Welcome to February, but as we all know: dynasty football has no offseason. What exactly are dynasty gamers supposed to do during the offseason? The goal of this article series is to use the events of the NFL season to contextualize what dynasty players should be doing to prepare for the eventual start of the 2023 season when your team starts scoring fantasy points again.
Self-scouting Your Roster
“You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you’ve been.”
In order to properly assess what you should be doing this offseason, it’s best to figure out what team you’re working with. Especially for contenders, deals get made during the season which can be optimal for securing a fantasy championship but suboptimal for sustaining the dynasty value of your roster. Evaluating your roster is the first step to building and retooling for another contending season.
What exactly do we mean by roster evaluation? Some readers may see this and think that we are trying to assess a team’s positional needs. This is wrong. There is no positional need for your dynasty team in the offseason. The only need that your dynasty team requires in the offseason are assets that are going to appreciate or maintain value until the opening of the 2023 season. There are several important things I find useful to assess the current dynasty value of my teams that can all be derived from the PlayerProfiler Data Analysis tool.
Age
The age of the players on your dynasty roster is of the utmost importance. As discussed in Dynasty Dominator, aging curves matter. For these reasons you must insure that the average age of players is below the age apex for each player’s respective position. A good way to do this is to create a spreadsheet of your dynasty team using the birthday and age information from the PlayerProfiler database. Once you get this information from the PlayerProfiler database you can then use the “AVERAGEIF” function in Excel to determine the average age of each position on your team and see where that aligns with each position’s age apex. Below is an example of a spreadsheet I use for one of my dynasty teams along with age and other data points from the PlayerProfiler database that I find helpful in self-scouting my dynasty rosters.
As you see, this roster was in a win-now focus last season with players like Richie James and Demarcus Robinson filling out roster spots. As a result, the wide receiver position has a bit of an average age problem.
Ranks and Lifetime Value
Dynasty is a game of value. While a player’s dynasty value is both subjective to each individual owner, and dynamic, you should have a handle on the current value of your dynasty team. You can easily do this by assigning your own dynasty rankings to the players on your team. Alternatively, you can utilize PlayerProfiler’s Dynasty Deluxe Rankings or the Dynasty Dominator App and assign a player’s Lifetime Value Score by adding this column to your spreadsheet along with a simple VLOOKUP function. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you can determine the Lifetime Value Score for all teams in your league to see where you rank amongst your league mates. Additionally, if you have a team through Sleeper, you can utilize Dynasty Ranker to see where the value of your team stacks up with Keep Trade Cut’s valuation system.
Any way you decide to assign value, the value of players on your roster is good information to have and compare year over year to make sure you are maintaining or adding value to your dynasty roster. If you are going to build a team you need to determine who your core players are and who is expendable via trade or cuts. Also, the worst scenario in any dynasty league is to bottom out with a roster full of assets that have little comparative value to the rest of your league. Not only are you likely going to not compete in this doomsday scenario, but you’ll also be staring at a multi-year rebuild instead of the ideal scenario where you are churning your dynasty assets and crafting your team into a year-over-year contender.
Anticipating the Offseason
Now that you know where your team is at from both a roster construction and dynasty value standpoint, it’s time to start looking forward. With little actionable information happening during this time period in the offseason, the best use of time is anticipating where things are likely heading this offseason. Getting ahead of where the dynasty market is moving is a good way to try and absorb additional value onto your roster. You don’t have to predict exactly how things are going to play out this offseason, you just need to have any idea of what range of outcomes you are looking at for players whose value may be in flux this offseason.
Free Agency and Player Movement
Dynasty value is largely tied to anticipated on-field production. In order to produce fantasy points, your player must be on the football field. Having an idea of the free agent landscape, starting spots available, and potential cut candidates are a great place to understand how volatile some players’ values are this offseason.
DLF’s Ryan McDowell provides a great summary of the free agent and starting spots landscape for this upcoming offseason in this thread.
With the NFL offseason officially underway, here's an updated look at each positional landscape, including free agents, rookies & potential cap cuts…
— Ryan McDowell (@RyanMc23) February 17, 2023
PlayerProfiler’s Joshua Kellem recently previewed potential cut candidates, which is a good thing to keep in mind when potentially acquiring a player. PlayerProfiler’s Aaron Stewart’s excellent Transaction Implication series will break down the fantasy implications of key moves after they happen, most recently he discussed Aaron Jones’s contract restructure. Jack Cavangh’s PlayerProfiler Today is a great way to track the development of off-season news stories.
You can also take a look at websites such as Over the Cap to asses the top free agents and the teams with the most salary cap space to acquire them.
Thinking several steps ahead in dynasty by understanding the potential outcomes of the offseason can help you avoid dynasty landmines and help you tap into appreciating assets.
2023 Rookie Class
Evaluation of the 2023 rookie class is just beginning. The value of the incoming rookies is going to change from now until the NFL draft. You’re not going to have all the answers at this time of the offseason, but you should be able to start developing the correct questions. For example, what athletic testing measurables are you looking for a specific prospect to hit? Is this prospect’s fantasy viability landing spot dependent? What round is a prospect likely to go in the NFL draft? The best way to start developing these questions is to establish a baseline knowledge of the rookie class. Matt Kiwoom had an excellent podcast episode recently on The Game Plan explaining a great way to think about how to evaluate the rookie class during this time of the offseason.
Another great tool is the Dynasty Deluxe NFL Mock Draft Index which accumulates where multiple publications are mocking a prospect to be drafted in the NFL draft.
Setting Goals
Now that you have both self scouted your roster and anticipated the events of the offseason, you should have goals for the offseason when it comes to your dynasty team. Try to be as specific as possible with your goals. Additionally think of goals in terms of maintaining or building dynasty value, not fielding a starting lineup. The goals you have for each team should vary and should be a little more nuanced than “sell player X” or “buy player Y”. They should also be realistic based on how other owners in the league value positions and players.
As an example, using the team discussed above, I have the following three goals for that team: 1) Consolidate value at the tight end position by trading at least two of my tight ends. 2) Redistribute player value from the running back, tight end, and quarterback position to the wide receiver position with the goal of getting younger at the position. 3) Add running back depth by trading either Daniel Jones or Tua Tagovailoa.
Conclusion
With a self-assessment of your team, an idea of the potential range of outcomes for the NFL offseason, and specifically tailored goals for each dynasty team, you should have a firm foundation to crush the dynasty offseason. Stayed tuned for the next article in this series which discusses what you should be looking to do during the time period of the NFL combine and Free Agency.
