Editor’s Note: This post was written last March but wound up stuck in my drafts. I’m publishing it now because better late than never!
This is the third part in a detailed series looking at how I executed a rebuild in a dynasty league, from deciding to pull the trigger through completely overhauling the roster. You should read Part 1 and Part 2 first!
Done? Great! Let’s dive in.
Final Decisions
The bulk of the rebuild had been achieved by the end of my second update, but there were three last consequential decisions I made afterwards that I wanted to go over.
Decision #1: Moving Akers
I added Akers in my last deal because he made the values match up nicely, but now I had him rostered in both of my dynasty leagues so I’d prefer to move him for equivalent value to keep my teams fully diversified. I mentioned this to Will after the trade and he gave me a hot tip that another GM, Danny, had approached him immediately after he drafted Akers trying to acquire. I thanked Will for the tip and hit up Danny to see if he was still interested.
Danny was. I was interested in his future 1st. Danny wondered what the catch was because he felt I was a sharp owner, so I must have seen something he was missing. I assured him that this was 100% a diversification move for me, I wasn’t trying to sell before the bottom dropped out or anything. So we tentatively agreed on a deal that saw me sending him Akers for draft capital from the 2021 draft.
The sticking point was how much draft capital. Danny was willing to send his future 1st. I thought that was a very fair deal as long as his future first wound up in the Top 5 or so, around the same range Akers was drafted in in the first place. (In this case, I’d essentially just be waiving my time discount because I didn’t care about the present anymore, trading the 1.05 in 2020 for the 1.05 in 2021).
But Danny was on the playoff bubble, and there was a serious risk that he made the playoffs and won a game, leaving his pick more in the 1.09 range, in which case I’d be trading a present pick for a later future pick, which wouldn’t fly with me. (Especially because, at the time we were discussing things, there was optimism for Akers’ role going forward; he could be the piece that pushed Danny into the playoffs.)
Danny agreed that if his pick was in the back half, it’d be more than fair to throw in his 2nd rounder as well. And if his pick was in the first half, it should really stand on its own. If we could make conditional or pick-protected trades, that wouldn’t be an issue, but we couldn’t, so we were both left reading the tea leaves trying to estimate the chances Danny made the playoffs.
Because of this, I asked to delay the trade for a bit so we could get a bit more information on standings. Delaying trades is always a risky move because things seldom remain the same. By the time I remembered to come back to this, Danny was all-but-eliminated and his higher pick was virtually secured (it finished at 1.05). But also by this time, Akers had been a disappointment and Danny was no longer interested in buying at that price.
That’s fine. That was the risk I ran, and it worked out for me in the long run as Akers saw a huge value spike after the trade deadline, to the point where if I were to trade him now I suspect I could get substantially more.
Decision #2: Moving Godwin
I mentioned that when I added McLaurin for Godwin at the end of an existing deal, I actually preferred McLaurin, but I had him in both of my leagues and actively try to diversify. I also mentioned that I liked Godwin because I felt it would be easy to get good value for him on the open market.
I was wrong. The league was largely uninterested in acquiring him. Now, I’ll never trade for a player who I wouldn’t be fine holding long-term if a second deal didn’t materialize (unless I already had the second deal lined up before the first one was completed). So if I got “stuck” with Godwin, that would have been fine. But I had some concerns about his role (primarily slot-based receivers tend not to hold value as well as their outside counterparts, and “holding and increasing value” was my only goal for this season), so all else being equal, I’d rather trade Godwin away for equivalent value.
I kept putting out feelers, but (
as much as I hate trade deadlines in dynasty leagues), the old adage that “deadlines spur action” proved true. (In this case, it made me extra motivated to buckle down in the final week.)
Tee Higgins had really been producing with the Bengals, and Bob Henry had moved him into the Top 10 of his rest-of-season rankings (at age 21!), which sent strong “buy” signals to my model. So I approached his GM about a Godwin-for-Higgins swap, but was rebuffed. (This is the same GM who had early in the season offered me Diontae Johnson and Tee Higgins for Odell Beckham and Sammy Watkins. Coulda / woulda / shoulda.)
I had a fortunate break elsewhere as a team that had been competing decided to pull the plug at the end, sending off Darren Waller, the Steelers Defense, and Drew Brees. That was my signal. I approached him about trading for Miles Sanders, who I wasn’t actually that interested in (my model had him as a strong sell), but who was young enough that I felt he’d be a fine store of value if I couldn’t flip him quickly. The other GM wanted a bit more than just Godwin for Sanders, so I threw in the late 2nd round pick I’d grabbed early on from the now-competing team, and we had a deal.
(The other GM confided that he’d been trying to buy future firsts, not realizing that I already owned a third of the market, with most of the remaining picks in the hands of other rebuilding teams uninterested in selling.)
Immediately after completing the deal, the Higgins GM contacted me about Miles Sanders. I still rated Sanders as a sell and Higgins as a buy, but the market valued Sanders a lot higher and the fact that he contacted me as soon as he saw Sanders change hands suggested he was a motivated buyer, so I asked for Higgins and his (expected late) 1st round pick. He wanted me to throw in O.J. Howard on my side, which I was okay with (despite liking him better than consensus and this being a league with a huge TE premium).
Decision #3: the Myles Gaskin Dilemma
The last move I made was actually a move I didn’t make. In Part 2, I detailed my Dalton Schultz dilemma. In short, he was young and projected to be quite productive in the short term, but his long-term value was very much in doubt (because he was a backup to Blake Jarwin, who was lost to injury but would return).
I had a similar problem with Myles Gaskin, a 2nd-year running back who was drafted in the 7th round and starting for Miami largely because their other options weren’t great. Gaskin was putting up great numbers in PPR and was projected as a Top 20 option going forward, valuable enough that he could sabotage my efforts to secure the #1 (just as Schultz had already “cost” me a loss with his production).
Ideally, I’d sell him for a pick, netting me value and removing the offending production. But nobody was interested in buying.
This left me with a tough call. I could hold Gaskin, but if his value went to zero over the offseason and I won an extra game as a result, that would be a big negative-value move for my team. Alternately, I could cut Gaskin and remove the risk. That would be the safer play.
The community was more than 2-to-1 in favor of cutting Gaskin outright, but I hate cutting players who have value (even if they don’t have any value to me), so I rolled the dice and held him.
This wound up working out about as well as it possibly could have for me. An injury to Gaskin ensured he only played two more games during the fantasy regular season, neither of which I won, and then he blew up in the fantasy playoffs, from which I was already eliminated.
Gaskin’s final stats, pro-rated to 16 games, would be 1550 yards, 66 receptions, and 8 touchdowns, which would have been good enough to finish 4th at the position this year. His value still might go to zero, but it’s not zero at the moment (Dan Hindery ranks him as RB26, FBGs staff consensus has him at RB30, DLF’s March ADP had him at RB35, etc), so holding him was the plus move.
Evaluating the Decision to Rebuild
So now you’ve seen the choices I made to rebuild, from start to finish. Let’s talk about how good those choices were.
The first and most important decision to evaluate is the decision to rebuild in the first place. Did I make the right decision to pull the plug before the season, or should I have tried to ride things out?
Emotionally, it was a bit hard watching Alvin Kamara and Rob Gronkowski both blow up in Week 16 on another team’s roster. Between the two of them and Gaskin, I absolutely would have won the championship this year if I could have made it that far.
But even with the full benefit of hindsight, I doubt I’d have been able to make it that far. With Kamara and Lockett putting up hot starts, I likely would have been able to eke out enough wins to make the playoffs. But there were some awfully high scores floating around in Weeks 14 and 15 of the playoffs, and there’s little chance I could have survived in a counterfactual universe.
Plus, philosophically, if you decide before the season that your only hope of winning a championship is one of the few remaining quality assets on your team putting up a historically dominant performance, then the fact that he actually *did* put up that historically dominant performance isn’t really relevant.
Here’s what I wrote at the beginning of this process:
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…
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.
… 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.
That reasoning… was basically spot on. So yeah, the self-evaluation that triggered the entire rebuild was excellent process independent of how the rebuild actually went. (I’ll evaluate that process in a bit.)
And while I’m on the subject of my reasoning at the beginning of the season, in my first piece I offered an interesting statistic as a measure of the degree to which I had been neglecting the team.
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.
I’m now up to 54% of players acquired via trade (13/24) and a whopping 87.5% of players (21/24) are guys who weren’t on my roster prior to this year’s rookie draft. (This doesn’t even count the extra picks I added.) The only players with at least a year of tenure are Leonard Fournette (acquired via trade in 2019), Chris Herndon (drafted in 2018), and John Ross (drafted in 2017 and who only survived the year because he was able to hang out on IR instead of costing a roster spot). No neglect here!
Evaluating the Rebuild
Again, the decision to rebuild in the first place was arguably more important than the rebuild itself. In the long run, making the right choices for the wrong reasons is a lot less sustainable than making the wrong choices for the right reasons. But the actual nitty-gritty of the rebuild is what is going to have the biggest impact on my outcomes in the short run, so let’s dive into that, too.
Again, I want to start the evaluation by examining my intentions, deciding if they were appropriate, and then evaluating how well I executed the things I had control of. To that end, I’ll quote myself again:
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.
Measuring my rebuild against my goals, it was an undeniable success. All six of my must-trade players were moved at fair market value or better within a manner of weeks. (Beckham also suffered an untimely ACL tear, reinforcing my original fear.) Watson wound up traded as well (despite initially having no intention to do so) simply because I managed to get the only quarterback in the league at the time who was comparably productive and even younger, Kyler Murray.
So again, my decision to rebuild was good, and I accomplished the goals I laid out at the beginning of the rebuild. I’d feel comfortable stopping the analysis here and declaring it a good rebuild regardless of whether the individual moves worked out or didn’t.
But that’s less fun, so we might as well dive into whether the individual deals worked out or didn’t, too.
Trade #1: Moving Odell Beckham
During trade discussions I received an offer of Tee Higgins and Diontae Johnson for Odell Beckham and Sammy Watkins that, in hindsight, would have been the best possible deal for me to take. I didn’t take it. Judging myself against the standard of all counterfactual universes, that makes the Beckham deal I did make a relatively bad one.
But judging yourself against all counterfactual universes is setting yourself up for failure, so I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll only judge the deal I did make. (Besides, things wound up working out there in the long run, but we’ll get to that.)
Give: Odell Beckham, Brandin Cooks, Austin Hooper, Tony Pollard, 2021 2nd (projected early)
Get: Julio Jones, Marquise Brown, Jonnu Smith, Devin Duvernay, 2021 1st (projected late)
At the time, Dan Hindery’s trade value chart called it a wash (actually, it had me losing by 1.5%), while my naive value formula had me making a killing (winning by 100.5%, more than doubling my value). Part of the difference was Hindery’s chart being a week or two old and my naive value formula not having a way to deal with guys like Tony Pollard, who were valued based on future possibilities despite being projected to contribute nothing in the short term.
But this was actually the trade I felt strongest about and the only one I would have made no matter what. I felt it made me better both in the short term *AND* in the long term. My biggest concern was moving Julio Jones, who was much older than I really wanted for a rebuild, but even if I failed to do that I could just pivot to trying to contend in 2020 and still be better off in expectation.
(I hate buying players I don’t actually want with the intention to sell them later, because oftentimes the “later” part doesn’t work out, so it’s important for me to have a backup plan whenever making a deal like that.)
Ironically, given how much of a slam-dunk I felt this was for me, it actually wound up being the trade with perhaps the most mixed results. By Hindery’s March trade value charts, it would still be essentially a tie (actually a 5.5% loss for me), mostly because Cooks hit the upper end of what I thought his range of outcomes was, while Brown hit the lower end. But I did manage to get a strong return for Julio Jones before his injury problems dropped his value, and when considering that this trade was a big win for me and I’m quite happy with it.
Trade #2: Moving Alvin Kamara
If there was one place I absolutely had to get good value, it was in dealing Alvin Kamara, arguably the only true top-end asset on my entire roster. By one token, I failed to truly capitalize: if I’d held him for another few weeks, his scorched-earth start to the season would have likely driven his price up. But again, I’m not judging myself against all possible counterfactual universes, and timing the market is incredibly tricky; if he’d torn his ACL instead, I’d have lost huge chunks of value.
(Also, there were definitely worse counterfactual universes out there, too. I tried to trade Kamara for Clyde Edwards-Helaire straight-up and was rebuffed; that deal would have been much worse for me than the one I wound up making.)
Anyway, even compared against counterfactuals it’s hard to imagine coming out much better, as the final deal I made was easily my best deal of the year and forms the cornerstone for my rebuilt roster.
Give: Alvin Kamara, Julio Jones, Tyler Lockett, Deshaun Watson, Rob Gronkowski, Tyler Eifert
Get: Jonathan Taylor, Terry McLaurin, Brandon Aiyuk, Kyler Murray, Laviska Shenault, Dawson Knox, 2021 1st (late), 2021 2nd (late)
At the time, the two packages were rated relatively closely by consensus rankings and ADP, but Hindery’s value charts had me taking home a 20.7% gain. My own value formulas had it as a 9.7% loss… assuming I cared about 2020, which I didn’t. Using the rebuilding values, it was an 11.1% gain, and this despite my formulas being completely naive and therefore underrating long-term assets with little expected short-term value like Aiyuk, Shenault, and not even assigning a value to the picks.
Since the trade, that difference has only become more lopsided. Between Hindery’s September and March trade value charts, the package I gave dropped in value by 17%, while the package I received rose by 11%. The end result is that today, the trade value chart rates what I got as worth a whopping 60% more than what I gave.
I needed to get a huge return for Kamara. I knew the package I got for him would essentially make or break my entire rebuild. And early returns suggest I stuck the landing, getting younger, deeper, and better. And this completely ignores how much this trade improved my own draft position (probably pushing me from around the 1.06-1.09 range all the way up to 1.02).
So my trade partner is probably kicking himself today over making this deal, right? Wrong. Because the whole point of the trade is both he and I were in the middle of the pack, and I wanted to push him to the top of the league while simultaneously dropping me to the bottom. And that worked every bit as well for him as for me; he won the league this year in no small part thanks to Kamara and Gronkowski’s Week 16 explosions.
I’m pretty confident both sides walked out of this deal feeling like massive winners, which is awesome. This might be the best trade I’ve ever made.
Trade #3: Jerick McKinnon
Nothing too exciting here, but after the last blockbuster I continued to shed short-term production to help improve my draft position.
Give: Jerick McKinnon
Get: Rashaad Penny
McKinnon produced a few big games through the season and might have accidentally won me an extra game or two, so I was better off without him. Penny wasn’t a great return, but more importantly because he was on IR he didn’t take up a roster spot, which enabled me to grab an extra guy in free agency. Which directly led to…
Interlude: Adding Gaskin, Schultz, and Sample
Because of injuries ahead of them on the depth chart, Myles Gaskin, Dalton Schultz, and Drew Sample were suddenly projected to be starter-caliber players off of waivers. All were super young (24 or younger) and in their 2nd or 3rd NFL season, which meant they all had significant upside, so I bid big on all of them.
This was a risk, because it added points to my team in the short term. I ran the risk of getting extra wins (and hurting my draft position) because if they were productive enough to actually get me extra wins that would likely mean I could either count on them as long-term contributors or flip them for extra value somewhere else.
The risk definitely hurt; Dalton Schultz had a big game in my starting lineup and unequivocally turned a loss into a win. Had that game’s outcome been reversed, I would have been drafting at #1 overall; instead, I got pick 1.02. That was the direct cost of adding the three players.
Did the payoff to the acquisition justify that cost? We’ll get to it later, but I think so. Gaskin is still on my roster and Schultz was eventually flipped for a late 1st (we’ll get to it in a bit). Would I trade 1.02, Gaskin, and a late 1st for the 1.01? I don’t think so. It’s an interesting thought experiment, though.
Regardless, when evaluating processes the fact that Schultz actually *did* cost me the 1.01 is less important than the question of whether he was *likely* to cost me the 1.01. I still don’t think he was, I think I just got unlucky. Had I lost another game somewhere else, or had my opponent won another game somewhere else, none of that would have mattered anyway.
Anyway, per Hindery’s March trade value charts, the value of the things I wound up getting for that trio is 20+ points, while the value of the draft spot drop is 5 points or fewer, so good move overall even accounting for the huge chunk of FAAB I had to spend (which is largely meaningless in this league, anyway).
Trade #4: Moving Sammy Watkins
Another relatively inconsequential trade, but I still wanted to get the potential for short-term production from Sammy Watkins off my roster.
Give: Sammy Watkins, Dwayne Haskins
Get: Quintez Cephus, Teddy Bridgewater
At the time, Watkins was the only one of those players with non-zero value per Hindery’s chart. Today Cephus is twice as valuable as Watkins, but both are still fringe players. Either way, I’m happier with what I got than what I gave and it protected me against the risk of a big game from Watkins at an inopportune time, so good move.
Trade #5: Moving Dalton Schultz
As I mentioned, Schultz had already cost me one loss (and ultimately dropped me from the 1.01 to the 1.02, though I didn’t know that at the time) and I was eager to prevent a repeat. In this league, tight end scoring is kind of insane (it works out to about 2.2 points per reception for TEs), so a young and productive guy has a lot of value. But there was always the risk that Schultz’s role would go to zero once Blake Jarwin returned, and that wasn’t a risk I was interested in taking, so I found another competing team and unloaded him.
Give: Terry McLaurin, Brandon Aiyuk, Dalton Schultz, 2021 3rd
Get: Cam Akers, Chris Godwin, 2021 1st
This trade was really more like three trades in one. I was trying to get a 1st for Schultz, and had to kick in the 3rd to get it done, which I was fine with. I also was trying to actively diversify my two dynasty rosters; I had McLaurin and Aiyuk in both.
I preferred McLaurin to Godwin, but offered to swap the two both to diversify and because I figured Godwin could fetch more on the open market if I wanted to continue dealing. Plus Godwin was hurt and wouldn’t put points in my lineup in the short term, which helped my draft position. (The opposing GM preferred Godwin to McLaurin in a vacuum, but also liked the short-term boost to his bottom line that McLaurin provided, given he was in a dogfight to make the playoffs at the time.)
Similarly, the other GM was looking to add more receivers for the playoff run, and I was happy to offer either Aiyuk or Shenault for Akers, whose star had fallen a bit since the draft. I preferred Aiyuk to Shenault in a vacuum, but again, I was trying to actively diversify, so I offered him instead.
This leaves us with two things to evaluate. First: the trade itself. Second: the decision to make moves that I felt were less optimal in the name of diversifying rosters with my other dynasty league.
As far as the trade itself, I really liked it at the time. Hindery’s charts at the time had me getting a 19% premium, and since then that’s risen to 39% (largely due to a surge in Akers’ value). Again, I doubt the other GM is losing too much sleep over it, either, given that he finished as the league’s runner-up, suggesting the trade helped him accomplish his goals, too.
As for the decision to diversify… with the benefit of hindsight, I would rather have Aiyuk than Shenault today, diversification-be-damned. But that’s because of Aiyuk’s hot stretch late in the season, and that easily could have gone the other way. I think the process of valuing the two as roughly interchangeable at the time was sound and the desire to diversify was also sound. Besides, Shenault himself got a nice bump with the Jags landing the rights to Trevor Lawrence.
And as for McLaurin vs. Godwin… not much has changed for me there. The market still prefers Godwin slightly, I still prefer McLaurin slightly. It wasn’t as easy to flip Godwin as I thought it would have been, but I did eventually manage to move him, and I do think he returned more than McLaurin would have. And again, diversification is a compelling interest in its own right because it reduces my exposure to downside risk. So… fine process.
Trade #6: Moving Godwin
Godwin sat on my roster for a long time with no real interest around the league and I began to think I’d wind up holding him (which would have been fine), but right before the deadline I saw a couple teams switch over to rebuilding mode, which opened up new opportunities to deal. I tried to swap Godwin for Tee Higgins, but the other GM wasn’t biting. Instead…
Give: Chris Godwin, 2021 2nd (late)
Get: Miles Sanders
I was much lower than market consensus on Sanders at the time, but I felt that this represented good value. The 2nd wound up being 2.12, but even still this wound up being my only real loss of the season per Hindery’s trade value chart, which considers this a small 12% loss today. Even this wasn’t really a setback, though, because
Trade #7: Moving Sanders
As soon as I traded Sanders, the Tee Higgins owner DMed me asking about his availability. I couldn’t move Godwin for Higgins as I’d wanted, but I was able to get a deal done after all.
Give: Miles Sanders, O.J. Howard
Get: Tee Higgins, 2021 1st (late)
I liked this deal at the time and I like it now. My value formula rated Sanders the strongest sell and Higgins the strongest buy in the league. Joe Burrow’s injury meant Higgins didn’t actually improve my team enough to cost me any losses, which was a nice bonus. Per Hindery’s March trade values, this was a 50% net gain for me.
Overall, the rebuild was a stunning success, even more than I could have hoped. My team got dramatically younger, it rose in value over the course of the season, and I landed the #2 pick in a top-heavy draft class to boot. There were some lucky breaks and, while I arguably lost a couple individual trades, they were part of larger trade-chains that were on the whole quite favorable to me.
I mentioned at the beginning of the series that this was my first strip-to-studs rebuild. Hopefully it’ll be my last, too. But approaching it with a clear and cohesive vision ensured that it was quick, successful, and most importantly, fun.
