Dynasty Compass | The Currency of Dynasty

Rookie draft picks are possibilities, not performance. In this midseason guide, Jeff shows how to price picks vs. players, when flexibility earns you value, and how to decide between possibilities or points based on your team’s direction. Quick reality check on pick outcomes, a practical exchange-rate for common trades, and a reminder: direction before transaction.

🧩 Key Takeaways

• Picks are possibilities, not performance.
• Flexibility creates value; certainty charges a premium.
• Choose: possibilities or points—based on your direction.
• Direction before transaction.
• Manage strategically, not emotionally.

🔗 Related Links

• Jeff's dynasty rankings: https://www.footballguys.com/rankings/ranker/jeff-blaylock/duration/dynasty?year=2025&userId=978336
• Follow Jeff on Twitter: https://x.com/jeffblaylock
• Footballguys: https://www.footballguys.com/

🧭 More about this podcast: https://dynastycompass.buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Dynasty Compass - Episode 12

"The Currency of Dynasty"

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Last week, I asked if you were managing strategically or emotionally. And while that question was framed in the context of a mid-season roster review, it applies to today's topic as well, which is draft picks. Now, draft picks are in their essence possibilities, but they are not promises. They are not performance.

Unlike players, who are more or less known quantities, draft picks can be anything that you want them to be, and they, not players, are the true currency of dynasty. How you think about, how you spend, how you use, how you value draft picks directly impacts your ability to reach your desired strategic direction. 

And I gotta tell you something, there's a dirty secret about draft picks that only the savviest dynasty managers know, and I'll share it with you in this week's episode of Dynasty Compass.​

[Theme music]

Hello and welcome to Dynasty Compass. I am your host, Jeff Blaylock, the other Jeff B from Footballguys, where I do dynasty rankings and content, including a weekly column called Dynasty Waivers of the Future that I co-write with my colleague Josh Falsing. You can also find me in the Discord communities on our Footballguys server. Thank you for joining us today. It's always good to have you here. 

We are now at mid-season. Trades are now picking up speed. They're happening every day. We now have to talk about one of the crucial elements that we can trade: draft picks. These are unique to dynasty formats. When we are in a redraft league, we don't worry about future draft picks because we will just simply have another draft next year.

But here in Dynasty we have rookie drafts, and so rookie draft picks become something that we can trade, and they are in fact one of two renewable resources in dynasty. The other is free agent acquisition budget, if your league has that, that rolls over into a new amount every year. Likewise, draft picks. You get the same set each year, unless of course you've already traded them away. But let's talk about what those picks really are and what they aren't, and what are you trading for or trading away. 

Now, a moment ago, I promised you a dirty secret and I'm not going to make you wait for it anymore. I'm going to tell it to you right now, and here it is: draft picks have no inherent value whatsoever. None. They are merely potential. They are merely possibilities. They are neither production nor promises. A draft pick is simply a chance to take a chance. 

The value of the pick, then, is rooted in what another dynasty manager thinks it will become, or what you think it will become. What will it do for the team, either as a potential draft selection or as a tradable asset? And the perceived value rises with the perception of certainty. For example, a first-round pick could be any of, let's say 12 in a 12-team league. A first-round pick is any of the 12. An early first is probably 1.01 to 1.03 or 1.04.

And then the 1.03 is just that. It's the third pick in the draft. But that certainty that advanced from each understanding – first round, early first round, 1.03 – that certainty is really just an illusion. What's certain is when you get to make your choice, but what's uncertain is what you're actually going to get with that choice.

And I don't mean the who. Particularly early in drafts, the who can be pretty well nailed down. But I mean, the what, what kind of player will this pick become? What kind of production will I get? What kind of value will this pick return to me? And there is absolutely no more certainty in that question gained from getting more specific on when the pick is going to occur.

Now I've looked into the drafts of the last eight years and plotted out what the value of players were that were chosen in different draft slots. And what I've found immediately is that only the 1.01 offers near certainty of getting an every-week starter. Everything else is probabilities, and those probabilities begin to drop as you go down the draft board, as we might expect.

But managers are going to overpay for knowing what their draft pick will become, knowing which pick number it is, or which player it's going to be, because that's managing emotionally, that you are targeting a specific player or a specific draft pick. The antidote to this, to falling for this illusion, is what I would call the key principle of today, and that is flexibility. Having flexibility creates value. 

Now, you might recall from our Trade Winds episode a few weeks ago that I had three really fun F words that I used to describe trading, and none of them are the word you're thinking of. But the second of those was flexibility, by turning a transaction into a conversation, by being willing to adjust who or what you're offering and who or what you're getting in return.

Because when you become fixated on one piece in a trade, you could wind up overpaying for it. If you've ever bought a house, you probably ended up paying more for it if you fell in love with the house during the transaction process. If you treated it as a house, one of several that you could have purchased, then you probably didn't pay quite as much for it.

This same idea applies to draft capital when a manager fixates on a particular player that they want. They overpay for that chance to get them, and that is never stronger than when that pick is on the board. But it is also true even out to here, if you think you're getting an early-round pick, you know which of several guys that might be.

You might even zero in on one guy, and emotional managers are going to chase that guy. Strategic managers on the other hand, understand that there are several options around the same tier of players that are going to provide similar values, and strategic managers will be happy with any of them. And if they're not happy with them, they will trade down or out of whatever round we're talking about.

But that willingness to not be held to one particular player, that willingness, that flexibility, creates opportunities for you to add value. Let's say the pick is on the clock. Trading down within the same tier of players will get you the same value, the same probabilities in terms of the player, and it will net you additional value because your trade partner really wants their guy and the certainty of getting that guy that a higher pick provides. You pay a premium for certainty. You earn a premium for flexibility. 

Now, as I said, I looked at the eight draft classes from 2017 to 2024, and by draft class, I mean dynasty rookie draft classes thanks to the ADP data from our friends over at Dynasty League Football. I looked at how those picks actually performed to see if we could place a value on them. And the way that I wanted to approach value is thinking about the probability of the pick generating a particular type of player. 

You may recall from a past episode that there are five types of players that I like to think about in Dynasty. They are Cornerstones, Set and Forgets. Next Man Ups, Developing Talents and Dart Throws. The Cornerstones are the people you build your franchise around. If you were putting out marketing materials for your fantasy team, these would be the faces on it. Set and Forgets are your regular lineup locks. They're going to be in your lineup if they're healthy. Together, those two types of players, Cornerstones and Set and Forgets. are your every-week starters. 

The 1.01 has for the last eight years delivered a 100% chance of landing an every-week starter. Six have been Cornerstones, two Set and Forgets, but a 100% chance at an every-week starter. Just going to 1.02 through 1.05, that percentage drops to 63%. So not even two thirds of the picks of 1.02 to 1.05 are generating every-week starters.

In Superflex, in particular, the next group, 1.06 to 1.09, that percentage drops all the way down to 38%, just slightly fewer than two out of every five. I think the reason there is because managers who miss out on the top couple of quarterbacks in the class are reaching for quarterbacks that probably shouldn't be drafted in the middle of that round. They don't end up turning into franchise players. They're not Cornerstones, they're not Set and Forgets. They are merely contributors, back up quarterbacks or people that put in your Superflex lineup because your other guys were injured.

On down, the probability of getting an every-week starter rebounds a little bit. Down at the bottom of the first round and the top of the second round, it's is about 50%, essentially a coin flip. From the 2.03 to 2.06, that percentage drops dramatically down to 25%. Just in that little bit of space. This suggests that in any particular draft class there are between 12 and 15 guys who are pretty solidly going to be starters in this league. 

Everyone else is going to be more of a contributor, at least in my sense of looking at the world. Contributors would of course be the Next Man Ups,  the Developing Talents, the Dart Throws. At the bottom half of the second round, we're now down to 17% probability of getting an every-week starter. When we get to the third round, it drops to 13%, one out of every eight, and in the fourth round and beyond, it is 3%, about one out of every 33.

And as you might guess, as you go down the draft board, the probability that the player won't become fantasy-relevant at all greatly increases, but it doesn't even get to a 50-50 situation until we're at the end of the second round. So even in the lower portions of the second round, you are still talking about at least a 50-50 chance of getting somebody who will be a starter in your lineup, at least at times. They'll either be an every-week starter or they will be a contributor who starts periodically for you.

In the bye-byes episode, "Welcome to Dumpsville," we learned that, when you have a player that hasn't hit yet by the second year they've been in the league, that 17 out of 18 of them aren't going to hit at all. And so that means when we get past that 50-50 chance that the player will hit, will become a contributor or become an every-week starter, that means that the ones who hadn't by that point really aren't going to.

There's at least a 50% chance that the player's never going to hit in the late second round, 64% in round three, and it is over 80% approaching 90% after that. But within those bands I was just talking about, the hit rates blur considerably, and that means that the tiers, the sets of picks kind of all right together, matter much more than any individual slot does except for the 1.01.

If you are in a position where you need to hit in this draft, you need to be landing every-week starters, you need Cornerstone players in your lineup from the draft, you really need multiple chances in order to do that. And that's why rebuilding teams really need more picks. It gives them more chances of landing a player that can change the trajectory of their franchise.

But at their heart, trades involving draft picks are really the question of possibilities or points. This is the moment that our philosophy is going to meet the trade block. Draft picks are possibilities. Players are points. Players with proven records of production are more reliable at scoring fantasy points than draft picks or rookies. We just talked about that. It's still not guaranteed. A player who's been performing at WR1 levels all season can get hurt in his very first game in your lineup, but production tends to follow production. If the player's been producing, they're going to keep producing. So in order to evaluate a trade that includes picks or players, we need some method of assigning values to each.

And there are lots of tools out there that do this, including Footballguys'  dynasty trade value chart, but they're all trying to assess a single value to each player in each pick. But we know that context matters. We know how  different managers value different things based on what they need or what they want. So these single-number kinds of value assessments are really only good for seeing if you are in the ballpark of what you think might be a fair or an unfair trade, but they should not be the referees. The referee is you and what context means to you.

We just looked at picks in terms of the probability of them becoming certain kinds of players, and we can allocate players to the five categories we talked about a moment ago. So we have the possibilities. On one hand, those are your draft picks, and we have the points, a history of production on the other, and that creates a choice of possibilities or points.

Now, I can't do an episode like this without giving you at least some kind of estimation of value on my own. So I'm going to do this kind of quickly. Basically, we're going to look at what I think a reasonable value for each of these kinds of picks is going to be in terms of the five kinds of players that I've talked about.

The 1.01 to me is worth a Cornerstone and a starter. If you're going to trade away 1.01, those are the things you should expect to get back. In the 1.02 to 1.05 range, we're talking a Cornerstone plus a contributor or two starters. In the mid-first, a starter and a low-end starter, or perhaps a starter and a contributor. I mean, the fact that managers reach for quarterbacks in the stretch does not diminish the asking price or the value or if you're trying to get one as well. It's still just a middle first-round pick.

In the late first, we're talking a starter, which could also be a productive veteran and it could be a rental. But if it's a rental, which is a player in the last year or two of their productive careers, I would want a contributor to go along with that. 

In the second round, a pick in the second round, I'd be expecting a lower-end starter at the top, and that could include rentals there. I'd be leaning contributors more and more toward the later ends of the second round. Now, if we don't know when the pick is, then we take this to higher end of the value here. The lower end starter is what I would be expecting. 

We get to the third round, we're really talking more about a sweetener in a trade, but straight up, I think we're talking about a contributor, the backup running back, the backup quarterback or a WR3 or WR4. That means on a team, the team's WR3 or their backup wide receiver, that's kind of what we're looking at, at a third-round pick. 

And below that we're really looking purely at a trade value balancer. They have very low probabilities of hitting. No one should be paying very much for of those kinds of picks, but they do help balance out value in trade negotiations.

Now, this has been merely a high-level guide and I went through it really, really fast because, let's go back to the dirty secret. There is no inherent value in a draft pick. The picks are worth whatever someone else will pay for them, or likewise what you will pay for them. Scarcity, especially for starting quarterbacks in Superflex formats can skew these values. If you're buying, scarcity makes your pick worth less. If you're selling the pick, it makes your pick worth more.

Now, the high-level trade value I've outlined here is based on the idea that the picks are being traded for points, picks for players. Picks traded for other picks, or pick swaps, create different calculations. Now, this is more than just using a third-round pick as a sweetener. This is a pick or picks in return for a pick, like trading a first for a player and a second. 

Future picks are going to tend to be valued about a half round to a round lower for each year out beyond the upcoming one. This is 2025. We are post the draft. The next rookie draft is 2026. A 2027 first is valued approximately like a 2026 second and upper end of that. A 2028 first would be more like a middle to lower round second in 2026. 

And part of that is just simply the function of this illusion of certainty we were talking about. There's not a whole lot of certainty about where a 2026 pick may fall on the draft order until we get later in the season. We can see a team is either contending or rebuilding, and that gives us some sense of at least as a top pick, a middle pick, bottom pick, but there's absolutely no certainty where a pick will fall following a future season. Certainty means more cost. Lack of certainty means less.

The important thing here, before we start trading picks for players or swapping them, is you have to understand the direction that you're going, the strategic direction you're going, or more specifically because we're talking about things that implicate the future where you want to go in our compass metaphor, which direction do you want to go? You use the specific direction of where you want to go to refine the decision-making process of "Possibilities or points?" Remember, the biggest mistake dynasty managers make is making moves without having a strategy in place.

So let's look very quickly at the four cardinal compass directions in our compass metaphor, beginning with the the West, because the West is the easiest to figure out. Win-now teams need points. Points help teams win now. Productive players help teams win now. Picks help teams win later. Later doesn't do much for you if you're trying to win now. So you are very willing to trade picks for points, including potentially quite a few of your picks for points.

The South, which is a total rebuilding situation, is also fairly easy to suss out. Rebuilding teams need possibilities. Points don't really help now, and in fact, they might hurt you. Too many points and you move down the draft board. In the South, you need picks. In fact, you need multiple picks as a rebuilding team in order to beat odds that are essentially coin flips. You need multiple opportunities to flip that coin, particularly multiple firsts.

If you are in the North, true North, which is our goal of dynasty, that is perennial contention, the points versus possibilities question is really all about balance. Unlike managers in the West, perennial contenders are trying to win now, yes, but they're trying to remain a contender in future seasons as well. That's the difference. In the West, you're trying to win now and the future doesn't really matter.

Sometimes for managers in the North, that's going to mean adding points. Sometimes that's going to mean preserving picks. The selective spending of draft capital for assets that help win now and later, which can include a pick in return. These are the kinds of trades that keep you in the North. 

The things you want to absolutely avoid are trading picks for rentals, for veterans nearing an age cliff, for players that only have a season or two of productivity left in them. Let the managers in the West buy those guys. You in the North need to go after players who will help you now and later. 

In a nuance for the North when it comes to the possibilities or points discussion, is to acquire a Developing Talent that fits your long-term strategy, who may not help you now, but does potentially help you later. And while they don't have a track record of production at this point, otherwise they would not be Developing Talents, they would be Set and Forget starters or Next Man Ups. They don't have that track record. We do know more about their future trajectory than we do some random incoming rookie player, which is why trading for Developing Talents can be a very strong strategy.

The East is the hardest position of all. In the East, you are looking for trades that begin a drive toward a particular strategic direction. And the East itself is not much of a strategic direction. It's kind of a place that you end up if you don't have some other strategy in place. And so many managers in fact in the East, in these chip and a chair situations fighting for that last playoff spot, don't have long term strategies in place to begin with. 

And that causes many managers to do nothing. They don't trade for player or for picks. They don't trade their picks anywhere else. They're content to take those picks wherever they land on the draft board year after year after year. And that's actually better than making moves that would foreclose on your strategic direction. But even better than that is getting a strategic direction and then making moves that gets you there.

So if you are in the East, the best trades that you can make are going to be the ones that you make as late as possible in the season, either right before your trade deadline or if you don't have one of those right before the playoffs begin. Because by then you know your chances for reaching this season's playoffs. By then, you hopefully have a sense of where this roster's going to go next season and where you want to take it. And by then, the contenders, the teams, particularly in the West, are going to be paying the most to get help right this moment. If you have that and you're not in a playoff spot, right at the trade deadline is a terrific place to send your points off for possibilities.

Like in the North, in the East judicious use of picks to get players or other picks is key. And if you don't know where you're going, stand still. Remember, the biggest mistake that dynasty managers make is making moves without having a strategy in place. 

This is another place where the question, "Am I managing strategically or am I managing emotionally?" comes into play. Emotional managers are going to act first and rationalize later. Strategic managers are going to plan first and act second. 

Put another way, emotional managers will put the transaction before the direction. Strategic managers will put the direction before the transaction. And when we are dealing with assets whose primary value is going to be what they can do in the future, you really do need that direction before you start making those transactions.

So to wrap up just very quickly, what we've talked about today is that draft picks have no inherent value. They are merely possibilities. They are not promises, they are not performance, they are not points. That having flexibility around which draft pick you're willing to use, what player you're willing to take with it, what you're willing to do with it, is going to create value for you.

That every manager has the choice between possibilities or points, and the answer depends on which direction you're in and what you really need. And that direction is critical to understand because that should always be placed before making the transaction or else you risk foreclosing an ability to go a strategic direction potentially for years. Above all, you want to manage strategically and not emotionally.

Well, next week we are going to go West. We are going in the win-now direction to help managers who are pushing their chips in right now. What should you give up to grab that trophy? How can you chase the trophy without mortgaging your future? And at what point does an all-in bet need to be pulled back? That's what we're going to talk about next week on Dynasty Compass. 

Thank you so much for watching, for listening, for reviewing, for liking, for subscribing. These are the things that help keep this show going. So thank you so much for that, for sharing on social media. I'm Jeff Blaylock, your host here at Dynasty Compass. Thank you so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you next week.