Evaluating Your League’s Dynasty Rosters

Experienced dynasty owners know they should be continually evaluating their own roster throughout the year, but evaluating the rosters of the rest of your league is also worthwhile:

This morning I’ve logged onto each league and attempted to predict each teams finished placement for the upcoming year.

— Dwayne Brown (@DwayneB13) June 23, 2017

This is the perfect time of year for roster evaluation and league rankings since it’s so close to the start of the season. Most rookie drafts and major off-season trades have been complete.

I’m sure owners in leagues with divisions are used to keeping an eye on their rivals, but some may ask: “Why bother examining every roster in the entire league? I can’t control what other owners do with their teams.” To answer to that question, I will highlight the main benefit of league-wide evaluation.

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Finding Trade Opportunities

In a redraft league, every owner is going to feel like their team is in good shape to compete. In dynasty, however, some teams are either in a rebuild or acknowledge that the current state of their team may not be competitive. By evaluating the rosters of all other owners, you can identify those that you feel will perform the worst. Assuming the league awards picks in reverse order of standings, those owners would possess the most valuable rookie draft picks.

The reason this is exploitable is because many owners tend to overvalue their own players and are ultimately too optimistic about their own chance of success. Take a poll in any of your dynasty leagues asking the question “Do you think your team will make the playoffs?” And I guarantee more people will answer “yes” than there are playoff spots. Perhaps there’s an owner you’re convinced will finish low in the standings, but that owner believes otherwise. They will value their own rookie picks much lower than you do. Send trade offers for those picks treating them as mid/late, and if your evaluation of their roster is correct you’ll make a tidy profit. We can reverse this logic as well: If someone believes the original owner of a pick you own will have a terrible season but you believe otherwise, sell them that pick at a premium. In other words:

I want to buy owner failure, and sell their success.

— Dwayne Brown (@DwayneB13) June 23, 2017

Executing this method requires knowing what other owners think of their own rosters. Sometimes you can gain that information by monitoring the types of trades they make, or what they do with their rookie picks. But there’s another way to learn what your opponents think…

Share your rankings!

Seriously. In my dynasty league, my friend and I co-author a set of rankings each preseason and post it on our league message board, commenting on each team and justifying our results. Conversations arise in which owners express where they agree and disagree. Some even share their own rankings. It’s become a yearly tradition that the entire league looks forward to: We routinely get asked late in the off-season when we will release our rankings. I should note that I use non-inflammatory language when writing out the comments for each team. The intent is not to trash talk (though I suppose if you’re in a league that’s used to that kind of thing, then trash talk would be acceptable.)

Through this process, you may learn, for example, that a certain owner believes they are a playoff contender when they post their own rankings. If I have this owner ranked as a bottom three team, you bet I’m making an offer for their first round pick if they own it.

The flurry of discussion may also spur other teams to make trades, and in general league activity should increase. Anyone browsing DLF is probably active all year around, but for some owners reading your rankings would act as a nudge on the shoulder after a long off-season.

League-wide Roster Evaluation Tips

Now that we’ve established that the evaluation/ranking of an entire league is worth our time, we must determine the most appropriate method. Evaluating our own rosters is difficult in its own right, so how can we be expected to accurately evaluate an entire league, especially for those who play in multiple leagues? One important element to consider is time: With so many teams (and leagues) to evaluate, I think it’s better to use a list of general guidelines as opposed to a more intricate method.

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve developed the perfect system. Over the years, my ranks have been hit and miss. I’ve only starting doing this recently, and I vary my methodology each year as I try to determine what works best. Furthermore, I don’t know the tendencies, rules and scoring system of your leagues, so what may work for me may not work for others. However you choose to evaluate and rank your leagues, I highly recommend recording your methodology, ranks, and comments so when next season comes you can look back and determine what worked and what didn’t.

What follows are the general guidelines that have proven to be most accurate in my evaluation, along with a few that I tried for the first time this season based on lessons that I learned from recent seasons. (And yes, these guidelines apply to your own roster as well!)

Roster Depth

Evaluating only the starting lineup for other owners is tempting, especially if you have many rosters to look at. But every team has to deal with bye weeks and injuries, so make sure you take a look at how many players on the bench are expected to be fantasy relevant that season. Based on how my league mates discuss their own rosters, most owners are overconfident in their own depth. I think this lies in the fact that owners naturally expect all of their stashes to pan out, so they fall into the “if everything goes right” trap. Even the best dynasty owners end up with many duds, but most don’t consider that fact when evaluating their own rosters. So if you can identify a team with terrible depth at most positions, it’s possible they won’t recognize it and you’ll be able to capitalize.

On the flip side, be careful not to underrate teams that don’t really have a lot of top-end talent but have a lot of depth. I made this mistake last season, as a team with massive depth at every position that I ranked low made the playoffs despite not having any studs on the roster.

Last Year’s Finish

This is something new I’m trying this year. It’s difficult to just look at a roster and determine how many points you expect that team to score relative to the rest of the league, so use last season as a starting point. Consider not only how you expect the performance of their players to change from last season to this season (regression, breakouts, etc.) but also consider all the moves that owner has made via trades, rookies and pickups since the end of the season. You may even want to treat players acquired late in the previous season as new additions to the team.

Ranges of Outcomes

Due to the difficulty of projecting performance, even the best of us are pretty bad at predicting fantasy football outcomes. This issue is compounded when attempting to predict the outcome of an entire roster over the course of an entire season. If you rank a team around the middle of the league, instead of pegging that team for a specific mid-range pick, consider that the range of outcomes for that team is anywhere from playoff contender to bottom of the standings, meaning their rookie picks could realistically be almost anywhere. Even if a team has a roster stacked with studs and depth, it’s still reasonably possible that they finish in the middle of the standings. If you’re using these ranks as means to find trading opportunities, being overly confident in the rank of another team can burn you when a pick you were certain would be top three ends up much later.

Group Teams in Tiers

This follows from the previous paragraph. There may not be a big difference in how you rate a team ranked third vs. a team ranked seventh, so if that’s true make sure you note of it in your rankings. Initially, the difference between third and seventh sounds large, but if those teams are in the same tier then it means the range of possible outcomes for each one overlap a great deal.

Midseason Changes

If another owner decides to go full rebuild midseason after treading water for eight weeks, they will likely finish near the bottom of the standings even if you had them correctly pegged for a middling team. Similarly, some owners outside the playoff picture will attempt to make a playoff push near the trade deadline. Consider this both when making trades for picks and when re-evaluating your ranks at the end of the season. If you league is old enough, you may even be able to predict which owners are more likely to change the direction of their team mid-season.

Conclusion

I hope I convinced you that that taking the time to evaluate your league’s rosters is a worthwhile task. I suggest trying it out this season using the guidelines listed and/or some of your own. Please report back to me at the end of the season with the guidelines you used and the results!

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