For those who don’t know him, Jason Wood is a phenomenal fantasy player, (and an all-around good guy, besides). He provides annual player projections for Footballguys, among other things, and has a pretty unimpeachable track record of success. At the same time, dynasty isn’t really his lane.
Prior to the 2013 season, Wood and I both joined a dynasty league with other Footballguys staffers, and Wood set about building a dynasty team entirely ignorant of the “rules” that all dynasty owners should follow. With two years on the books, I wanted to highlight his team to serve as an example for all new dynasty owners. Being a good sport, Wood agreed.
First, some background on the league. It’s a basic 12-team PPR dynasty league, with only one real twist: tight ends get 1.5 points per reception *AND* 1.5 points per 10 yards. In practice, since the league-wide yards per catch average for TEs has fluctuated in a narrow band between 10.88 and 11.60 over the last six years, it’s roughly equivalent to giving just a hair more than two points per reception to TEs (while other positions get just one), though of course high yard-per-reception players, (Rob Gronkowski, LaDarius Green), benefit a bit more, while low yard-per-reception players, (Jermaine Gresham, Mychal Rivera), benefit a bit less.
What impact does this have on the position? Rob Gronkowski becomes a league-dominating force, of course, with his pro-rated totals ranking in the top 3 of all flex-eligible positions (RBs, WRs, and TEs) in each of the last four years. Also, quality tight ends becomes dominant flex options; typically “flex-quality” tight ends (TE13-16) outscore “flex-quality” RBs and WRs, (RB25-28, WR37-40), by roughly 30 points over the full season.
Anyway, background aside, let’s discuss these dynasty rules and just what Wood did to violate them.
Rule #1- Don’t draft expiring assets as franchise cornerstones.
Wood came out the gate swinging on this one; his very first pick in the startup draft was 28-year-old Adrian Peterson, taken 9th overall. Expiring assets are great players to acquire as the cherry on top of an already fantastic team, but selecting one early in the startup draft leaves you behind the 8-ball; talent is typically evenly distributed in the first year, meaning you’re likely going to be wasting all of their value trying to win a title with only a slightly above-average team.
What should Jason have done instead? Grabbed a proven stud with 4 or more years of quality football left in front of him. With the 9th pick, Wood could have easily selected LeSean McCoy, Dez Bryant, or Demaryius Thomas and been set for years to come. Instead, Wood is already looking at life without his first selection, and Peterson’s suspension was just the insult added to injury.
Rule #2- Know your window.
One of my earliest articles for Footballguys discussed the concept of thinking in terms of competitive windows. The idea is that, with limited resources, you can spread them around and focus on being pretty good in every year, or you can stack them up and focus on being dominant and some years and terrible in others. The first approach gets you a lot of early playoff exits, while the second approach wins you some championships, and in the years you don’t win, you’re much more likely to walk away with very high rookie picks to aid the rebuild.
When committing your team to an aging star at the top of the draft, the rest of the draft should focus on maximizing your title chances during that star’s competitive window. After a pair of smart cornerstone picks in the second round spent on receivers Randall Cobb and Demaryius Thomas, Wood focused on loading up on unproven 1st- and 2nd-year players. He didn’t select another veteran until Wes Welker, all the way down at the 7.09 pick.
By refusing to commit to a specific window, Wood drastically increased the chances that he was going to waste Peterson’s last few years before the startup draft was even over. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but with Wood missing the playoffs in 2013 and Adrian Peterson missing the entire 2014 season, it’s fair to say that Jason has yet to see any return at all for his pick.
Rule #3- Know your league.
Remember that bit at the top about how crazy-high the premium is on the tight end position in our league? One would think that this would inspire owners to prioritize the position and scramble to ensure they had enough quality players to start one in the flex. Instead, the rule flew a bit under the radar, with tight ends lasting nearly as long as they would in a standard PPR league.
Wood certainly didn’t help the trend, as he was the 11th franchise to draft a tight end. He selected the 13th tight end off the board, and then rather than trying to address that weakness by going back to the well immediately, he didn’t select another until the 19th tight end off the board. Those were the only two tight ends he selected until a throwaway pick in the final round of the draft.
The biggest gut punch, though, is that Jason Wood originally owned the 1.03 pick in the startup draft. With the pick on the clock and both Gronkowski and Graham still on the board, Wood traded down and took Peterson, instead.
Rule #4- Draft for Talent, Trade for Need.
Smart dynasty owners know that they have only one mandate in rookie drafts: get more talented. Rookies sometimes take years to contribute, and so should not be looked to to patch short-term holes. Heading into the 2014 rookie draft, the class was already being hailed as potentially the greatest crop of receivers in NFL history.
With this in mind, what did Jason Wood do? He loaded up on running backs, of course. After missing the playoffs in year 1, he was drafting 5th overall, where he selected Carlos Hyde, (the best running back left on the board after Sankey went at 1.03). The next three picks off the board were Kelvin Benjamin, Jordan Matthews, and Odell Beckham Jr., each of whom was a top-25 fantasy receiver in year 1.
In round 2, already strong at running back, what did Wood do? He went back to the well, this time taking Andre Williams, who was drafted in the 4th round of the NFL draft. Still on the board were Austin Sefarian-Jenkins and Jace Amaro, (remember that bit about the TE premium?), as well as Allen Robinson and Donte Moncrief.
By focusing on a perceived need and ignoring far superior talents, Wood wound up with inferior talents who didn’t actually help his area of need at all in year 1. Ironically enough, the weakest position on his entire roster in 2014 wound up being his #3 receiver.
Rule #5- Prioritize Receivers in PPR.
Point per reception scoring used to be a niche system, but it gained popularity in the early 2000s as a way to balance wide receiver and running back value in redraft leagues. Today, the scoring system suffers from two major flaws.
The first is that, since the early 2000s, passing totals have exploded and workhorse running backs have become rarer. The second is that wide receivers already had an advantage working in their favor in dynasty leagues; their careers last, on average, nearly 50% longer than the careers of similarly-talented running backs.
These two factors combine to form a universal truth: wide receivers are more valuable than comparable running backs in PPR dynasty leagues. According to Dynasty League Football’s monthly ADP data, receivers comprised the top 6 dynasty picks in January, and 11 of the top 14.
I’ve already mentioned Wood’s failure to grab any of those receivers in last year’s rookie draft, but there’s one other move that I wanted to highlight. After week 4, when it became clear that Adrian Peterson wasn’t coming back, Wood traded Demaryius Thomas for Matt Forte, who at the time was 29 and the 12th-ranked fantasy running back.
Not only was it a move away from a stud wide receiver in his prime and to a running back near the end of his career, but it also meant Wood was trading a player at a position of weakness to acquire a player at a position of strength.
To add insult to injury, Demaryius immediately blew up, posting seven straight 100-yard games and totaling nearly 1,000 receiving yards during that stretch. From week 5 to the end of the year, Demaryius was the #1 scoring receiver in fantasy, even over Odell Beckham, Jr. and Antonio Brown.
Sifting Through the Wreckage
So what does it look like when a smart, talented redraft owner runs a dynasty team with such a redraft mentality, ignorant of the long-term consequences? Wood finished 5th in total points in year 1, but as I mentioned, he missed the playoffs. Then, in year 2, Peterson’s suspension hit and his rookie RBs struggled, and Wood…
… totally humiliated the rest of the league. Wood’s team put up the highest weekly score in 6 out of 17 weeks, but that’s not even the impressive part. Wood’s team put up the second-highest score in a further 9 weeks, meaning there were just two weeks all season long where Wood did not have one of the top two scores.
For the season, Jason finished with 2688.91 total points. The second place owner had Aaron Rodgers, Demarco Murray, Antonio Brown, Odell Beckham Jr., and Seattle’s defense… and still finished more than 150 points back. The third place owner had 2295.82 points, (nearly 400 points back), and no one else was within 550 points of Wood. It was an epic beatdown the likes of which I have never seen.
You see, those 1st and 2nd year players Wood drafted in the startup? They included Andrew Luck and Le’Veon Bell. At running back, in addition to Forte he had C.J. Anderson. Supplementing Randall Cobb, he owned breakout star Emmanuel Sanders at receiver. And despite waiting at TE, he managed to walk out of the startup draft with both Martellus Bennett and Antonio Gates.
The Wrong Way to Build a Dynasty?
Which brings us to the title of this piece. I claimed that Jason Wood built a dynasty the “wrong” way, but the truth is that dynasties are dynasties, regardless of how you get there. I stand firmly behind each of the rules I listed above, and think that given enough iterations, my way will produce more championships than Wood’s way.
If I didn’t believe that, then I wouldn’t be writing articles about how to build teams my way; I’d be writing articles about how to build Wood’s way, instead. I advocate for processes that I truly believe will give the biggest edge, and that’s all I can do. My very first article on Footballguys dealt with the importance of evaluating processes over outcomes, and that’s not a mistake; it was first because I believe it is most important.
At the same time, it’s so important that we approach the dynasty format with humility. Fantasy football will never be a “solved game” like tic-tac-toe or checkers. In order to solve fantasy, we’d need a perfectly-calibrated crystal ball that could tell us exactly how ever player would produce each year.
With that said, some formats are more “solvable” than others. Based on the volume of entries and low number of variables, some smart guys have done a lot of really good work analyzing the secrets to success in no-transaction best-ball leagues, such as MFL10s and the Footballguys subscriber contest. For example, there’s enough data to say pretty conclusively whether you should be drafting two defenses or three, (answer: grab three).
Of all the fantasy formats, though, dynasty is by far the least “solvable”. The time spans covered are far too long. We won’t know the answers to this year’s questions definitively for another four or five years, and by then we will have only gained four or five year’s worth of new questions to find the answer to.
There are a lot of people who will tell you they know the “best” way to dominate redraft leagues. While a true “best” way can never be known, there’s enough data to gain some sort of rudimentary idea about what strategies work better and what strategies don’t. It's a lot easier to check someone's processes and verify them against their outcomes. I often like to say that the reason I love dynasty, though, is because it's essentially the wild west. There are a lot of different people with a lot of different ideas, and we don't really have any way of knowing whose are the best.
The lesson here is this: be skeptical of anyone who purports to know the “right” or “wrong” way to build a dynasty, including me. We’re all flying blind. All of our “best practices” lists are either based off of five-year-old information, or are strictly theoretical. Be open-minded towards anyone who is taking a different tack in your leagues, even if their strategy seems bizarre or far outside the current community norm. The format is far less black-and-white than it appears. The owners who thrive are often those who are best able to adapt to that ambiguity.
In short, you can approach dynasty with an air of hubris or of humility. You’re probably going to struggle either way, because dynasty is hard, but at least if you approach with humility you won’t feel so terrible about it afterwards when a Jason Wood shows up and stomps all over you.
