Parenting Tips: How To Raise Your Orphan
It’s the time of year when owners are expanding their dynasty league portfolios, and a large portion of this expansion comes in the form of adopting orphan teams . Anyone who has taken on an orphan before knows there’s always a reason the team was abandoned, and that reason is usually the team itself. I would estimate less than 5% of orphans are set up for long term success without putting in considerable work, so we’re going to focus on the ones needing the work put in here as opposed to the rare diamonds in the DLF forum rough.
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The first thing that needs to be understood is every dynasty team should take on the personality and preferences of its owner. This is a fairly easy thing to accomplish in start-up leagues, with each owner building their team from scratch, but it’s quite the opposite when taking on a neglected orphan. When you agree to take that orphan, you have to understand that you’re receiving the sum of another owner’s personality and decision making, and you’re going to have to actively change out the vast majority of the team to have it the way you want it and to make it a profitable endeavor.
For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to split these orphans into two categories. Ones that were competitive and abandoned due to an impending cliff, and ones that were better suited for intra mural leagues than varsity because they just didn’t have the talent to hack it. I would estimate that greater than 80% of the orphans you see will be the latter where the former will fit somewhere in the 10% range. The first step is being honest with yourself about what you have, and classifying accordingly. Odds are that you’ve gotten an intra mural squad, so that’s where we’ll really dive in, but I will touch on the cliff teetering teams first.
If you have a team that falls into the impending cliff category AND there is enough in the cupboard for a one year run, don’t pussy-foot around. You are taking this team and going all in for the current season without a second’s hesitation. There is no such thing as an untouchable asset in this case and value is the least of your concerns. Your sole focus is point output for the current season and nothing else matters as you’re trying to squeeze profitability out of this one year window. The train of thought behind this is simple: You’re going to have to have a two year rebuild for this team in any scenario, why not have your league mates finance this rebuild with the current year’s prize money? The downside here is you are potentially set back one additional year in your rebuild if it fails. From a risk versus reward standpoint, there is simply far more to gain than there is to lose. Just to drive the point home on when to employ this strategy, make sure you are unequivocally certain your team has the ammunition to reasonably attempt. There’s only a ~10% chance your team falls in this category so triple check and phone a friend first.
I know what you’re thinking now: Ok I get it, I didn’t get one of the good ones – what then are you telling me to do? Well, the first piece of advice hinges on a question: how serious are you about permanent, sustained success for your orphan? If your answer is anything higher than moderately, the thing to do is punt, punt hard and completely blow up this team to start it from scratch and gradually instill your own personality into it. Any asset you currently have past the age of 24 is going to be gone post haste. Roster composition has no bearing at all, and the only mission is to acquire long term assets. There isn’t an NFL team to draw a comparison to, but for those of you who follow the NBA, the current comparisons to draw are the 76ers or the Timberwolves. Winning for the current season or ensuing season actually becomes a hindrance to your grand design, much like it would for those rebuilding NBA franchises. For those of you unfamiliar with the NBA and why I would be drawing parallels to dynasty leagues, there is a simple answer: sustained success in either is never born of mediocrity. In both fantasy football and the NBA, the teams that hover around the playoff bubble just aren’t good enough to beat the juggernauts and are in turn and additionally hindered by the team’s own draft pick mediocrity being a road block on its own path to blue chip assets and success. This is simply not the way, my friends. I can’t stress the importance of a sound foundation enough, and when you don’t have one, simply put, you must build one. To draw an NBA comparison one last time, the Cleveland Cavaliers are the recent NBA model for rebuild success and the dynasty model is very similar. Compiling assets, mostly in draft pick form, is the basis for creating your foundation, just like the Cavaliers did.
In dynasty leagues, you can usually compile the needed assets for a team’s foundation in two calendar years or less. No, that’s not a typo and yes I understand that may sound like an awfully long time if you’ve never embarked on a full rebuilding mission before. I also know this doesn’t sound like the immediate competitive fun you may have initially signed up for, but think of it more as a game of Chess with a long strategy to create an advantage for yourself heading into each and every season. To draw the best parallel to Chess, you are buying time for the plethora of pawns you’ve acquired to reach the end of the board and instead become a plethora of queens, rooks, knights and bishops.
You might be wondering if I’ve had success with the above strategies, and the answer is yes*, with the asterisk leaving an incomplete information designation. I’ve only taken on three orphans in my life, but I still own all three and I’ll share with you the path I’ve taken with each team.
The first of three was a somewhat good team that needed some tweaking after a ninth-place finish in 2014 when I took over drafting from the 1.04. This was a very high end orphan in comparison to the others I inherited and after acquiring Devonta Freeman and Travis Kelce for late round picks in that off-season, the team presented itself as one of the diamonds in the rough. After another 30 or so trades, here is the current team with consecutive Super Bowl appearances and one title. Reminder: this team will fall under the exception to the rule column.
The second I took on was with my partner for multiple leagues, Scott Barrett. We were part of a three team dispersal in the Drunj32 league. There were a few high end assets available, but nothing to instill confidence about having any chance to win in ’16 or beyond so we immediately took to selling off all even moderately aged assets with no worry of roster composition. We are now set up with youth on the roster and enough draft pick capital over the next two years to potentially compete in ’17 with some rookie luck, but more likely to create a league favorite both via draft pick use and trade during the 2018 draft. There is incomplete information as to how this turns out, but we are set up to have an enviable foundation, especially considering a 16 team conference.
The third was taken on week three of the 2015 season when an owner abandoned the team in every sense of the word. It was a complete dumpster fire and I took it on as a challenge and a quasi-favor to a commissioner of a couple of my other leagues. This team had Mike Evans, Jordan Matthews, Isaiah Crowell, its own draft picks and a collection of other players that would be absent from any top 300 list ever made. I initially sold Evans for two late firsts, a second, Marcus Mariota and Martavis Bryant and just kept chugging along on asset acquisition there. The current state of the team is not quite where I’d like it to be, but considering where it started, it’s possible to compete in 2018 and that would be a win.
These are certainly projects, and are not for those who have a relatively inactive trading style nor for those who are unwilling to wait for their team to be reborn in the image of its new owner’s personality. For those up for the challenge, enjoy the process. Embrace it. In leagues where you draft your own team in a startup, it’s unlikely you’ll ever have the chance (or need) to have so many draft picks and youthful pieces to move around. You get to view the dynoverse from a different lense and it may just give you some new perspective for your other leagues as well.
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