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The Big Takeaway
Earlier this week I wrote about why owners should want to trade in dynasty leagues. That’s what I do in “Dynasty, in Theory”— I give you the "whys" and the "wherefores", with little attention paid to the "how". You see, the problem with trading, as I noted, is that we have a powerful mental driver who is always mashing on the brakes. When we are presented with an offer that is balanced, our built-in loss aversion and risk aversion are always applying a thumb to one side of the scale, encouraging us to maintain the status quo.
Basically, I gave a suggestion, but no practical advice on how to follow it. Luckily, that's what Dynasty, in Practice is for- practical advice on how to achieve your goals. With that in mind, here are a few tips on how to become a prolific and successful trader in fantasy football.
Be Fair
The old saying goes that you can shear a sheep many times, but only slaughter him once. Someone who doesn’t trade unless he’s screwing the other guy quickly becomes someone who doesn’t trade.
At its most basic, adhering to this policy is a matter of just being a decent human being. If your players get injured, don’t try to trade them before the news breaks, (something that may sound impossible in today’s fantasy environment with all of its instant updates, but which was a very common move a decade or more ago).
More broadly, don’t try to trick anyone into making a trade while they’re not in full possession of the relevant facts. Eventually they will gain full possession, and then they will resent you.
Also, when making offers, put yourself in the other person’s shoes and ask “is there any way in hell a reasonable person might take this deal?” If the answer is no, make a better opening offer.
If a leaguemate sends you an offer that you think is insulting, be polite about it. Nobody likes dealing with jerks who will only belittle them, (even if the belittling seems perfectly warranted).
Be Gracious
If a trade goes well for you and badly for your opponent, don’t gloat. Let them know that you were hoping it could be a win/win trade, and express condolences that things didn’t work out. It seems silly, but it’s easy to do, and it’s earned me a lot of goodwill in the past.
When things go wrong, reassure them that it was just bad luck rather than anything they could have foreseen. Owners don’t like thinking they screwed up, and if they’re afraid of screwing up, their risk aversion is going to be at full strength.
As an example, I traded Ray Rice this offseason after his two-game suspension was announced. When the second video surfaced and Rice got banned from the league, I sent the other owner a quick note saying “Hey man, I’m really sorry about Rice! That’s crazy, I’ve never seen the league change their mind like that before. If you need some help patching that hole, let me know. If you just want to vent and call me some bad names, let me know that, too.”
It’s important not to come off as defensive, because that just raises questions of what you are defending; did you have an idea that things would play out like that? Could you have?
In truth, assuming the initial trade offer was a good one, there’s nothing for you to defend. Sometimes things go south. It’s part of trading. That doesn’t mean we can’t commiserate with the other party when they do.
And when you find yourself on the wrong side of a trade— which will certainly happen— be gracious about that, too. The more pleasant you are to deal with, the more people will be inclined to deal with you.
Also, as a general rule, if someone has second thoughts about a trade shortly after agreeing to it, I let them back out. It sucks to lose out on a trade that was already agreed to, but I find that when people know they have a grace period, they're more likely to make a deal with me in the first place. Remember, the goal isn't to screw your opponent and then hold them to it, the goal is to find some deals that both parties can be satisfied with.
Be Transparent
Most owners’ idea of trading is the win/lose trade. One owner believes one thing about a set of players, another owner believes the opposite, they trade, and then they wait and see who was right.
That model of trading turns the risk aversion and loss aversion up to full force. All most owners can think about leading up to it is “what if I’m wrong?” Sometimes this particular trade model is unavoidable- such as in a one-for-one swap of two players at the same position.
Most of the time, however, we can short-circuit that trade model and replace it with a win/win trade. In short, instead of trying to trade bad players for good players, we can try to trade one group of good players for another group of good players in a way that benefits both teams.
The easiest example of this is a team that is loaded at running back but thin at receiver trading with a team that is loaded at receiver but thin at running back. In that situation, it’s easy to create a trade where both sides are better off afterwards.
I’ve found that the best way to transition from the “win/lose” trade model to the “win/win” trade model is just to be transparent. Be clear about your wants, needs, and motivations from the get-go, and ask questions to find out the other owners’, as well.
Don’t just make offers and hope the other owner intuits your desires. Say things like “I feel my WRs are strong, but I’m worried about their age and looking to get a bit younger” or “I’m making a title run this year, but I’d like to patch that hole in my RB depth chart”, or “I’m clearly not going to make the playoffs, so I’d like to trade some of my older players for youth and picks”.
At the same time, ask them things like “are you worried about any of your starting spots?” or “are you looking to acquire talent at any positions where I’m deep?” or “are you loading up to make a run this year or throwing in the towel?” Once you feel like you understand their trade motivations, ask one last time to make sure you have it right. Say “So, as I understand it, you think you’re a contender but you’re worried about your running backs.”
Once both parties understand each other, the trade negotiations can begin in earnest, and both sides will be able to make reasonable, thoughtful offers. I’ve found that no single thing has cut down on the number of terrible offers I have received than clearly explaining what I’m looking for.
Be Patient
None of these tips are a magic cure-all that will make quality trade offers fly across your desk faster than you can accept them. The overwhelming majority of my trade discussions end with nothing being done.
In fact, I’d say that for every trade I make, I probably have four trade discussions that never go anywhere. As I mentioned in my last article, I make a lot of trades. This means I engage in a ton of failed negotiations every year— several a week, in fact.
I’ve never had a problem with that, mostly because I genuinely enjoy talking about fantasy football. Most of my leagues are very long-standing, and the guys I’m in them with have become good friends. I don’t view an eventual trade as the goal of negotiations, I view it as one possible outcome, and I enjoy the talks for their own sake.
Often, even when they don’t result in a trade these negotiations are laying the groundwork for a future deal. Something might come up weeks, months, or even years later and old talks that were broken off will be dusted off and renewed.
In my most memorable example, I have a good friend with whom I’d spent maybe an hour a week chatting about football for over a decade. In that time, we had completed a grand total of one trade, as his loss aversion usually gave him cold feet right at the threshold.
In 2011, he owned Rob Gronkowski, Jimmy Graham, and Antonio Gates, and saw two of those three sitting on his bench every week. After the season was over, he told me that it was crazy that we talked so much but never actually hammered anything out. In short order, he was shipping me Rob Gronkowski and I was giving him Maurice Jones-Drew.
(In fairness, I was also willing to give Jamaal Charles for Gronkowski, which would have been a true win/win deal. The other owner preferred Jones-Drew at the time, since Charles was coming off of a torn ACL. He’s a regular reader of the column, and I’m not sure he’ll appreciate that little reminder.)
These “dead-end trade talks” are also giving you a lot of fodder for future conversations. We have selective memories, predisposed to recall all of our failures more readily than our successes. With a long history of stalled negotiations, you have plenty of chances to remind your trade partner of deals he could have made, but balked at.
For instance, I might casually remind a guy “boy, I’m sure glad you didn’t take my offer of a 1st for Hakeem Nicks last year- it wound up being the #2 overall pick!” Little reminders like that can help embolden them to take action in the future. Just remember, the key is always to be gracious, not gloating or mocking.
The last key of being patient is being willing to walk away from the table. This is, in my experience, the most important skill a trader can develop. When the goal is in sight, we often are prone to giving up more concessions just to get something done.
As I pointed out in my previous column, though, a high trading volume only makes sense if we can consistently turn a profit, and giving up too many concessions will destroy our ability to do that. At some point, we need to set a limit and walk away once it’s been reached.
Besides, few things have sealed more deals than a true willingness to walk away. A lot of dead trades will suddenly become firm offers a week later once the other owner has some time to sleep on it, (and, more importantly, realizes that they aren’t going to be getting anything else from you).
Fighting Bias with Bias
To this point, we’ve focused mostly on unambiguously positive things, (Be nice! Be helpful! Be friendly! Be patient!), and I doubt any advice would be the least bit controversial. Those goals are always the primary goals.
When going up against a cognitive bias that impels inaction, though, sometimes we can take advantage of other cognitive biases to help offset. This can be a more ethically gray area, and some of these things might seem like ways to trick the other guy, (which is a clear violation of our ironclad “be fair” rule).
I like to think of them more as tools in my tool bag to help the other owner shake off their reluctance and engage in mutually-beneficial negotiations.
I could, (and will!), spend many columns on the various cognitive biases that impact our decision-making process and how we can work around them to get deals done, but for now, I just wanted to highlight two simple and powerful tools to help make trade offers go down a little bit easier.
Anchoring Bias
Humans are notoriously bad at gauging value, and the scientific literature is replete with examples. We use a lot of simple shortcuts and rules of thumb to help estimate rather than sitting down and carefully considering. Some of these shortcuts can be exploited.
Perhaps the most notorious shortcut— and one that has been exploited by the advertising and retail industries for centuries— is our anchoring bias. When we don’t know how to value something, we cast about for clues and then anchor to those clues.
As an example, let’s say that someone invented a new shoelace that tied itself. How much would such a product be worth? It would be very difficult for us to decide that for ourselves. Instead, we’d probably go into a store and see what the asking price was.
If the asking price for these self-tying shoelaces was $20 and we saw a pack on sale for $10, we’d think that was a nice bargain. At the same time, if the going rate for these self-tying shoelaces was $5 and we saw a pack for $10, we’d think that was an outrageous scam.
We witness this in real-world situations, too. If grocery stores have a selection of wines ranging from $5 to $20 in price, they will sell very few bottles of the $20 wine. If they add a few more wines in the $40-$50 range, then they will sell very few of those new, more-expensive wines… but sales of their $20 wines will shoot through the roof. When compared to $5-$10 wines, $20 seems like a big rip-off. When it’s sitting next to a $40-$50 bottle, though, that $20 wine seems like a great bargain.
When we consider our purchases, we usually don’t look at the absolute price, we look at the relative price. If we are feeling frugal, we will buy the cheapest or second-cheapest option. If we’re feeling lavish, we’ll buy the most or second-most expensive item. How cheap or how expensive the items are is completely irrelevant.
What does this have to do with trading? Simple: by laying out the prices, an owner can create the anchors and control the conversation. There is often a lot of hesitation in trade discussions with neither side wanting to be the first to make an offer.
In reality, being the first to make an offer is a large advantage, because the rest of negotiations will naturally anchor around that offer. The remainder of the discussion usually revolves around negotiating a price relative to that initial offer.
Another way to use anchoring bias is to bring up several very cheap or very expensive options to make the mid-range options look like a better deal. For instance, if I own Jamaal Charles and Frank Gore and I’m looking to trade Frank Gore, I’m going to approach an RB-needy team, but I’m not going to offer him Frank Gore.
Instead, I’m going to say “Hey, if you need an RB, I can hook you up. Obviously Jamaal Charles is a star, and if you wanted him, he’d cost a ton. I would probably be willing to part with him for (insert very high price here). Or, if you’d like something cheaper, I’d be happy to trade you Frank Gore instead.”
All of a sudden, relative to the premium price a Jamaal Charles would command, the going rate for a Frank Gore starts to look like a bargain.
Framing Effect
Loss aversion is a really tough nut to crack, but by cleverly exploiting framing effects, it’s possible to make it work in your favor. The framing effect is the psychological phenomenon whereby people react differently to two identical choices depending on how they’re framed.
For instance, imagine you’re running a cooking class and you want people to sign up early. You want the cooking class to cost $80 if they sign up before May 1st and $100 if they sign up afterwards. There are two ways for you to frame this outcome.
First, you could say that your cooking class is ordinarily $100, but if people sign up before May 1st, they’ll get a special $20 “early bird discount”. Second, you could say that your cooking class is ordinarily $80, but if people sign up after May 1st, they will incur a $20 “late registration fee”.
In both instances, the outcome is identical- the class is $80 before May 1st and $100 after May 1st. Despite this, the results of both approaches are very different.
Why is this the case? Because the second method frames the choice as a potential loss. The class costs $80, but if you do not act now, then you will lose an additional $20 in penalties. The first choice, however, frames it as a potential gain; the class costs $100, but if you act now you will gain an additional $20.
As I mentioned earlier this week, our minds are biased more towards avoiding losses than towards realizing gains, so it is no surprise that the second approach produces a dramatically higher rate of early enrollment as people are highly motivated to avoid the perceived loss.
Similarly, how you frame your trade proposals will go a long way towards how likely people are to act on them. You should never, for instance, offer limited-time discounts on players. They simply don’t work. Instead, mention the possibility of the price rising in the future.
If you emphasize the possibility for your players to have a big game and see their value rise, your trade partner will perceive that as a potential loss- no one wants to wait on a deal and see the price go up in the meantime.
You don’t even have to threaten higher prices, you can feel free to drop hints and let them draw their own conclusions. If you’re trading a rookie, emphasize how young they are and how they are getting better every week. If you’re trading a veteran, mention that other owners are going to be more interested in buying as injuries strike around the league.
Similarly, when discussing trade offers, always emphasize the potential gains to the other owner’s lineups. Talk about how this shores up that RB position, or gives him some solid protection from injury at QB. Target players on the other team who are unlikely to see the starting lineup, and casually mention the fact that they’re unlikely to see the starting lineup. After all, if they never start, how much of a loss could they be?
Putting It All Together
There is no magic bullet to trading. It’s not like you can just abuse the anchoring bias to trick other owners into making dozens of trades with you. Exploiting these cognitive biases is not a tool for conning owners into acting against their own best interests. People are usually smart enough to tell when you’re trying to manipulate them.
Instead, think of these as ways to stage a discussion that will put the other owner more at ease and open to making a fair deal. Really, the cornerstone values at the top of the article are going to be the biggest keys to trading. Be fair, be gracious, be transparent, and be patient.
At the end of the day, there are no secrets or shortcuts, there are only best practices. It’s all a matter of building relationships and putting in time. As anyone who has worked in sales can attest, the number of sales you make is going to be directly proportional to the number of leads you run down.
With that said, these are the rules and guidelines that I have lived by while building a repeat champion where more than three quarters of the players I start on a weekly basis were acquired from someone else through trade.
Keep an open dialogue, develop a reputation that makes other owners want to work with you instead of against you, and before you know it, you’ll have turned over half of your roster. And, who knows, you might even find that you enjoy the process a lot more along the way.
Second Thoughts
Ryan Tannehill, just when I thought I was out... you pull me back in. Two years of showing little sign he's going to put everything together, Tannehill is coming off the best three-game stretch of his career. He lit up bad defenses in Oakland and Chicago and had a very strong game- despite the two interceptions- against a top Green Bay pass defense. Perhaps most encouragingly, Tannehill set a personal best 3-game total for rushing yards, and Miami seems to be getting him more involved on the ground. This week's matchup against Jacksonville is Charmin-soft, so there's a good chance that Tannehill will put up a fourth straight good game. I'm not going to be rushing out to buy him, but let's just say that I'm a lot more intrigued than I was a month ago.
Speaking of quarterbacks, has anyone noticed how Tom Brady has been on a fantasy tear while Matt Stafford has been in a fantasy slump? In one of my leagues, Tom Brady ranks 3rd in fantasy points over his last three games. Matt Stafford ranks 25th. It is no coincidence at all that this coincides with Rob Gronkowski getting healthy and Calvin Johnson getting hurt. No non-quarterbacks in the NFL today are more integral to their team's offense than Gronkowski and Johnson, but this just underscores a key point- a massive percentage of quarterback production is a function of supporting cast, but most owners don't consider that when valuing quarterbacks. Passers who are missing key weapons wind up consistently underrated. Passers whose targets are elite and healthy wind up consistently overrated.
What does this mean for practical purposes? It means Andy Dalton might not be a bad guy to target on the cheap right now. It also means that people probably aren't doing enough to anticipate how big of a deal Pierre Garcon, Desean Jackson, and Jordan Reed are going to be for whoever lines up under center for Washington. With reports that Robert Griffin III is going to have his job back in a manner of weeks or even days, people are sleeping on the possibility that he performs as a low-end QB1 down the stretch this year. This failure to account for supporting cast is one of those "persistent and predictable market biases" that I'm always going on about as the holy grail of dynasty analysis.
I spent a lot of time last year talking about how terrible the RB corps was. This year, things have gone from awful to catastrophic. If you own Le'Veon Bell, Giovani Bernard, LeSean McCoy, Jamaal Charles, or Demarco Murray, you have a crushing advantage at the position. If you don't, there's pretty much no way to acquire them right now. For the majority of fantasy owners who are on the outside looking in, I remain convinced that the best approach to the problem is stockpiling future draft picks and grabbing unsexy veterans like Justin Forsett or Rashad Jennings on the cheap to tide you over in the meantime. Don't be afraid of rostering old or untalented RBs as short-term fill-ins.
Another option is to trade for young upside plays like Jerrick McKinnon or Denard Robinson. The problem with that is that these guys are typically RB20-caliber players, but in today's player pool they might command prices more in the RB10-RB15 range. If you can get those two, (or Isaiah Crowell, or Tre Mason, or any similar players), on the cheap, then more power to you. Otherwise, grab some stopgaps and plan on addressing the position in the draft.
We're now reaching the point of the season where teams are realizing they aren't going to be able to compete and throwing in the towel. If you happen to be one of those teams, my condolances- I'm joining your ranks in a couple leagues, myself. An important thing to keep in mind in situations like this is that you really want to be motivated to move your aging players now. Not only is their value going to continue to drop, but the longer they are on your roster and you are using them, the more wins you're going to luck into and the worse your eventual draft position will be. Don't be afraid to sell a Frank Gore or a Reggie Bush or a Darren Sproles for below market value if that's the best you can get.
