Dynasty content is part of the ELITE package for Footballguys Premium Subscriptions. We're making this preview available so you can see the edge these subscribers are getting. Sign up here.

There's a lot of really strong dynasty analysis out there, especially when compared to five or ten years ago. But most of it is so dang practical-- Player X is undervalued, Player Y's workload is troubling, the market at this position is irrational, and take this specific action to win your league. Dynasty, in Theory is meant as a corrective, offering insights and takeaways into the strategic and structural nature of the game that might not lead to an immediate benefit but which should help us become better players over time.

If You Want To Win, Stop Trying To Win

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how complicated models tend to outperform simple heuristics (or rules of thumb) in environments with low uncertainty, but as uncertainty increases, that observation tends to flip. Last week I gave two such heuristics that perform well in rookie drafts. This week, I have a related rule of thumb that has served me well in the day-to-day management of my dynasty team.

A good heuristic should be like a slogan— it may convey a complex concept, but it should be easy to say and easy to remember. As a rule of thumb (and yes, I have heuristics for how I create heuristics), I like to say that if I can't convey an idea in ten words or less, it probably needs a bit more time and testing in the lab.

So here's today's slogan: "Chase value, not wins".

For most of us, winning is the whole point of fantasy football. To borrow a quote from former head coach Herm Edwards:

This is what's great about (fantasy) sports. This is what the greatest thing about (fantasy) sports is: you play to win the game. Hello? You play to win the game. You don't play it to just play it. That's the great thing about (fantasy) sports: you play to win, and I don't care if you don't have any wins. You go play to win. When you start tellin' me it doesn't matter, then retire. Get out! 'Cause it matters.

Edwards' issued that rant after his Jets fell to 2-5 on the season. They went on to win seven of their last nine games, secure the AFC East divisional title, and thrash the Indianapolis Colts 41-0 in the wildcard round before losing to the Oakland Raiders. His Jets embodied his speech; they played to win the game.

And that's good. I think winning the game is a laudable goal, and I'm not here to say it shouldn't matter to you. If you start telling me it doesn't matter, then quit. Get out! Because it matters.

But there's a big difference between us and Herm Edwards and the 2002 Jets. NFL coaches and players have a direct impact on the outcome of the game. They can immediately improve their chances of winning even in the middle of a game just by personally doing their job better.

But our closest parallel in football is not to the head coach but the general manager (which is why we're often called "fantasy football managers" but rarely called "fantasy football coaches"). We assemble the team to the best of our abilities, and if we do our job better than our competitors, we'll be more likely to win than they are. But once the game kicks off, we lose all direct control over the outcome.

I like to contrast Edwards' tirade against another famous (and colorful) rant, this time by Billy Beane, a general manager.

My s*** doesn't work in the playoffs. My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is f****** luck.

Several years later, he expanded on it in an interview:

Bleszinski: You famously said, "My s*** doesn’t work in the playoffs." Do you think that’s still an accurate statement?

Beane: By and large, out of 162 games, the best eight teams will get to the playoffs. Cinderellas in May aren’t there at the end of the year. I said eight, but it’s 10 now. You have the 10 best teams because you’ve gone through the season. You get into a short series, anything can happen. There’s no accounting for random events that happen. There’s nothing that you can plan for in order to prepare for those random events. Over a season, they get washed out, but in a short series, they don’t. The last two World Series Champions, one made it the last day of the season, one made it the second to last day of the season. They were very good teams, but I don’t think their business plan was to barely make it to the playoffs and then win the World Series.

…

Bleszinski: Is the team going to have to get over that hump and win the World Series in order to fully validate the A’s process, or is getting in the playoffs with that budget enough of a success?

Beane: I don’t think about validation. You always want to win the championship.

Bleszinski: All you can control is being that team that succeeds over 162 games.

Beane: Yeah, exactly. You just put yourself into that tournament enough times and…

Bleszinski: Eventually, you’ll win it.

The added emphasis is my own. Beane agrees with Edwards: you always want to win the championship. But he doesn't have any direct control over the day-to-day business of winning games, so he places a lot more emphasis on the role of luck, prioritizing good processes and trusting they'll eventually lead to good results.

Both have "winning the game" as their ultimate goal, but for Edwards, it's also a proximate goal— the thing he is directly focusing his energy on. Beane treats "build the best team possible" as his proximate goal and winning games as downstream from that.

With this in mind, I want to talk about "win-now" trades in Dynasty.

Winning Is Good, Actually

Again, I want to win. If I have a good team right now, I fervently hope it can live up to its potential and bring home a title. Despite this, I am strongly against making "win-now trades". But why? Is it so wrong to want to make moves to increase the chance that happens?

Of course, it's not. My goal is to build the best team possible, but there's nothing that says "putting more points in your lineup today" can't make my team better. (Points, like winning, are good, actually). If I have a team with title aspirations and I can increase the points it is scoring as well as its total overall value, that's a slam-dunk move.

For instance, if a team that is out of contention offers my competing team Travis Kelce for Dalton Kincaid, I'd be foolish not to accept because I think Travis Kelce's total value is greater than Dalton Kincaid's. (Let me rephrase: I think Kelce's value in years I care about is greater than Kincaid's. But I get why a struggling team might feel differently; they don't care about this year anymore— in fact, they'd probably rather perform poorly in 2023 to secure a higher draft pick— and it seems very plausible that Kincaid will offer more value than Kelce in 2024 and beyond given that Kelce will be turning 35.)

I don't consider this a "win-now" trade; I consider this a "maximize value" trade (that also happens to make me better in the short term). And when it comes to "maximize value" trades, you can consider me Sam-I-Am. I will make them in a box, I will make them with a fox, I will trade for someone old, I will trade with someone bold.

"Win-now" trades are a different category entirely; they're trades where you are receiving less total value than you're giving up, but you're making that sacrifice to increase your chances in some narrow window. These directly contradict the "build the best team possible" ethos, and while good publicity has them known as "win now", they'd be just as accurately described as "lose later".

Here's the rub: while I completely understand the instinct to maximize a competitive window, the reality is the teams that are in a competitive window are likely the ones that best avoided these types of trades in the past. They went about the slow and unsexy business of improving their roster piece by piece until it stood above the competition.

Increasing Value Increases Wins

Here's the thing about "value", whatever that may mean to you: as long as it's measuring something real over a long enough timeline, it's going to correlate very strongly with wins. This is true of whatever measure of value you happen to use.

Personally, I love Dan Hindery's monthly trade value charts, and I track how all of my rosters perform over time according to them. There are also community-created resources like the free crowdsourced rankings at KeepTradeCut or the bootstrapped trade values at FantasyCalc (which automatically incorporates thousands of actual trades from actual leagues to estimate a player's current market value). DynastyLeagueFootball has been running monthly mock drafts since 2014 to estimate current ADP. And, of course, there are more dynasty rankings out there than I could possibly list, including our own offerings at Footballguys (which you can tailor to your league specifics, a killer feature if ever there was one).

You can pick your favorite resources. For my rosters, I track a custom blend of all of these sources (and several others) weighted by how reliable I think they are. But here's something true of all of them (provided they're at least tangentially correlated with how much a player is going to help you win dynasty leagues over his time in the league— and they all are): if your team consistently scores well by your favorite measure of value, it's going to win a lot of games and a lot of championships. The better it does, the more it will win.

None of these measures are perfect, and I can already anticipate some of the objections. Trent Richardson was once a slam-dunk Top 5 dynasty pick. In a dynasty league I joined with several Footballguys staffers back in 2013, Doug Martin went #1 overall, and C.J. Spiller went in the first round. You can have a team that has a high "value" in the short term that never experiences any success.

But these value measures are self-correcting. Bubbles can exist, but they always burst. Spiller's value was high, but it didn't remain high. Neither did Martin's. A team anchored by a Martin/Spiller core would, at one point, have a high value by any measure, but that would quickly change. If you held those players on your roster over time, your team's total value would eventually crater.

The only way to maintain a high value over the long run is to ensure that your value gains (either from adding new players or seeing old players increase in value) consistently match or outpace your value losses (due to aging, injury, or updating opinions).

That's a hard goal. The entire structure of dynasty leagues is designed to bring good teams back to the pack. They get the worst draft picks, they often get the lowest priority on waivers, opposing teams are sometimes leery of making deals with them, and also, the best teams tend to have players predominantly in their prime, which means the specter of age-related decline is always looming. These headwinds are strong enough without helping them out by making value-losing trades, too.

Managers Underrate How Much Wins Are A Product of Luck

The entire instinct to sacrifice value to increase your odds of winning in the short term stems from, in my opinion, a fundamental misunderstanding of fantasy football. It imagines a much more deterministic universe than actually exists, one where the best teams win and the worst teams lose.

I have devoted a ton of effort to quantifying championship odds over the years. I've used a bunch of different methodologies. I know others who have attempted similar. And the conclusion everyone who seriously grapples with the question reaches is that the better team is about a 60/40 shot to advance in the playoffs, on average. Maybe closer to 55/45.

With this in mind, if the best team in the league is armed with a bye, it optimistically has about a 1-in-3 chance of winning the title (36%). If it could increase its per-game odds to 65%, its championship odds would be more like 42%, a 6% boost, which is another way of saying, "there's a 94% chance this trade doesn't change anything about the outcome of the season".

Adding to this, a 60/40 favorite is staggeringly unlikely to gain a +5% per-game increase from a single move; that's like upgrading your starting lineup from a replacement-level starter to a ~Top 6 wide receiver, something akin to adding CeeDee Lamb. Not just adding Lamb, though— adding Lamb without giving up a single player who is currently starting for you (something the manager who rosters CeeDee Lamb is unlikely to go for).

But it gets more bleak than that, because while CeeDee Lamb is currently Footballguys' projected #6 receiver for the season, he's unlikely to perform to that level. Over the last three seasons, only 50% of the Top 6 receivers by preseason ADP finished the year in the Top 6.

But it gets even more bleak than that because you don't need Lamb to perform Top 6 over the full season to improve your playoff win rate; you need him to perform Top 6 specifically over the small, three-week playoff window. Over the last three seasons, only 27% of Top 6 receivers by preseason ADP scored in the Top 6 over the three playoff weeks.

Over small samples, that "replacement-level" receiver you're "upgrading" from actually has a decent shot at being a league-winner, himself! Last year D.J. Moore, Chris Godwin, and K.J. Osborne were the 6th, 7th, and 8th highest-scoring receivers from Weeks 15-17. The year before, Amon-Ra St. Brown ranked 45th through Week 14 only to lead all receivers in scoring during the fantasy playoffs. Strange things happen over small samples.

(Even worse, all of this assumes that the quality of team you're facing is constant throughout the playoffs; in reality, it tends to get tougher the further you advance.)

I've collected data from my 16 years of playing in dynasty and have found that the top 3% of teams (based on how much they outscored the league average by) have won championships about 40% of the time. These are the types of dominant teams that only come around once every three seasons, and they're still more likely than not to lose the championship. If you have a garden-variety "best team in the league" type squad, adding enough talent to reach "league-destroying juggernaut" status still only provides marginal gains to your title odds.

All Hope Is Not Lost

This may seem bleak, but it can be a reason for optimism if you let it. If winning titles is dominated by luck, then failing to win titles doesn't mean you did anything wrong. And if the best team usually doesn't win, that means you don't need to have the best team to have a shot. This even opens up a rarely-pursued possibility— contending teams can make trades that marginally reduce their expected scoring in the short term but increase value in the long run.

These are terrifying, but the reality is they barely reduce your odds of winning a title this year, and if the long-term value is there, they can be worthwhile. Similarly, it can be profitable to make trades with your biggest rivals for the championship this year, where you improve their team in the short term (but hurt it in the long run). Again, it's scary, but it's a bit of a power move to let your leaguemates know that you're so unconcerned with their squad that you'll even help them out.

In the end, the two best things you can do to maximize your titles over the long run are consistently make the playoffs (for an average team, each playoff berth typically doubles your preseason title odds, in expectation) and earn as many byes as possible (since a guaranteed "win" is an immediate 50-66% boost to your title odds— far greater than the impact of any one player). In the long run, value-losing trades that chase short-term points hurt both of those goals. They typically happen too late in the season to matter much to your odds of securing a bye, and losing long-term value is a great way to miss the playoffs in the future.

Better to recognize that winning ultimately boils down to luck and busy yourself with the task of building the best, most valuable roster possible and then letting the chips fall where they may. Chase value, and let the wins follow.