It’s Not Easy to Win a Fantasy Football Championship
It’s simple. All things considered equal, there is a 1/12 chance of winning a 12 man dynasty league. While you may feel confident in your own abilities to improve these odds, there is no dynasty player on the planet who can fairly project favorable odds in a standard league. Winning a league necessitates taking some risk in drafts and trades, as a “safe roster” might make the playoffs, but is disadvantaged against teams with players who have achieved the upper levels of their range of outcomes. Of course, anything can happen in the playoffs, but having upside built into your team can increase your team’s ceiling. If this upside manifests itself, your team can become a true championship contender instead of a fringe playoff pretender.
There are different ways to add upside to your team. Commonly, you will hear players reference “boom/bust” players as “week-winners” that you should look for in your flex spots. While this is a valid dynasty strategy for including upside into your roster, with the rapid expansion of the fantasy football industry, players are taking advantage of the ever expanding depth of information available at their fingertips. Such strategies are becoming widely adopted, lessening the potential edge that can be gained by them. This is the same reason why “sleepers” are increasingly difficult to identify come draft season, as public ADP and analyst rankings draw closer to one another.
Finding New Ways to Win
Contrarian dynasty strategies are ways to differentiate yourself from others and improve your team’s overall ceiling. They look to capitalize on value as it inevitably falls, given the inflation of other assets that are propelled by common strategies. Draft cost and trade value charts present zero-sum gains, with every movement up the ranks met by corresponding movement(s) that offset one another. If there are common strategies favoring certain types of players, there will be a corresponding “defavoring” of players that don’t fit conventional draft strategies, creating value.
While “contrarian strategies” like Zero RB or Zero WR present benefits in certain cases, they have become more and more popular over time, arguably falling out of the contrarian label altogether. So we really have to look deep into the widely adopted strategies of the fantasy football industry to find true contrarian strategies that provide an edge in dynasty leagues and dynasty tournament leagues. At the same time, such contrarian strategies run the risk of being counterproductive to team goals or are outright ill-advised. Here is one of the contrarian dynasty strategies I believe in to maximize upside, and justification as to why.
In Full Rebuilds: Prioritize RBs
The Concept
The key to this strategy is the state of the team. In general, analysts advise drafting running backs in rookie drafts, but often as final pieces to contenders. On the other hand, rebuilding teams, especially full rebuilding teams, are advised to stay away from them initially, as wide receivers, quarterbacks, and tight ends have more long term staying power in the NFL (for more information, feel free to check out the Positional Breakout Timings portion of my earlier analysis of rookie breakouts). All the above information is certainly valid in my opinion, so why do I value running backs over other positions in rookie drafts for completely rebuilding teams?
In the link above, I dove into the fantasy relevant positional rookie finishes of the past five years and discuss shifts in perception that must be made to breakout timings. Running backs clearly emerge as the top position for early fantasy football success, hitting their value apexes sooner on than other positions. In full rebuilds, your team needs all the help it can get, and maximizing the value of every draft pick is imperative. Since the distance to apex is far lower, if you can sell your assets at or around that apex, you will see faster turnover of value for your team, allowing you to keep stockpiling value at a comparatively fast rate.
This is no easy task however, as running back peaks can end so quickly, whether through injury, replacement, or the loss of efficiency due to either the natural wear and tear on the running back themselves, or due to the performance of other units (eg. the offensive line and the offense’s success as a whole). Moving off running backs before it is too late is not only difficult to identify, but is emotionally difficult as well. Fantasy managers easily fall in love with running backs during their peak, as their performance becomes a cornerstone of their team, dominating week after week and consistently outscoring top wide receivers and tight ends. Despite these risks, this strategy injects significant upside into your team build, which can be essential to the transformation of complete rebuilds into contenders in a comparatively short time period (vs a similar strategy on other positions like WR or TE).
If employed correctly, and given some luck, this strategy can move up your contending timeline significantly. This is especially useful in paid leagues, where there is an effective “clock” running against you depending on your financial commitment to the league, but it is applicable to free leagues as well.
Execution
In order to implement this strategy, I’ve found that investing in running backs in the first round of rookie drafts is best, as later on there are dead spots in value caused by fantasy managers chasing positional needs, which is especially an issue at running back due to its positional scarcity. I’ve commonly seen this play out in the second round of rookie drafts, where the top running backs have long gone off the board, leaving some teams scrambling to fill out their rosters. This can lead to massive reaches to fill their roster spots in this area of the draft, creating a “trap” of sorts in this range of the draft for rookie running backs.
If not in the first round, I find myself waiting until late in the draft, identifying talent I like with suboptimal landing spots or situations that have potential for solid opportunity, and taking shots on the relatively early upside of running backs relative to other positions. In the off chance that I hit on these late picks, this can speed up the period until the value apex, leading to quicker fantasy success and/or peak trade value. Often low draft capital backs have little long-term security, which can make moving off these later-round backs beneficial (eg. James Robinson, Philip Lindsay).
Final Thoughts
Upside is an essential part of any championship team in dynasty leagues, however due to the mass proliferation of information caused by the fantasy industry’s massive growth, edges are increasingly difficult to come by. Using contrarian strategies that run opposite to established schools of thought within the fantasy community is one way to retain potential advantages, and find unique ways to maximize your team’s ceiling. Thank you for reading!
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