Welcome to the next installment of the Get Better At Dynasty series. In Part II, we talked about profiling your league mates’ trading habits. In this part, we’re going to talk about profiling your league mates’ rosters, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their trajectory.
To start, go through every roster in your league and categorize their position groups in a spreadsheet according to:
1. The quality of their starters
2. Their depth
3. The age profile of the position group
4. The quality of their prospects
I like to do this by making a grid and color-coding it. My color-coding uses the following scale:
Sometimes these lines blur and that’s ok, just use your best judgement. When you’re done, you’ll have something that looks like this:
Now that you’ve profiled all of their position groups, go ahead categorize the trajectory of each roster.
Roster Trajectory
Each of your leaguemates’ can be categorized as
1. Conteder
2. Pretender
3. Emerging Rebuilder
4. Rebuilder
Take a look at each roster in your league, and categorize them into one of these labels. You can even be more detailed if you’d like. Based on these categories, the best way to trade with them will differ.
Contenders
Contenders are the easiest team to profile generally, and a contending team will typically behave predictably. These rosters are the best of the best in your league and likely will not have too much incentive or sense of urgency to make a trade. However, depending on whether their roster skews older or younger, they may be willing to either package young assets for one last piece, or to acquire prospects in order to remain sustainable.
Contenders are most likely to throw around their second and third round picks lightly, while they tend to hold their firsts until the deadline. In my experience, the best way to trade with contenders is by offering your cheaper key starters for their seconds and thirds, and by waiting for the deadline to offer them your best rental or whichever mediocre vet is in the middle of a career year. When trading with them, keep in mind their picks will be late, and don’t be in a hurry to acquire these. Sometimes, it’s just hard to trade with these teams.
Pretenders
Pretenders are the teams you most want to trade with, as their rosters are usually not good enough to seriously compete but not in a good spot to kick off a rebuild. Their rosters typically have solid veteran players, but are short on players in the Untouchables tier and have at least one major, debilitating weakness, often lacking a high-end QB1. These teams are frequently playing unsustainably well because a couple journeymen on their team are having a random career year. They’re usually teetering between going all in for a short contending window or blowing it up, and usually enter the offseason undecided about which way to go.
Pretenders end up trading according to the following roster outlooks:
1. Pretender + desperation = contender
2. Pretender + resignation = rebuilder
It’s your job to convince them which way to go by firing the opening salvo of the league year, based on your own roster direction. Make the decision for them by offering them direction in exchange for value. When you trade with pretenders, you’re trading them hope in exchange for players that shouldn’t be available. Only one side in that trade scores fantasy points.
Pretenders are often willing to give up significant value in order to get somewhere else, since their current trajectory is the least fun in dynasty. For pretenders sorely lacking depth, you should be proactive about trying to acquire their Untouchables. If you’re a rebuilder, offer a package of prospects and picks with the justification that your leaguemate can finally slide into rebuild mode. If you’re a contender, offer players in your Key Starters tier, letting them talk themselves into the trade because they need depth.
One last thing, you are never a pretender. Bold, decisive dynasty owners are either contenders, emerging rebuilders, or rebuilders. If you do look over your roster and decide you might be a pretender, stay tuned for later in this series when I build a blueprint on how to attack a one-year reload for pretenders. To be clear, it’s ok to be an emerging contender who narrowly misses the playoffs, as long as you are still asset-rich and your trajectory is clearly pointing up.
Emerging Rebuilders
These are the rosters that are finally finished rebuilding and are ready to pivot to competing. If you want to slide into rebuild mode, these are the owners you want to trade with. Emerging rebuilders generally have a lot of prospects and picks, and may succumb to the “found money” fallacy, in which they’re likely to throw around their assets to make contending moves.
If you do want to acquire prospects and picks, your job is to convince emerging rebuilders that they want your Key Starters and Re-Rolls (see Part I). Emerging rebuilders should be focused on finding favorable buy opportunities for Untouchable players and Studs, but you need to bring out your inner marketer and convince them to load up on your key starters and rentals instead.
Rebuilders
To trade with rebuilders, contenders should try to acquire their key starters and rentals for light returns, specifically around the deadline. All owners should be proactive about convincing them to trade away their players in the Untouchables tier, even though they shouldn’t.
This might be a hot take, but never acquire players in the Key Starters tier during the offseason. If you’re in a position to acquire these players, your roster can survive until closer to the deadline and then you can load up. Consider the following scenario:
It’s March, 2024. You’re an emerging rebuilder and are ready to really go for a playoff push by adding key starters during the offseason. To take the next step, you consider buying low on one of the following players:
1. Chris Godwin
2. Deebo Samuel
3. Terry McLaurin
As it turns out, only one of these choices would have helped you down the stretch of the regular season, and there was no reliable way to know who ahead of time. In preseason, all of these players were key starters and an emerging rebuilder could justifiably have acquired any one of them to make a push. Fast-forward to weeks 8-14, and only Terry McLaurin was actually winning you weeks. Chris Godwin was incredible, but got injured, while Deebo Samuel looked washed all the way until Week 16. Terry McLaurin on the other hand benefitted magnificently from the rise of Jayden Daniels.
When acquiring key starters, keep the following in mind:
1. Key starters are often teetering between being busts and being league winners, and you won’t know which is which until the season is 8+ weeks in. This can often vary season by season, as players who are perenially in this tier can have monster seasons without warning right after a clunker.
2. A decent chunk of key starters will fall to injury during the season, and you can afford to wait for most of the season to pass in order to acquire the guys who are still healthy.
Emerging rebuilders and contenders should never have a sense of urgency to acquire these players. If a single Key Starter makes the difference between a postseason appearance and a lost year, then you are either still a rebuilder or you’re a pretender. Be patient and really shop at the top of this tier once enough of the pretenders and rebuilders in your league face the music and pivot to rebuilding.
Instead, during the offseason these roster types should be focused on acquiring Untouchables, Studs, or Strong Stashes who might be unaquirable by the deadline.
Categorize Your Own Roster
Going into this exercise, you most likely have a good idea of what you want to do with your roster. However, it behooves you to double check once you’ve really thought hard about the rest of the teams in your league. Maybe that contender you were sitting on turns out to feel ominously pretender-y. Or maybe you realize you have the assets to pivot into becoming a playoff team. Either way, good scouting includes self-scouting.
Starting Sketching Out Trade Ideas
Now that you have a strong sense of each owner’s trajectory and their strengths and weaknesses, you have everything you need to systematically send trade offers. While doing this exercise, certain players likely caught your eye that you’d like to acquire. But if you want a systematic set of steps to follow, you can start with this: (note, this section makes reference to the player categories in part 1 of this series)
Rebuilders
1. Offer your strong re-rolls to essentially every team for their third or fourth rounders, or for stashes
2. Look for favorable trades with Pretenders. This would involve trading your key starters for their picks or strong stashes, with a focus on offering them nominal solutions at their biggest needs. Pretenders might be especially resigned to trading off of their strengths to plug a hole at their weakness. Also, keep in mind their future first might be surprisingly high.
3. Look for prospects you’d really like to acquire from Contenders. Once again, offering upgrades at their starter positions. Contenders may be especially willing to offload prospects.
4. Try to strip the excess assets off Emerging Rebuilders by offering your key starters. They might be very inclined to turn their picks into key starters. The dynasty punditry (podcasts, Twitter accounts) is extremely vociferous about turning picks into real players.
5. Get a sense of who your potential trade partners might be if you’re inclined to trade back from a specific draft slot. For example, if you pick 1.03 or 1.04 in superflex this year, you’re in a prime trade back spot with a QB-needy pretender.
Contenders
1. You’re also looking to turn your strong re-rolls into picks or stashes.
2. Look for Studs or Untouchable type players on rebuilders and pretenders. I’ve discussed in Part 2 why I don’t like acquiring Key Starters until closer to the deadline. If trading with a pretender, try packaging a large quantity of mediocre picks and prospects for good players.
3. See if you can get a favorable price to trade off your strengths to emerging rebuilders in exchange for picks and prospects that may be burning a hole in their pockets. Careful, you don’t want to accidentally make them stronger than you.
There you have it, you now have some actionable categories you can use to profile your leaguemates’ rosters and make a plan of attack. Using these profiles, you’ll know which assets your leaguemates are likely to undervalue and which opportunities you can jump on.
By wisely navigating your own roster direction, and by making trade offers that nudge your leaguemates along theirs, you can give your leaguemates a justification to make a trade that’s actually favorable to you. Stay tuned for Part IV, where I discuss how to prepare for the draft. Until next time, stay hungry and stay sharp.