Fantasy Football Today - FFT Dynasty - Analytics of Dynasty - Team Building Guide with Jordan McNamara | Fantasy Football Today Dynasty (06/14 Dynasty Fantasy Football Podcast)

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Join Heath Cummings and special guest Jordan McNamara as they dive deep into the analytics of building a winning dynasty fantasy football team! In this episode, you'll discover strategic insights on picks, trades, positional strategies, and asset usages. Whether you're a dynasty veteran or a newcomer, this guide is packed with data-driven advice to help you dominate your league. Don't miss out! Intro (0:00) Chris Olave vs. Garrett Wilson (1:02) One Non-Negotiable Dynasty Rule or Setting (6:27) The Most Undervalued Rookie by Rookie ADP (8:30) The Most Undervalued Veteran in Dynasty Trade Markets (12:15) Start-Up Drafts (14:45) Rookie Drafts (23:12) Trading (28:50) Contender Roster Management (34:54) Tanking/Rebuilding (46:38) Follow our FFT team on Twitter: @FFToday, @AdamAizer, @JameyEisenberg, @daverichard, @heathcummingssr, @ctowerscbs Follow the brand new FFT TikTok account: https://www.tiktok.com/@fftoday Watch FFT on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/fantasyfootballtoday Get 20% off Fantasy Football Today merch: https://store.cbssports.com/collections/fantasy-football-today%20?utm_source=podcast-apple-com&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=buy-our-merch&utm_content=fantasy-football-collection Join our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/FantasyFootballToday/ Sign up for the FFT newsletter https://www.cbssports.com/newsletter You can listen to Fantasy Football Today on your smart speakers! Simply say "Alexa, play the latest episode of the Fantasy Football Today podcast" or "Hey Google, play the latest episode of the Fantasy Football Today podcast." To hear more from the CBS Sports Podcast Network, visit https://www.cbssports.com/podcasts/ To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Welcome to Fantasy Football Today, Dynasty. I am your host, Heath Cummings, joined today by Jordan McNamara. We are going to talk Dynasty strategy. You can find Jordan on Twitter, at McNamaraDynasty. Tell them where they can find the rest of your work and what you've been working on Jordan. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. We were talking beforehand. I'm a staff writer at football guys, fellow,

you're an alum of there as well. I also hosted dynasty think tank podcast with Chad Parsons and you can find me on X or formally Twitter at McNamara dynasty. Yeah. I think, I think either started calling it like Xeets or something like that instead of tweets because he's still trying to combine the two. It's a really terrible thing. On today's show, like I said, we are going to talk Dynasty strategy. We're going to talk about startup strategy, rookie draft strategy, trading, and more. We're also

going to talk about some of Jordan's favorite values, but like my favorite thing when I'm having a guest on and I haven't like set a rundown for the show is I just go to the guest's Twitter and I'm like, can they provide some content for me? And like, I had to hold back. I had like six tweets that I wanted to talk about today, Jordan, but we're going to start with one because it's a, it's a hot topic. And I think an interesting topic we've talk about today, Jordan, but we're going to start with one because it's a hot topic and I think an interesting topic. We've talked about these young wide receivers in Garrett Wilson and Drake London

that virtually everyone is expecting to have a massive breakout for the second year in a row. Like, even though they didn't do it last year because of a quarterback change. And you tweeted out yesterday, Chris Olave has been better than Garrett Wilson sinceson since entering the league you've got the breakdown here better in targets per route run better in yards per route run better in yards per target

yet everyone thinks wilson has the elite ceiling and olave is limited yeah um so this one's confused me right i i think garrett wilson has gotten a pass because of bad quarterback play for two years, which I understand that argument. What I don't understand is why that look at, you look at Chris Olave. And I think, I think one of the things that I've found in, especially in dynasty is that ADP is explained by about 50% of what the player did and just total points per game last year. Right. And which makes sense, right? When you look at the scoring and you kind of go from there, but that hides a lot of information.

And it hides a lot of information on the fact that Garrett Wilson's been inflated by high play volume. He's been inflated and Chris Olave's been dragged down by low play volume. Just in terms of pass attempts. Chris Olave's mystery games. Right. So you start looking at these things and by basically every metric. Right. And every, you know, per route metric, Alave is substantially better, like 30 plus percent better. And you just kind of wonder, like, OK, what are you expecting of Garrett Wilson to get that much better? Right. Everything has to get better. And I think people think a lot of Aaron Rodgers is going to improve. You know, one of the things with Aaron Rodgers that I have a lot of concern about,

I mean, A, he's 40. B, he's coming off an Achilles injury. He's not played with this team before. He was out all of last season. But beyond all of that, 2022 is his second worst yards per attempt as a passer in his career at 6.8 yards per attempt. And he plays at a significantly slower pace than the Jets have played, right? I mean, in terms of in 2022, just that year specifically, they ranked 31st in seconds per play, ahead of only San Francisco.

The Jets were a top three team, right, in terms of pacing. And you might think, well, what does that matter? Like it's a lot more shots on goal, right? It's a lot more plays, right? You have to be extremely efficient if you're going to reduce all that volume. And I just don't know. It just seems a lot less likely, I think, than, than putting him at wide receiver eight and underdog and wide receiver eight and, and, and dynasty ADP. That just seems like a lot. And it feels like all the ranges of outcomes for Alave are better, right? So that's just the, and combined with his production, they had similar pedigree. They're the same age, right? We're discounting what garrett wilson has done and and at the same time discounting what alave has done yeah i have wilson at wide receiver 10 in dynasty i have alave at wide receiver 12 so i am like putting wilson ahead of alave and i am expecting aaron rogers even if he's bad aaron

rogers to be a pretty decent size upgrade over like Zach Wilson and everybody except for maybe Joe Flacco that Garrett Wilson has played with maybe he's in that Joe Flacco range but that seems like the floor for Rodgers this year maybe he could be worse I think the difference obviously is that Derek Carr is still the quarterback of the New Orleans Saints and so for this year in particular people have a hard time expecting car at this stage of his career to be better than he has been and so why is olave going to be better is what i what i would i think people who discount olave's upside would say when you look at those numbers that were in the tweet. Like obviously, in my opinion, the targets per route run

probably don't have very much to do with the quarterback. The other two can be pretty heavily influenced by quarterback play. And so, and maybe the targets do as well because there was a period of time where Wilson was playing with a dump-off artist, but Olave's played with a dump-off artist but a lot of these played with the dump off artist, basically his entire career because Alvin Kamara is there.

So I do think that like having those guys two spots apart is pretty much a coin flip territory for me anyway, but it does. There's more certainty. Cause I see like there's people that have Garrett Wilson as top six and dynasty probably not warranted. If you don't have Chris Olave right behind him. Now, that was not one of our three questions for the guests. We do start with three questions for our guests every time. The first question is the same for almost everyone. You're starting a new Dynasty

League. What is the one rule or setting that is non-negotiable and we don't allow people to say super flex anymore because too many people said that? that's fair uh tight end premium i want to be i want to be playing deeper in the tight end pool it's a lot more interesting position than it was even a year ago right i mean you've got an influx of young guys you've got a middle class now you've got an older group there's a lot more strategy involved with it i really like the two ppr setting so that gets you even more involved in like playing the flex i think that brings in a lot of different strategy as well. So yeah, definitely juicing up the premiums to make tight end, just more valuable and valuable compared to other positions,

especially when you put it in lineup type decision-making. I like that. I have a follow-up question on that because how do you, what at CBS, our standard setting has always been six points per pass touchdown. That is unusual in the fantasy community. There's more standard settings with the four. And I think that probably most dynasty leagues are four. Do you prefer four or six points per pass touchdown?

I prefer six. Most of the ones I play in are six. And I like six. And I like six and penalizing interceptions more okay i mean as it's an imperfect way to penalize poor poor play but it's a you know it it enhances the value of of elite quarterbacks which i find uh to be more fun yeah and i i think you say it's imperfect and patrick mahomes last year and dac prescott the year before that show you why it's imperfect because a lot of times interceptions are not the quarterback's fault I like I like that idea of of

increasing the interception I also am really trying to push towards like let's get a negative one for quarterback sex yeah I like that we are definitely seeing analytically that quarterbacks have a lot more responsibility for sexacks than we've historically given them. And that is something where we don't see the best quarterbacks in the NFL take that many sacks, at least not most of them. Like I said, we're going to talk almost entirely about strategy on this show, but I want to give you a chance to talk about a couple of guys. So the second question, who do you think the most undervalued rookie by rookie ADP is? And by the way, on your interceptions and sack point,

a lot of times a sack is worse than an interception. Right. Because you look at like the arm punts that Josh Allen makes, right? And everyone's like, oh, he's among the league leaders and interceptions. Well, he threw like six of them that were basically punts on third down and long last year.

Like, you know, it's where the sacks, hisance is much is much more important than that is a drag so yeah i i agree with that i think sacks is interesting um my for for rookie drafts um i think this year's a really fascinating year i didn't come into this year thinking that i would be a big bow nicks guy or a michael panics guy or frankly a xavier Leggett guy. But they all get like, you know, Knicks and Penix, they're basically top. I look at like top 10, top 12 quarterbacks as being a significantly different tier than anything after that in terms of quarterback draft pedigree, just in the NFL draft. And when you have six of them going to top 12, I think, you know, you don't worry so much about the person going 12 as opposed to 10, you know, that's a, that's a pretty big group and that's a pretty

solid draft pedigree there with a lot of opportunity. We historically see those guys outperform, you know, the rest of the quarterback draft classes. So both of those guys, you can get outside the first round and rookie drafts, the super flex rookie drafts. I mean, those are smash outcomes. And Xavier will get a 20th overall, according to Fantasy Calc, by my last look of it. You can get first round quarterbacks or first round wide receivers in the second round of rookie drafts. That is almost always just take the guy, even if you don't necessarily love the guy, right? His odds outproduce those costs. So those three guys specifically I've come away with a lot this year. I like that a lot.

The range of potential landing spots for Bo Nix and rookie drafts has been fascinating. I have a slow draft going on right now, and he went 10th overall. I've also seen him like you said in round two i think 10 is probably about right i'm not a huge fan or believer that that sean payton's going to be successful in denver but i 100 believe that if bo nicks was going to have success in the nfl it was going to be in a system like sean Payton's. I think it's been absolutely perfect marriage. And you don't even, one of the things that I think people in dynasty attach themselves too much is

to prove that they're right. You don't even need to prove you're right. Like you don't even need to say that Bo Nix is really good and I'm going to take him at, you know, one 12 and prove I'm right. Like you look at guys in the past like you could sell mac jones who you know belongs in the same sort of family of the quarterback position that i would say bo nix does right like you after year one you could sell him at a pretty good increase you could sell him for an elite quarterback in a package he could be a part of a package and you don't need to necessarily prove that you're right on the guy or on the evaluation you

just it's a it's a it's an insulated player for a year, basically, with a decent chance they go up in price and you can put them into a much better package. Right. You know, I think that, you know, and there's a chance you can do that in season. Right. Like what if someone gets off to a poor start? Right. What if what if someone has Patrick Mahomes and he gets off to a bad start and the team's hurt and the person wants to reset? Now you've got assets. You've got the type of structure there that you can put together with Knicks and some younger players and some picks. And that's something that could allow someone to rebuild. So, again, you just use Mahomes because I'm always in that business trying to get him.

But that's the type of opportunity that those guys have. And then we've got to go with the old guys occasionally as well, who is not necessarily old, but non-rookies. Who's the most undervalued veteran in dynasty trademark market right now? I'll just give you the same answer that I've given for about, I think probably going on about five years of this answer. It's Mike Evans. You look, he's wide receiver, what at 36. I mean, all he's ever done is be a top 20 guy I mean that's all

he's ever done he's 31 years old he's not that old uh you know he's his I was just checking out his his uh props for this offseason it actually is better than his redraft ADP he's like a top 11 guy in terms of his yardage props up over 1100,100 yards. I just, at that cost, he's dirt cheap. I mean, you look at that group of guys, like the guys that are 28 and older that are still wide receiver one types on their team. It's Amari Cooper. It's Mike Evans. It was Keenan Allen last year.

But that group of guys, Devontae Adams, all of those guys are just undervalued because people want from that. Oh, I want a big uptick in, in draft and, and trade valuation over the next year. That's what I'm shooting for in the, in the thirties of wide receiver ADP. Like that's a really bad bet. Historically, you're much better off to just take the guys that are productive in that range. And it allows you a lot of roster construction flexibility. Yeah. Those are the types of guys that give me the most trouble when it comes to putting together dynasty rankings,

because like there really should be a slider on all dynasty rankings. Like, are you competing or are you not? Because probably a fourth of the league should have no interest in having Mike, maybe a third should have no interest in having Mike Evans on their roster. But there's also a third of the, like, I agree with you. I've got him ranked, I believe, 12th for redraft this year. I think he's a top 12 wide receiver as long as nothing goes wrong. And so that guy is worth a ton to those of us who are competing this year.

And it is difficult to put together. Maybe one day I'll just have two sets of rankings, but that sounds like a lot more work. Let's take our first break, and then we'll talk a little dynasty strategy with Jordan McNamara. It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats.

But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goal tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age.

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or visit securiancanada.ca securing canada insurance designed for life we are back and we are talking strategy i love these kind of shows because besides what we just talked about these are kind of evergreen shows this this will live for a while and you can come back to it when you get to the stage of maybe going through a rebuild, which we'll talk about later in the show, or trying to turn from a rebuilder into a contender. But I want to start at year one of a startup thinking, I don't want to compete, or you want to try to draft a contender immediately or the idea of trading back throughout a startup draft. What, what are your general philosophies when it comes to a dynasty startup draft?

Yeah, it's changed over time. If I'm doing super flex, right. I want to get elite quarterbacks, right. That's, I want to get Elite quarterbacks right that's I want to get Elite quarterbacks and I'm willing to trade up for two of them right I mean I called the the I called Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes the Apex predators like if I can start a team and it's possible to do this right I've seen it done I've done it I've done it in existing leagues to go both of them right I did it in an auction last year right to just pay the price because the floor is so high the ceiling is so high it's basically a riskless strategy um you know you you talk about undervalued guys like those two guys are actually undervalued and

they're the top two guys in the format right because there's just not right there's not there's just so much far beyond the next tier of guys. So I think like going up and being aggressive to get elite quarterbacks matters. I'll say I like trading down where, where other people want to pay for certainty, right? For what they believe, right? They want to really express their opinion and they're really certain about something outside the top three or four rounds. I let them pay me to do it And I'll just trade down, right? I'll trade down. I like to kick future picks into the future, not because I necessarily want to build out, you know, some young team. That's not what my aim usually is. What I usually aim for is like a productive team right now. And if I can kick

some picks into the future, I'm not doing it to build a young team. I'm building it to give myself flexibility in season, flexibility to trade for productive players, to upgrade at positions if injuries happen, right, to constantly be moving up. I think having, you know, sliding down in startup drafts while also, you know, drafting productively, I think allows you a lot of different outs on your team. So that's something I really do. I think just attacking premium positions early, right, attacking them a lot. We talk about my favorite format is playing two PPR for tight end. In the first five or six rounds of those drafts, I typically draft, you know, if it's the first six rounds, I typically draft at least five quarterbacks and tight ends in those formats,

right? Just attack the premiums. And those things will help you over the long period of time. So I want to go back to the start of that answer and, and the grouping of Allen and Mahomes, and we're kind of unique here and from a redraft perspective, because Dave Jamie and I all have Patrick Mahomes ranked as QB1 and Allen's not QB1 for anybody at the site but you look at ADP and he's mostly QB1 maybe he's just right behind QB2 on some sites and so I do kind of want to ask

about if you have any concerns about Allen in this first full year with Dorsey without Stefan Diggs and maybe Keyon Coleman's his number one wide receiver. I'm not sure who his number one wide receiver is. And then the second thing is in one quarterback leagues, I don't think this really matters. But in super flex leagues, which most new dynasty leagues now are that floor for quarterbacks matters quite a bit more. And I have some real questions about the long-term outlook for Allen, for Hertz, for Lamar Jackson. We've not seen quarterbacks who run the ball as much as they do stay healthy and stay productive into their thirties. It's much easier for me to look at Mahomes and say,

we've got a decade of him with QB1. That's why he's my dynasty QB1. So I want to kind of like first talk a little bit about, do you have any concerns about Allen still being one or two this year? And then have you had any thoughts about like how these rushing quarterbacks are going to age? So good question. I, you know, from the period of time, I think Diggs's last 100 yard game as a bill was in like week nine.

And from that point on, right, without any Stefan Diggs, 100 yard receiving games, Josh Allen was quarterback one. And that, by the way, was when Dak Prescott was going thermonuclear. I mean, he was going crazy, throwing touchdown passes, throwing for, I mean, just a huge season. Allen was quarterback one. So I don't have a ton of concern about that. Again, he's a double-digit rushing touchdown threat every year. I'm not super concerned about Diggs because Diggs wasn't an important factor in

Josh Allen's fantasy production. And we saw him as quarterback one during that stint. So I'm not super concerned about it. I get the concern about the quarterback running. But if you look at it, like so many of the injuries happen in the pocket right like i i i think that the we haven't we don't have a huge sample and i think this is one of the hard parts about analytics we don't have the a huge sample of guys where we can say like hey this rushing threat caused xyz injuries right right because we haven't it's only really been like 10 years where we've seen the quarterbacks run like this. And I want to clarify, I'm not necessarily saying, although Allen has had a couple shoulder injuries the last two years,

and this was about the point. If you were going to say from a size, the type of hits he takes comparison, well, the only real comparison we have is Cam. Sure. And 28 was about the time when everything caught up to him um now i don't want i'm not predicting that for alan and i'm not even predicting he's going to get more hurt it's just that and it's less for him than it is for jackson and hertz but a lot of their fantasy points come more from running back type production than

quarterback type production it's it's rushing yards and for alan last year it was a human you referenced that time i think he had as many rushing touchdowns in those final nine weeks in those nine weeks as he had in any season before that last year yeah um so it's not so much that i think that they're necessarily more likely to get hurt as i'm just not sure the way they're producing fantasy points will be as reliable in their thirties. I do wonder as well, like you mentioned Hertz, right? It's part of the reason that they brought in Saquon Barkley to stop doing some of that short yardage stuff. I don't know the answer to that.

I could actually kind of go the other direction and say, maybe the reason why they brought in Saquon Barkley is because Jalen Hurts saw the short yardage stuff. We could kind of go back and forth on, on that. It would be interesting to see. I do worry about like the way Hertz runs a little bit more than the way that Josh Allen runs. Okay. One thing I would say, like, I just, I don't know those like car crash pile up push, push things don't like that,

that doing that a dozen times a game doesn't seem like something that I want to pay, do my $200 million investment. Like that's not what I would do. So I, again, they run a little bit differently. So again, I think it's a concern, but I don't, the ceiling's so high. Right. Right. And that's the, I mean, that's the thing as well. Like the ceiling's so high on these guys that, you know, if, if Alan does this for, you know, if Alan, if you, if you drafted Alan two years ago right and he retired tomorrow

and never played again right it still probably pays the cost for what you paid right i mean that's how good he's been how dominant he's been and the ceiling and floor combination so i don't you know outside of like i think thinking anything beyond maybe three or four years even on those top guys is is too far out to really have a lot of confidence in. No, that makes perfect sense. I've been trying to kind of wrap my brain around that. I think it gets really interesting when you're thinking about a quarterback like C.J. Stroud versus Allen or Jackson or Hertz. But Stroud's going to have to show a lot more upside before we have that conversation.

Let's talk about rookie drafts. So I don't think that the trade back philosophy necessarily works as well early in the draft, but certainly in round two, that's something I like to do for the same reason that you said, like let somebody else express a lot of certainty about whether wide receiver six is six, seven, or eight. I'll just take the other one and pick up some future picks. Do you have any other like just kind of go-to rules when it comes to dynasty rookie drafts? By the way, do you have any concern? Can I just ask you on the Josh Allen thing? So Joe Dorsey, excuse me, Ken Dorsey was 5% over passing expectation last year and Joe Brady was 4% under.

Do you have any concerns about that? Because that's the thing about that offense that concerns me more than anything about Josh Allen's concern. It's that they went from being pass-happy to run-heavy, and I thought that they were worse because of it. Yes, I combine that with what I expect to be some pretty significant rushing touchdown regression this year off of last year. Because he scored six more than he ever had before and didn't run the ball more. Didn't have more rushing yards. He just had the touchdowns. And the fact that I don't know if he has any good wide receivers.

I'm not saying I'm not sure he has a number one wide receiver. I'm not sure if he has any good nfl wide receivers so yeah those three factors he's my qb4 in redraft this year i've actually got at mahomes hertz jackson allen um and he could make me look stupid he's made a lot of people look stupid over the last five years for various reasons um but yeah i i that i think this could be a monster season for j Cook. Oh, I love it. Both because of that increased rush rate and because Josh Allen's probably going to have to throw to him

because nobody else is open. Right. Yeah. So I'm pretty high on Cook. He's a top 10 dynasty running back for me, and he's like a top six guy in redraft this year. But, yeah, that's where I'm at on that and i lost my track well let's go back to the you asked you asked about rookie just sorry i totally i know no that was

good i'll answer your question i wasn't i wasn't filibustered no that was good good so yeah what specifically like how are you attacking rookie drafts most of the time so one of the things i like to look at rookie drafts is like look at profiles. So the way I kind of think about that is each position, right, draft pedigree matters in different ways, right? So the earlier you're drafted, the NFL draft is usually the better, right? That's, I think, fairly obvious. But each position works a little bit different how that declines, right? You look at the quarterbacks, for example, I'd mentioned that like top 10 to top 12 kind of range where you get six of them in that top 12. I kind of treat that as one tier. You can make some specific preferences in that tier, but I do think like identifying that as a

tier to be in on and to target, especially at the bottom of it is really important. So again, I mentioned guys like Panics, I mentioned guys like Knicks, kind of identifying that tier and being in on that. The other one is receiver, right? Like when you look at this receiving class, like it's really interesting because you're getting guys like Makaki, you're getting some second round wide receivers going up ahead of first round wide receivers. And anytime that happens, right, you just look the average wide receiver first round wide receiver hit rates about 55 it's about 35 for second rounders so just looking at that your default rule should be first round over second round right your default rule when you when you pass on someone with higher pedigree you have to have a darn good reason to do it. And I don't see guys like Adnai Mitchell as being a good reason to go over

Xavier Legat as a first-round guy. I don't see, you know, you look at some of those, Ladd-McConkie is a similar example, right? I mean, the difference between some of these guys, like Xavier Worthy is going almost a full round ahead of another first-round wide receiver. When the Dynasty community has done that, one of the things that I've learned is the difference in AD, if you just look at players in a tier, so just look at like first round wide receivers, Dynasty ADP has not been predictive

of future success within those tiers. So what that means is all the work, all the analysis, all the preparation that we do doesn't predict success better than just random chance does. And so if you're taking someone at 10, that's got the same profile as someone at 20, you should probably not take the guy at 10, right? That's a lot of what my strategy has been in recent years is to just kind of look at those things, arbitrage them and take advantage of them. So that's how I trade down. But I do, I will trade up in the top of the draft to kind of stop runs right if i want to get in on like let's say for example that you get you know three wide receivers you get a couple of quarterbacks off and drake may sitting there at like seven or eight

i'd be apt to like trade up for him right but i'm not necessarily going to be like trading up for receivers in the back half of the first round so i think that makes a lot of sense that was going to be my kind of my follow-up question because i do think like there are troy franklin people who might take him ahead of a first round wide receiver there are a couple of them in fact pierce all and laguette um there are mitch ad mitchell people um there are lad mcconkey people are you pretty much of the mind that the first round wide receivers should all go before any of the mind that the first-round wide receivers should all go before any of the round two or three guys this year? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Really? There can be exceptions to that, but there needs to be a really good reason for it. For this class, at least, you don't have any of those guys where you have a really good reason for it. I think we should move now to everyone's favorite part of Dynasty.

Well, everybody says it's their favorite part of fantasy football until you send them a trade offer. And then they ignore it or they're a jerk about it. But getting trades done, I want to attack this from two different angles. And the first is, like, how do you get more trades done? And then the second we'll talk about later is like, like how you're actually approaching the trades and what trying to quote unquote, win them, or at least make your team better. But do you have any strategies just for like people trying to struggling to get trades done in fantasy leagues and what you think are the best ways to

get that done? Send more offers. Yeah. I mean, I see that people all the time will say, well, I can't get a trade done. You know, I put a trade bait up and no one sent me an offer. Well, I mean, what's marketing, right? I mean, marketing isn't just putting up a billboard and hoping that someone will show up. Marketing is calling, it's mailing, it's emailing, it's texting, you know, it's all those, just how do people sell you things, right? They, they try to contact you, right? I mean, it's the same way in Dynasty, right? It's not, it's not that different. So again, just send more offers. And if you're not

comfortable, one of the things that early on in Dynasty, I had a really hard time with sending offers because I was playing in a couple of leagues and, you know, I was really, you know, I had all this attachment to these players and I didn't want to make a mistake and all these things. That's something I see all the time. What I would recommend to people is adopt an orphan, especially a bad one, right? Just take a, take an experiment, right? Take a team that's awful, right? That someone's offering you a free year of an entry fee just to manage, right? And just trade it, right? I don't care. I don't care about what happens. My team's horrible. It's going to be bad anyways. Let's just use it as an experiment. Let's try and trade. Let's try and

do stuff. Let's send 10 offers. Let's send 20 offers. Let's just keep sending offers. And what that does, it's like taking a batting weight off a bat. You start swinging it. You're saying, okay, I feel comfortable with this. Then you take off the weight, and all of a sudden you go out and you're actually in a normal league. You're like, wow, I feel a lot more comfortable moving these picks or moving these players or sending anything like that. So I think the key thing on trading is just do it more. Just do it more. I mean, that just do it.

And if you're nervous about doing it, do you get some more leagues that that don't that don't mean anything to you. Right. If you're nervous about trading a home league, get in a league where a bunch of strangers, where it doesn't the buy ins low. It doesn't matter if you lose and just try it. Just just experiment. It's like anything. The other thing I think that the I see people trade aimlessly.'re just trading to trade right they're just trading um and i think that that is a mistake um because i do find myself to be one of the more active traders but all of it's got an intent all of it has a reason right what am i doing and I think like I start off and I talk about, you know, in my dynasty team building guide that I got over at AOD in my podcast that I release. You know, I've got I release podcasts every day for AOD subscribers. Like when I do those things, one of the things I talk about is like your strategy, your your actions, your moves, your transactions should all reflect your strategy, right? So if you're

coming into a trade and you're just like start pressing buttons, like what are you trying to accomplish, right? What is it that you are trying to accomplish by sending this trade? Is it just to make a trade or are you trying to actually do something with your team? And I think if you answer that question, honestly, I think a lot of people will just kind of go in and just start hitting buttons and trading. Whereas I think a lot of people will just kind of go in and just and just start hitting buttons and trading whereas i think a lot of people um kind of can put their team in the wrong direction by not having a plan they have a plan going and execute it and that allows you to get good prices you know like earlier like kind of wrap it together like what we were talking about earlier with like mike evans and like you're asking me undervalued wide receivers like i've

got like four or five of them right and so if i go in and i'm like all a hole at my receiver position. Okay. Well, let's go check on the price of Mike Evans. So that seems like a lot. Well, if I'm just locked in on Mike Evans, I'm either going to pay it or I'm not. And maybe I'm paying too high of a price for Mike Evans in a trade. But if I say, I'm not really trying to get Mike Evans, right. I'm trying to get a productive wide receivers discounted. Okay. Well, who reflects that? Well, Mike Evans is one of them. Devante Adams is another, I mean, maybe Debo Samuel, right? You can't, you kind of can create a list of guys where you can go in and send similar offers to different people and get a deal done that way. And I think that helps you trade more effectively. So your strategy should reflect your

actions. And I think that's particularly true in trade, particularly true in trading. I love, love, love that. And we're going to get into contending in just a second but just to add on to that i think it works the same way when you're trying to get rid of someone and i would like some people don't like this i like to publicize it like i had in our staff idp dynasty league two years ago i think i had four or five of the top 12 linebackers um that year and so we're going into the next year and it's like year three or four of this league. And honestly, a couple of the guys had just gone in with the idea that IDP doesn't

matter. And so I'm going to just focus on my offense and I'll just start whoever on defense. And they were learning that that didn't work. So I'm trying to trade one of these top 12 linebackers for a late round two rookie pick. No dice. Nobody's going to do it.

We don't value them like that. So I just sent out a message to the league. I said, I'm going to send a trade offer to every one of you it was i think it was darius leonard at the time or somebody for your third round rookie pick and the first one of you accepts gets him and i literally went through and offered darius leonard to 13 different teams the 14 team league and soon enough he was gone and on somebody else's roster now maybe if i'd gone slower and offered him the team with 301 first then 302 then 303 but i also may not have gotten a response from half of those teams by the time they were on the clock i just

kind of put it out there and say i'm selling this guy for this price who wants him if somebody accept the offer joe had a question that kind of transitions us into the next thing. And I think it can still work on that trading talk as well, because that have a plan idea. There's different thoughts on this as well. I've generally preached on this show that I like to be all in on contending, all in on rebuilding, or occasionally, like if I'm not one of those two things, it's because I'm making that transition from the rebuild into contending. I might have one year in the middle, but I don't want to have a year in the middle going the other way. And so Joe asks, and I get this question a lot when we do mailbags, is there a good way to know if you're a contender during

the off season? I narrowly lost the championship last year, but I am worried about regression. And I will say that like, first off, I think you're ahead of people just by considering the fact that this team that was in contention last year might not be next year. I have done a complete teardown a year after losing a championship because sometimes that makes sense.

So is there anything you're looking for when you're in that contending mode, either going towards being a contender or maybe towards the end of that, that really you're using to decide that you are a contender that year? It's such a really good question. I think there's two things that I would point you towards. Okay. Two real easy ways to figure out if you're a contender. Number one, count how many top 30 assets you have in your league, on your team.

So if it's super flex, and you don't need to be complicated about this. Just go and see how many guys are in the top 30 of ADP. And if you've got three of them, you're a contender. If you've got four of them, you should get a buy. Because that's a real simple way to look at these things. OK, and if you've got three of them, you're a contender. If you've got four of them, you should get a bye. Right. OK, because that's that's a real simple way to look at these things. It can get more complicated than that again. But that's if you just do that and if you have three guys that are in the top 30 of ADP, you should be in the playoffs. Right. That's just the way the numbers kind of work with the caveat that guys like Marvin Harrison jr.

Or Caleb Williams, right? Like they don't really count for that because you're not really expecting like year one production. That's what I was going to ask when you say top 30 of ADP, right. And you're talking about a contender for this year. Are you talking dynasty ADP or redraft ADP? I'm talking about I'm generally talking about dynasty. Okay.

So I would say like, it's kind of a two part thing, right? Do I have top 30 assets? And then if I have, if I've got three of those top 30 guys, okay. Are they, are they contending guys? Right. Is it, is it Caleb Williams, you know, Jaden Daniels and Martin Harrison? Or is it, you know, Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts and Amin Ra Saint-Brun? Right.

Like, what do we, what do we, like, obviously you have Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, and Amin Rao St. Brown, right? Like, what do we, like, obviously you have to use some kind of judgment or wisdom there on that. But generally, if you have three guys that are productive guys that are in the top 30 of ADP, you should be thinking you can contend this year. Okay. And the way, like, I could get super nerdy and super geeky and all those things, but the way that that works is the difference between like the difference that those guys make is substantially, substantially more than the difference between the guys, between like a 50 pit gap between 50 and a hundred, right? The gap on those is really small. Like the gap at the top, those guys can run up a huge, huge, huge advantage for you.

So some of that smaller stuff doesn't quite matter as much. That's the basic premise of that. Okay. So that'd be the first place I'd look. The second thing that I would do, if you have a question about this regression, sit down, look at your team. And I actually have a sheet of paper I do this on. I have a thing um and if you if that person has more questions dm me and i'll send it to you um but you have um three ways that your team can get better okay three ways your team can get worse and that could be that actually forces you to be a little bit introspective about your team because you'll say like okay okay, well, listen, I had Dallas Goddard last year and he missed a ton of the season, right? I had Mark Andrews and he missed a bunch

of the season. Okay. So those are the things that I could get better from those, right? But three things that could be worse, like, okay, maybe I was really dependent on Raheem Moster, right? Maybe I was really dependent on, you know, last year, DeMarcus Robinson down the stretch of last season was like my wide receiver three. Right. Maybe you have like these sorts of things where you're like really dependent on things that are unlikely to happen again. Right. So that gives you if you are really kind of honest in that, that'll is you know look at what your team record was last year and compare it to you can do one of two things you can compare it to your all-play record right which is if you played everyone every week right what would happen okay and um and compare the two right if they're close that means you're pretty you're probably about what you should have bet right if you

you might have a team that you know is a 500 team in terms of all play about what you should have bet, right? If you, you might have a team that, you know, is a 500 team in terms of all play record, but you should have won 75% of your games. Right. In terms of, you know, in terms of the other way, right? You can flip, take a look at that and think about that. And, and then if you don't have all play records, just look at points, right? Where did I finish in terms of record and points, right? Was I the second best record, but the eighth most points, or was I vice versa, right? Because your record can be highly fluctuating year to year, right? Look at those other more fundamental things. And that'll tell you, that'll be,

that'll tell you the true status of where your team was last year. And you can think like, you know, for Joe, like specifically, what was your record? Right. Cause again, if you, if, if you were 10 and 4 and you're like i'm worried about regression that's maybe two games you're eight and six at worst right like you know like that's kind of right if if you're seven and seven right you're riding raheem most or two finals we might have a problem right but like you're you know so those would be kind of things i think about so let's let's say that we've gone through this exercise. We've decided we are a contender.

I will ask you next how that changes your dynasty movements and strategy and everything. But first, this time of year specifically, I mentioned I've got a rookie draft going on right now. A lot of people have slow rookie drafts going on or coming up shortly or just completed. When you're a contender, and maybe let's just say you have your own normal picks of those late round picks how willing are you to buy like contender pieces mike evans for example maybe saquon barkley derrick henry those types of guys this time of year versus waiting until oct, November, when the trade deadline gets here. So when drafts are going on, rookie picks tend to be inflated, right? So like, let's talk, cause there's a, this is a little bit different here. Current picks, right? So 2024 picks

are tend to be a little bit inflated if you're in a draft, right? So you might be able to trade, you know, a second round pick that's going, you know, later than Mike Evans for Mike Evans, for example, in a rookie draft, right? So I'm very aggressive doing those things, right? Like current year picks. What I don't like to do is trade future year picks right now because and and i'll give you an example right last year um puka nakua right two weeks in if you had looked at his numbers and were like dear god this could be a top five wide receiver like there was absolutely that like in his range of outcomes based on what his numbers were. And at this point last year, no one thought that, right. Not even Puka Nekua's mother didn't think he was going to be a top five wide

receiver last year. That did not happen. Okay. You want to be able to have the flexibility to target those players. Right. And that's not to mean that every guy that starts good, you want to, you want to trade for, right. But the guys that are truly substantially different than we expected them coming into the season their price doesn't catch up to them okay so you want to be able to have some flexibility to potentially target those guys kyron williams a really good example last year as well like no one really thought he was

going to come into the season be a starter and all of a sudden in week two he was playing like 95 percent of snaps and no one saw really that coming you want to have the flexibility to do that right the other thing is is like you can have the flexibility trading for if you have pick flexibility and all this flexibility in the future trading for contending players is really easy yeah because what happens is is like three or four teams fall out of it early and then they become terrified that their old player is going to retire right that mike evans is going to never play again right he's never going to be a competitive team and what they end up doing is they end up being sellers just almost fire sale more so than you would think and you get

discounts on players that you couldn't get now. And those trading in season, if you're a contender, it actually is a much better market for buyers than it is sellers because the sellers are panicked. And the buyers, if you exercise a little bit of patience and can kind of shop around a little bit, you get really good deals on that. So to answer your question in a succinct in a, in a succinct way, after I gave you all that current picks, trade them, trade them for contending players, future picks, hold onto them. You can still trade them for contending players, but let those situations reveal themselves a little bit more. Anything else you would say that's, that's really significantly different

in your approach to dynasty when you're in that contending window when just when um i i don't close contending windows i know you said like you're either rebuilding or you're retailing i'm i'm always people right now will declare themselves it's june right you you don't know we we don't know what's going to happen in in aug, let alone November or December, we think we might know, but like no one would have pegged Puka Nakua or, I mean, let's say you were last year right now and you were like, well, I drafted CJ Stroud and I've got, you know, I took a fire on Puka Nakua and I took Sam Laporta in the mid second and, you know, I'm not a contendingending team so let's trade away my good players right if you did that you just seeded away a like a one seat right you just fell into like an enormous dynasty season because you were like i'm scared of holding on to you know mike evans and i need to trade it

for a future second right like you you you got to be careful on doing those things so i never close contending windows even when it might seem bleak, I'm trying to, I'm always trying to win. And, you know, again, the other thing I would say about that is like, if you have top 30 guys, right, if you have three of them, right, you're, you should be on track for a playoff team. And if you don't, if you've only got two of them, right, the easiest way to rebuild is to take two and turn it into three. Right. So it's not, you know, people tend to rebuild from the bottom and think, oh, I got to build, you know, I got to have, you know, 17 top 150 assets. If you have four top 30 assets, you're like that should be where you spend your time is trying to get them. So when they're depressed, when they're injured, whatever, constantly being in on those guys, right?

That's the payoff more so than lower on your team. Excellent, excellent stuff. Let's take one more break and we'll finish up with, you know, one of my favorite topics, the rebuilding dynasty team. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Thanks for watching. Be aware and stay safe. They chose both because they knew the best part of beer is the beer. Your game time tastes like Miller time. Learn more at MillerLite.ca.

Must be legal drinking age. So you kind of answered one of my questions there, that process of going from contender to rebuilder. And there are different approaches to this like i and i always tell people the way that i do it works for me because i enjoy going through that process of kind of just like how much can i get for all of these guys and now i get all these assets and i'm going to rebuild it back up some people can't stand the idea of a full season of fantasy football where they're not trying to win that year and i get that as well but even if you don't like to do that there comes certain points in with a dynasty team to where you've tried to keep that window open you've tried to keep that window open and all of a sudden it

slams on your fingers and it's like clear to the entire league it's over what's your approach to going through that rebuild? If it's clear, it's over. And like, it should only really be clear at this point in the season to maybe like one team in your league. Let's take the time. Let's talk about we're in October and it's close. Oh, okay. That's even better. Right.

So I wouldn't rule it out now. So that's my big, that would be it. I'm 0-6. It's just before Halloween, right? We're sort of doing that. I, you know, again, be realistic on where your team is, right? Do the same exercise we talked about earlier, right? I had a team last year that was 1-6 with a 60% all-play record last year, right? I drew horribly, just a horrible luck. And I had to have a real assessment. Is that a tear down team

not really like it's a good team it's just unlucky right is it it's not like what am i going to tear it down and try and get better like it's going to be you know i'm going to trade josh allen or dac prescott like right for for what to what end like i'm just unlucky right so again if i can kind of go into next year maybe i I can retool a little bit. I don't want to necessarily tear that team down. Right. So I have a real kind of assessment there of that. I think, you know, more so than than selling, I think rebuilding is about trying to take asymmetric bets. OK, trying to take bets that have very low risk and a very high payoff. So you kind of think about guys that are injured, right? You think about guys like, even like last year, like Kyron Williams,

it didn't make a ton of sense as like a rebuilding guy, but if you could get him for a third round pick all of a sudden, you know, when he was injured, which he was a throw in, in some trades at that point. And all of a sudden he becomes like a top 25 dynasty asset at a period of time, you're all of a sudden in a massively different position, right? So I think those types of deals, again, like that Puka Nakua example, again, when those guys truly are different, right? They don't happen that often, but when they're truly different, be aggressive on them. Those things can really turn around your team, right?

Buying low and being aggressive when injuries happen. You know, if you were, if you had problems at quarterback, you should have been all in on Kyler Murray, all in on Kyler Murray, right. You should have been figuring out ways to attack Kyler Murray. I think that's something to, to definitely, you know, to definitely target. Right. And a lot of times, like, you know, some of the injury stuff or some of the suspension risk stuff, like Rasheed Rice right now, I mean, if Rasheed Rice is suspended, like I'd set the over under at four and a half games and take the under on it.

If that happens, like he's massively underpriced. Right. He's massively underpriced. And so be in on those things. And when you're a rebuilding team, you should have a huge tolerance for risk. Right. You should have a huge tolerance for risk, right? You should have a huge tolerance for risk. And that's not to say just kind of willy nilly, but you want to be in on guys that are

depressed for some reasons off of injuries, off of suspension risks, off of, you know, whatever, right? Like buy low on, buy truly buy low and not just poor performance by low, but buy, buy, you know, it's a fire set, right? Buy things that are literally coming out of the fire type deal, right? That's, those are the types of things that can really turn your team around. But again, focus on the top of your roster, right? Can I get another top 30 guy? Because if you can, right, that transforms your team much better than any, you know, targeting three or four guys that are in the top 120 of ADP.

I think any talk about rebuilding has to at least include some sort of discussion on tanking. I guess not so much about your personal preference, whether you want to tank for a specific pick, but in leagues that you're the commissioner of or participate in, do you advise any sort of rules around tanking or everybody's paying their entry fee let them run that run their own team i think the latter part of that um you know where i think tanking is unfortunate is where it disproportionately helps people like i played a home league that that you know someone started three and two and i played them while they were being serious and then they stopped playing and then they seeded you know i lost to them while they were being serious and then they stopped playing. And then they seeded, you know, I lost to them when they were like decent.

And then they seeded a win to everyone else in the league, which that that's aggravating. Right. You know, that's really aggravating. So that would be like the thing. There's some ways to go about it. Again, that the entry price, you know, make it, you know, if you have a constant problem with tanking and people throwing away their entry fees make them more expensive right that's one way to curb it you know the other way to curb it would be to some sort of lottery i've seen people do that you know one of the i think the concern most with tanking is people you know again disproportionately setting lineups and that sort of thing you know so so one the ways that I, that we do it in one of the leagues,

a lot of league formats that I play is just by potential points, right? It's an imperfect measure, but you know, that's something that you can't tank your way. You can't, well that drives your lineup, right? That drives more trading because then that like you don't, you don't get to keep all these guys on your roster and be bad. You've got to trade them away if you want to truly tank, and less teams are going to want to tank if that's the way you're going about it.

Right. I think that's absolutely right. And again, people will – and there's more strategy in that too. It's funny because I play in a format that's got potential points as the draft order, independent of whether you make the playoffs, unless you finish in the money. So if you're a top three team, you draft the order of what you finish. The winner picks 12th and the runner up 10th and the guy in third place picks 10th. And then everyone else is by potential points, right? So there isn't a reason to tank the bottom, like tank the last two games to say, I want to be out of the playoffs to get a high pick, right? It incentivizes everyone

to be in, right? So I think those things, right, we're incentivizing people to kind of do the right thing in terms of lineup setting. And if people, you know, there's a guy that I'm convinced the only possible rationale for his decisions is that he's consistently tanking in my home league. Right. That's the only thing that would make sense. But he does it by selling his future first. Consistently every year makes decisions. He's just adding money to the pot. Right. I mean, I can't stop that. Like, you know, that's a gift. Right. It's just it's a gift. So, I mean, you got to kind of be accepting of that too. Awesome. Awesome stuff, Jordan, tell everybody one more time where they can find your work and what you've got coming up. Yeah, go ahead and

follow me on X at McNamara dynasty. Check out over at football guys. I got a series of articles that are starting off. And again, over at analytics to dynasty.com, I've got the dynasty team building guide, which will give you kind of a lot of the stuff we've talked about. It's evergreen content, right? It's, it's, you know, just talking about strategy and different, different ideas. It's over a hundred pages. You can go in and, and dive into all that. And again, I release podcasts every day for my subscribers over at analytics to

dynasty.com. I'm going to do a promo code dad for father's day dad that 20 off so you can go ahead and check that out and get anything 20 off um you know for the next week thank you jordan thank you uh producer harry for helping us out this week it's been uh fantastic thank you to everybody who was in the chat and we will talk to you all next Tuesday.