 150 points of value tends to keep adding around 150 points of value– sometimes 120 points, sometimes 180 points, but generally fluctuating around that mean– until without warning they lose a step and become a shadow of their former selves.

Dez Bryant is illustrative of this phenomenon. From ages 22 through 26 he was worth 30, 76, 154, 150, and 162 points over a waiver-wire replacement. You see he improved, reached his peak, and then maintained it.

From that point, Dez Bryant was worth 13, 53, 58 points above a waiver wire replacement, and then he was out of football by age 30. (For context: ~60 points above a waiver wire replacement typically rates as a very low-end WR2 through middling WR3.) You wouldn’t necessarily think an All Pro receiver would fall off at age 27 or be out of football by age 30, but that “ascend, maintain, suddenly fall off” is actually the norm, not the exception.

Roddy White: 0, 103, 143, 135, 178, 138, 123, 31, 77, 0

Demaryius Thomas: 16, 146, 173, 187, 133, 70, 77, 29, 0

Wes Welker: 14, 145, 124, 169, 81, 194, 144, 92, 0

Torry Holt: 28, 149, 137, 103, 234, 164, 180, 145, 121, 36, 0

I could go on and on. Running backs and quarterbacks follow the same pattern: ascend quickly, bounce around in the same range for a while (with perhaps the occasional down year due to injury or egregious situation), and then descend quickly. The ages of the ascent and descent vary, but the overall pattern is remarkably consistent.

Armed with that key insight, I can attempt to estimate a player’s “true production level” (for players already past the ascent phase, redraft projections are a remarkably good proxy!) and their chances that any given year is their “sudden decline” season (based on historical aging patterns). From there, I can use math to estimate future fantasy value on a year-by-year basis. Add an overall time discount to the mix and there you go, dynasty values.

There’s a lot more that goes into it (for players who have not yet passed the ascent, estimates and approximations need to be made, and there’s a lot of subjectivity that goes into fitting players into historical aging patterns based on how good and established they are). But the end result is that, with a lot of effort, I have a process for making theoretically sound and– most importantly– market contrarian dynasty rankings.

The contrarian part is really important, because if you don’t have a strong opinion about where the market is wrong, you’ll have a hard time finding good trade values. And the “theoretically sound” part is even more important, because if you bet big on the market being wrong, and your process is bad, the market is going to eat your lunch.

A lot of times I’m valuing players in dynasty based on handwaves that sort of gesture at this general system. But in this case, I put in the effort to build out the actual player values necessary to find undervalued targets for my rebuild.

My #1, overriding goal was to get young and get bad. To do that, I needed to get maximum return for the few marketable assets I still had at my disposal. Based on the chart above, my top redraft assets were Watson, Kamara, Beckham, Lockett, Cooks, Hooper, and Gronkowski. With a bright-green EYR column, I didn’t really plan on moving Watson; he’d be there for me at the end of my rebuild no matter how long it took. 

But the other six were critical to unload ASAP. My roster had too little value for me to afford to lose any to age, all six of those players were potentially improving my team in the short run and hurting the 2021 draft pick I would earn. (I would never, ever, ever set anything other than my optimal lineup on a weekly basis. As long as Kamara was on my team I was starting him every week. But nothing compels me to hold on to him instead of trading him for assets that are less productive in the short term, such as rookies or future picks.)

Most importantly, all of my priority trade chips had values that were incredibly fragile. A single untimely ACL tear could rob me of one of my very few viable assets and kill any rebuild before it began. Every week I held on to them I was leaving myself exposed to tremendous risk.

I made the decision to fully commit to a rebuild after Kansas City’s opening game, so the first avenue I explored was offering a “Godfather package” for Clyde Edwards-Helaire. The crux of the deal was giving Kamara to get CEH, but I included a bunch of other ancillary pieces to see if I could unload all of my priority targets for younger players at once. The GM with CEH declined. After Kamara signed a long-term extension that Saturday I approached with a “clean” offer of Kamara for Edwards-Helaire straight up and was once again rebuffed. Fair enough.

The GM did respond with an offer of Diontae Johnson and Tee Higgins for Odell Beckham and Sammy Watkins. I was a fan of Johnson and Higgins had the kind of draft capital that made him a solid long-term bet, so I liked this deal a good bit. But I didn’t want to sell my second-most-valuable chip for the first offer that came along, so I declined with the option to revisit later if nothing better presented itself.

Shopping Lockett merely proved to me what I always knew: Tyler Lockett will always and forever be criminally underrated in every dynasty league in the history of fantasy football. Lockett was a 28-year-old talented receiver who ranked 16th in 2018 and 13th in 2019. He was tied to a Hall of Fame quarterback for the foreseeable future. I wound up with him in the first place because someone else offered him to me for a late 2nd (unsolicited!) No one has ever paid fair value for Tyler Lockett. I remain convinced.

Anyway, the best offer I had received was Van Jefferson and a 2nd from the best team in the league. So basically a 3rd rounder and a future almost-3rd rounder. That was an easy pass from me, though I kept the offer on the table fearing it might be the best one I ever received. At the end of the day, I would rather sell at an egregious loss than keep him around and waste value in a lost season.

There were two other avenues I pursued. I will say that because this was a league of Footballguys staff members, I had a tremendous advantage that most others won’t have when attempting to rebuild; many of my competitors published dynasty rankings. Moreover, several of them were contrarian, and confident enough to trade on those rankings.

It just happened that the Footballguys staff member who was highest on Odell Beckham was also highest on Brandin Cooks, so I felt there was strong potential for a deal there. At first I started playing around with more “Godfather” offers. I offered Kamara, Beckham, Cooks, and Watkins for J.K. Dobbins, Marquise Brown, D.J. Chark, Chase Claypool, and a first (likely to be late). This GM had Kamara ranked above Dobbins, Beckham above Chark, Cooks above Brown, and I thought I could get Claypool and the first as a nice kicker.

He declined (fair), but was still interested in dealing. He wanted to hold on to Chark and Claypool, but he was looking to unload Julio Jones and Raheem Mostert, and he also liked Tony Pollard (to handcuff his Ezekiel Elliott). He offered Dobbins, Mostert, Julio, Brown, and a 1st for Kamara, Pollard, Beckham, Cooks, and a 2nd. 

I assumed his 1st would be late and my 2nd would be early, so the upgrade wasn’t very compelling to me. And I was unwilling to take on a 31-year-old WR and a 28-year-old RB unless and until I already had a second trade partner lined up, because their value was even more at risk to injury. I didn’t, and I didn’t have enough time to fix that before Week 1.

Meanwhile, I had found another middling team with plenty of quality young prospects and I made one last-ditch “Godfather” offer, hoping that we could find common ground on a major deal that would make him an immediate title contender and leave me immediately rebuilt. But I’d put off the decision to rebuild for too long and we didn’t have time to make serious progress.

At this point, we were to kickoff in Week 1, so I called myself an idiot for waiting so long to start the process and reluctantly stood pat, hoping to avoid any major landmines and get an earlier start heading into Week 2.

Fortunately I survived Week 1 without any major injuries. Beckham underperformed, but the GM who was highest on Beckham took a long-term view so his interest wasn’t blunted. Since I had his rankings in hand, I figured I’d continue pursuing other trades in the background but turn my early attention to him.

I had a lot of issues getting the numbers to work. Since he was uninterested in parting with Chark and Claypool, that didn’t leave enough value available to match the worth of Kamara and Beckham. And what value was there would hinge on Julio Jones, which was a risky add for me. Eventually I decided to stop trying to find an all-in-one solution, drop Kamara from the table, and just focus on Beckham and Cooks, the two receivers he was most interested in.

Once that decision was made, a deal fell in place pretty quickly. I gave Beckham, Cooks, Pollard, and my Early 2nd, and he gave Julio, Marquise Brown, Devin Duvernay, and his Late 1st. I also gave Austin Hooper and got Jonnu Smith. This was a late add to the trade, but looking at Footballguys rest-of-year projections, Jonnu Smith was both younger than Hooper and projected for more points than Hooper. I love buying young guys who are projected to do well in redraft because you can usually get them a month or two before the dynasty market consensus catches up to the new reality.

Taking on Julio without a second trade partner in place was a massive risk and I was very uncomfortable with it, but I was willing to work the lines as hard as necessary to get him unloaded before Week 2 kicked off. It was a calculated gamble, but it paid off.

My first stop was another GM who I knew loved Julio based on his just-updated rankings. He had Julio ranked 3rd in dynasty and Calvin Ridley ranked 11th. That Ridley ranking was at the top of his market value at the time, but the Julio ranking was so strong that I offered Julio for Ridley and a 2nd anyway. (I was interested in Ridley because, per Footballguys’ rest-of-season rankings, there was no wide receiver who was both younger than Ridley and ranked higher than Ridley, a combination that should result in a Top-10 ranking at the position, but the market was still sleeping on him.) 

Unfortunately, this GM was also looking to rebuild, so he declined, and he also declined the offer of Julio for Ridley straight up. He said looking at it he should probably revise Ridley’s ranking upward from 11th (despite already being one of the top rankers on him.) I agreed and mentioned I’d have Ridley closer to 6th or 7th.

Once I had Jonnu, the team that had been interested in Tyler Lockett started asking about him, too. The problem for our purposes was that he didn’t have anything that I was interested in and he was willing to part with. (He had D.J. Moore, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and A.J. Brown, but they were all in his long-term plans.) The other problem was that I tend to be much, much higher on tight ends in this crazy scoring system than the rest of the league, which means even if other GMs are higher than I am on a specific tight end, they still are rarely willing to give what I’d consider fair value.

I did make progress on Lockett, though. The same GM very seriously considered giving Christian McCaffrey for Alvin Kamara and Tyler Lockett. By my personal values, this was an even trade, but I wanted to make it because I felt McCaffrey would be much easier to sell for fair value than Lockett. Essentially this trade would make my roster’s value much more liquid. Alas, the other GM got cold feet. (Understandably; it’s hard to part with Christian McCaffrey.)

It was fortunate for me that he did, because I wound up getting a solid return for Lockett after all, and I avoided potentially getting stuck holding the bag when McCaffrey got hurt in Week 2.

Now that I had Julio instead of Beckham, I could put together a much stronger “Godfather” package. By the League Dominator’s “rest of year” projections, I was now up to the 7th-best team in the league, but I still wanted to tank myself down to 10th or 12th. So I approached the 6th-best team, the team I had been talking with the week before, and offered Kamara, Julio, Lockett, and Gronkowski in a deal that launched him from 6th up to 3rd. (After last weekend’s action, he’s now projected as the 2nd-best team in the league.)

In return, I got Jonathan Taylor, Terry McLaurin, Brandon Aiyuk, Laviska Shenault, Dawson Knox, and a 1st. To shake things up a bit, I also included Deshaun Watson to get Kyler Murray. Finally, I offered him Jerick McKinnon for whoever he’d cut to make room for Jerick McKinnon, and wound up getting Rashaad Penny in return.

Overall, by DLF’s September startup dynasty ADP, Kamara was going 4th vs. Taylor going 11th, Julio was going 28th vs. McLaurin’s 41st, and Lockett was going 48th vs. Shenault’s 90th. (Watson and Murray were going 57th and 58th.) So by market consensus it was a solid upgrade at RB1, WR1, and WR2 for the cost of Aiyuk and a (presumably late) 1st.

But deals like this are why I love dynasty, because while the general value was largely a wash (per market consensus), the specific value was great for both of us. My team got much worse in the short run while adding a lot of intriguing young players. His team became an immediate title front-runner while keeping a young enough core to stay competitive for several years after.

With my high-priorty trade assets all gone, I set about trimming the back of my roster so it all matched the overall vision. I’d been trying to move players in various other small deals (offering Boston Scott for a 2nd to the GM with Miles Sanders when Sanders was ruled out of Week 1, for instance), but had made little progress.

I cut Tyrod Taylor and Matt Breida because most of their value came as short-term fill-ins, and I would rather not have short-term fill-ins available. I took advantage of the league’s IR slots (added to help with COVID) to stash Rashaad Penny. I bid big on Myles Gaskin, Drew Sample, and Dalton Schultz (remember: huge premium on tight ends) just as young long-shots. I added Nick Mullens.

After all my maneuvering, 50% of my roster has now been acquired via trade, and 88% has been acquired within the past ONE calendar year. Here’s where things stood after my trades.

EYRs are suddenly green for everyone except Fournette, Breida (who was subsequently cut), Scott, Watkins, and Howard (who I think is currently undervalued in dynasty, so I’m holding and hoping for a value spike at some point before selling). Nearly everyone is yellow, which means valued higher in dynasty than in redraft and likely to retain their value.

My team still isn’t as awful as I had hoped it would be, thanks largely to the emergence of Murray, Taylor, and McLaurin, but if they’re as good as projected I’ll gladly take that even if it means I’m only the 4th-worst team instead of the worst team.

My top priority is selling Fournette, preferably to a newly RB-needy team, and hopefully getting anything of value at all for Sammy Watkins. I’ll also be active buying any injured stars as the season progresses.

Mostly though I’ve just tried to extend my window as long as possible so that however long it takes me to come out of the rebuild, my players will still be at peak value and ready to contend.

Based on my process (age-adjusted redraft rankings), a few players stood out as screaming values compared to the current market consensus.

Why are Calvin Ridley and Terry McLaurin not top-10 dynasty WRs?

I’d say “wrong answers only”, but all answers are wrong answers so that’d be redundant.

— Adam Harstad (@AdamHarstad) September 22, 2020

Per FBGs’ latest rest-of-year projections, here are the “Pareto optimal” receivers (WRs for whom no one else in the league is both younger *and* more productive).

Davante Adams (28)
Calvin Ridley (26)
Terry McLaurin (25)
Chris Godwin (24)
D.J. Moore (23)
CeeDee Lamb (21)

— Adam Harstad (@AdamHarstad) September 22, 2020

McCaffrey
Barkley
Jacobs

That’s your top three.

— Adam Harstad (@AdamHarstad) September 15, 2020

I had Josh Jacobs in my other dynasty league already and prefer to diversify between my two rosters (so if a player tears his ACL, say, I’m not doubly screwed), so he wasn’t a prime target for me. But based on my formula (redraft value multiplied by time-discounted expected years remaining), both Taylor and Edwards-Helaire were top-5 dynasty running backs already, ahead of both Ezekiel Elliott and Alvin Kamara. I figured there was a short window to take advantage of this before the market caught on, so I didn’t want to trade Kamara without getting one of the two in return.

(While the formula has the rookies over Kamara, it’s reasonable to believe the formula is too bullish; the expected years remaining formula is only meant to apply to players who are actually good, and we can be much more confident that Kamara is actually good than Edwards-Helaire or Taylor after a single game. Still: given the fact that I actively wanted to avoid 2020 production, preferring the rookies over Kamara was an easy call for me.)

After Taylor and CEH, several receivers had insane profiles of immediate value and youth. Tyreek Hill, D.K. Metcalf, D.J. Moore, and CeeDee Lamb had tremendously valuable profiles, but the market was in love with them, so their price was relatively fair. But Ridley, McLaurin, and Marquise Brown all stood out as wildly undervalued; At the time of the trade, they ranked 6th, 18th, and 23rd in footballguys rest-of-season projections despite all being young and ranked well below that in dynasty. (All three receivers have since risen even further in FBGs’ rest-of-year projections.)

At the time I was trading, Ridley was ranked as the 14th-15th best receiver based on a broad average of data points I use to estimate market consensus. My formula (and a similar formula by Luke Vosters that I use as a sanity check) had him around 6th or 7th. McLaurin ranked 18th-19th per market consensus, but closer to 12th based on age-adjusted performance. (I felt that even this was low, and after a strong Week 2 game demonstrating that he’s going to be a force even in the short term, he has ascended even higher by the #math.) Brown ranked around 29th per the market, but around 13th per my approach. I’m super bummed that Ridley wasn’t realistically available, but was happy to get the other two.

Austin Hooper, similarly, was TE11 per the market but TE18 per my formula, while Jonnu Smith was TE18 per the market but TE8 per my formula, which essentially says that if all else is equal, prefer the player who is both younger and more productive. This is similar to why I wanted to trade Deshaun Watson for Kyler Murray. We’re much less confident that Murray is actually going to be a good NFL quarterback, so I’m shouldering more risk. But the potential payoff can justify that risk.

(If anything, rebuilders should seek to *MAXIMIZE* risk because even if the risk blows up, the worst that can happen is you wind up with the 1.01 pick again. The worst position to find yourself in is consistently in the 5-7 range, not good enough to make a run at a title bit too good to land a high pick to build around.)

Among my waiver adds, the formula also loves Drew Sample and Dalton Shultz. It doesn’t understand that they’re only relevant in the short term because of injuries to tight ends ahead of them. But they’re projected as Top 20 redraft tight ends, which means they have potential Top 10 upside, and any player that young with that kind of upside has real potential to finish the season ranked substantially higher than he’s ranked today. In a league that’s this tight-end heavy, that was a gamble I’m excited to roll the dice on.

Beyond specific trade targets highlighted by my formula, I wanted to load up on as many “low-risk” assets as I could. By low-risk assets, I specifically mean future 1st round picks and rookie receivers. History tells us that these assets are extraordinarily unlikely to lose value in the next year, which is important because my team is not going to be winning much and I don’t want to bleed trade value while I do it. I like Aiyuk and Shenault, but largely I view them as replaceable with a bunch of other similar receivers (Tee Higgins, Michael Pittman Jr., Chase Claypool, Darius Slayton, Denzel Mims, etc.)

Basically, unless a receiver is already producing positive fantasy value and therefore registering with my formula, all I care about is that they’re young enough to get a free pass for not producing enough fantasy value to register with my formula. If Tee Higgins is not a startable fantasy receiver this year, he won’t be downgraded, because nobody expected him to be. If I decide next year I want someone else, I can probably trade Tee Higgins for close to the same price I paid to get him. I wanted to acquire as many of these receivers and future first round picks so that when I was ready to compete again I would have some liquid assets to trade for players to fill any holes I might still have left. If they break out in the meantime, so much the better.

What I like about my formula is that it’s functionally like a crystal ball. The market is often slow to update, but my formula is not. Often it has me valuing players in places that look aggressive today and conventional in two months. (Despite the fact that zero Footballguys or DLF staff members currently rank Calvin Ridley among their Top 10 fantasy receivers, I’ll be shocked if he’s not a consensus Top 10 receiver by the end of the season, barring injury.)

Again, I don’t think the formula is perfect, and I definitely considered subjective impressions when making these deals, too. Any time you want to aggressively bet that the market is wrong, there’s substantial risk involved.

But risk in this case is okay. I wasn’t winning anything no matter what I did. I need to take some risks if I want to get back to the top.

The first takeaway is just one I always knew; success in dynasty is proportionate to effort in dynasty. I neglected this team for a couple years, and there was no shortcut to turning it around other than sustained effort.

I essentially rebuilt my team in two trades. But before I could even start talking about those trades, I needed to build out an entire set of player values. And for the two trades completed there were at least 15 offers that weren’t accepted. Those two trades were the result of plenty of back-and-forth, listening to other GMs and honestly trying to grapple with and meet their perceived needs. There’s no replacement for good old-fashioned legwork.

And also, it’s important to note that both trades genuinely left both parties feeling better about their teams. A contrarian ranker (who, I must note, has been quite successful in his contrarianism– he leads the league in wins, points, and championships by a large margin!) was able to trade off guys he didn’t love for guys he did. A middling team was able to get a huge production boost to make a run at the title while still retaining a sustainable, durable core. And I was able to get rid of virtually every player on my team who would be losing value while I tried to rebuild around them.

I don’t know if this rebuild will work out for me. There’s a good chance it won’t. A lot currently hinges on a bunch of players who may or may not actually be good– Kyler Murray, Jonathan Taylor, Marquise Brown, Henry Ruggs, Brandon Aiyuk, Laviska Shenault, Jonnu Smith, Chris Herndon. If that list has more hits than misses, I’ll come out of this looking great as early as next year. If it has more misses than hits, the rebuild might take a while.

But I’ve tried to position myself such that no matter how long it takes, I won’t be hemorrhaging value in the meantime. And most importantly, I finally feel like there’s a relatively simple story I can tell that results in me being a title contender once again, one that doesn’t hinge on avoiding any pitfalls and having four long-shot bets all come down in my favor.

Here’s the final before and after:

Update: I’ve decided I might as well let this post be a living document chronicling my thoughts and actions through the year. That way, three years from now when I revisit this season it’ll be easier to remember what mistakes to blame myself for!

The GM with Christian McCaffrey remains interested in dealing, and just came back with the following offer: McCaffrey and D.J. Moore for Jonathan Taylor, Marquise Brown, Jonnu Smith, and a 1st (presumably late).

On the surface this is very appealing to me. This trade could be broken down into Taylor/Jonnu for McCaffrey and Brown/1st for Moore. I was ready to trade Kamara/Lockett for McCaffrey, and I value Jonnu Smith pretty similarly to Lockett (in this crazy scoring system), so Taylor/Smith seems superficially similar.

But I was looking to deal Kamara/Lockett for McCaffrey back before McCaffrey was hurt, and his value has theoretically gone down (however slightly) since then. Additionally, I dealt Kamara for Taylor specifically because (for my rebuild) I preferred Taylor. Finally, the reason I wanted to deal Kamara/Lockett for McCaffrey is not because I wanted McCaffrey specifically (I have him in my other dynasty league already, and I’d prefer to diversify my rosters, all else being equal).

Rather, I wanted to trade Kamara/Lockett for McCaffrey because I thought it would be easy to flip McCaffrey for players I *did* want, instead. Let’s say that I view Kamara as being worth $50 and Lockett as being worth 20 Euros. 20 Euros is roughly equivalent to $25, so Kamara + Lockett should be worth $75. But it’s extraordinarily hard to find someone willing to give me $25 worth of value for 20 Euros.

The appeal of trading a $50 bill and a 20-Euro bill for the equivalent of $75 in Christian McCaffrey is that the $75 in Christian McCaffrey is much more spendable. It’s denominated in a currency that everyone is interested in. But with Lockett gone, the “conversion problem” is already resolved, and with the ankle injury I’m not sure McCaffrey would be the universally desired trade chip he was a week ago.

More than that, the point of acquiring McCaffrey was trading him for players I liked for my rebuild, so it makes little sense trading players I like for my rebuild for McCaffrey just so I can turn around and try to trade him for players I like for my rebuild all over again. That seems like a lot of effort for not a lot of payoff. Even ignoring the fact that players like Taylor, who are both young and productive, are very rare, so there’s few substitutes. Maybe I could trade McCaffrey for CEH or Jacobs? But I already have Jacobs in my other league, too, and it’s not obvious to me that CEH represents an upgrade over Taylor, and there’s no guarantee that I could get another valuable piece to offset the loss of Jonnu Smith.

I could, of course, just keep McCaffrey and rebuild around him. He’s 24 years old and he rates as the #1 asset even for rebuilding teams. But he lowers my margin for error; if I miss the landing and am not competitive next season, I will be wasting two seasons of his prime. I’ll have more of my roster’s value tied up in one player, which makes it hurt even more if he gets injured again or underperforms. Acquiring him is a much more aggressive, much riskier move than I’m currently looking to make.

Similarly, D.J. Moore is clearly more valuable than Marquise Brown. But I don’t know how much more valuable. I know the market thinks it’s a big difference. (D.J. Moore was WR5 vs. Marquise Brown’s WR29 in September Startup ADP, though expert consensus tends to have him more around WR9 or WR10.) But I also know that they’re the same age and, per FBGs’ rest-of-year projections, the expected difference between them going forward is just one point per game. That suggests a much smaller gap, perhaps smaller than a future 1st round pick, even a (presumably) late one.

(I could acquire Moore and then try to sell him for more somewhere else, but again, the end-game is to wind up with players I like, and it’s spinning my wheels to trade players I like to acquire valuable trade chips which I can use to acquire players I like. A bird in the hand vs. two in the bush, etc.)

As a strategic matter, if I’m shooting for an elite team (as opposed to a merely good one), that will require many top players across my roster, so it makes sense to maximize the number of dart throws I have available to me. So as a practical matter, trading 4-for-2 (even if the value on both sides is even) is more the kind of move one should make as a contender than as a rebuilder. Similarly, keeping more mid-level assets around keeps my roster value more liquid, which leaves me better equipped to make an aggressive play for wildly undervalued players in the future.

Finally, on the squishy subjective side of the ledger, I’m kind of excited about the possibility of rostering Taylor, Brown, and Smith for a while. My approach made a call that all three are wildly undervalued, and it’s exciting to succeed or fail based on the strength of that approach. If I’m wrong, so be it, I’ll be wrong my way. (I also have very little exposure to the Baltimore Ravens’ offense in dynasty leagues and look forward to have more of a rooting interest on that team going forward.)

So all told I think the offer is very tempting, but I’m going to decline. But also it’s the kind of deal that I might feel like a complete idiot for passing on two years from now, so I wanted to document my thoughts in real time so I could revisit them and use them as an object lesson the next time a situation like this arises.

There’s always a tension in a rebuild when it comes to adding productive players. Given the crazy TE premium in this league, I took a gamble on Drew Sample and Dalton Schultz on waivers, because my philosophy essentially boils down to “if a guy is both young and productive you should value him highly”. Highly-drafted young guys (Sample is a 24yo 2nd-round pick, Schultz a 24yo 4th-round pick) should almost always rank higher in dynasty than in redraft, and according to Footballguys’ rest-of-season projections, both of those tight ends were Top-20 options in redraft.

But the main reason Sample and Schultz are projected to be so productive is that guys ahead of them have been lost to injury (C.J. Uzomah and Blake Jarwin), and there’s no telling how their current production will carry into the future. It’s possible that if they play well today they can translate that into real long-term value. It’s also possible that they’ll add enough points to my team to cost me losses in the short term without any long-term value to show for it.

I would never put a waiver claim in for Mike Davis on a rebuilding team. He’ll hurt your draft position and likely give you nothing to show for it by the time you’re finally ready to contend. But guys like Schultz and Sample are not as clear-cut. There’s long-term potential there. I’m not sure if it outweighs the risk.

Adding Schultz has already cost me one loss; he scored 16.65, the other options I considered scored 13.2 and 4.2 points, and I won by just 0.43. Worse, I won against one of my top competitors for the 1.01 pick. If he costs me just 1 or 2 draft slots, that’s potentially a huge value loss, and Schultz would need to be worth at least a mid-2nd in trade to make it up. Potentially even a late 1st.

But if given the chance, I’ll always gamble on productive young players and worry about draft position later. I don’t know if it’s optimal, but it’s a lot more satisfying than sitting passively by and just letting the season happen. (Also, I will never under any circumstances *not* field my best possible lineup. If a guy’s on my roster, I’m starting him.)

With the Titans/Steelers game rescheduled, one team found itself unable to round out his starting lineup and started asking about Sammy Watkins. Watkins is a bit “old” for my rebuild, but the thing about end-of-bench players is you want to focus on guys with a (very small) chance at seeing a large value spike, and impending free agents have a lot of potential there. (This also applies to Leonard Fournette.) So I wasn’t feeling especially compelled to sell Watkins now, I was content to hold and hope if necessary.

But I was offered Quintez Cephus. I countered asking for either Van Jefferson or else Cephus plus a (presumably late) 2nd for Watkins and my (presumably early) 3rd. Neither option flew, but he offered me a chance to take a look at anyone else on the end of his roster to finalize the deal.

Most of the other end-of-bench guys were too old and short-term focused to catch my interest, but he did have Corey Davis, who I asked for and he declined. He also had Royce Freeman, who is young enough, but two years away from free agency; I don’t want to be burning a roster spot for that long with that low of a chance of getting anything to show for it.

So I offered Watkins and Dwayne Haskins for Quintez Cephus and Teddy Bridgewater and he accepted. No real expectations for Bridgewater, but to this point I find it hard to believe he could be worse than Haskins.

Since this post is already getting long, I’ve split the rest of the commentary into a second part which you can read here.