Dynasty Compass | The Strategic Suck: How to Rebuild Without Tanking

Not every dynasty team can contend every year. Sometimes the smartest path forward is choosing to lose—strategically. In this episode, Jeff explains “the Strategic Suck,” a rebuild approach where you intentionally lower your short-term ceiling to maximize your long-term success.

Topics include:
 • What South represents in the Dynasty Compass
 • Why losing without a plan is just losing, but losing with a plan is rebuilding
• The difference between a Strategic Suck and tanking
• How to set legal, defensible lineups while avoiding accidental wins
• Roster management hacks that reduce this week’s points and boost next year’s value
• Why healthy dynasty leagues need Southbound teams
• How accidental winning can derail your rebuild (and how to avoid “sucking at sucking”)

Whether you’re 2–9, dealing with injuries, or staring down an aging roster, this episode gives you the tools to rebuild with purpose—and come back stronger.

Sometimes the road to True North runs through the South. Walk it with purpose.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Open
• 0:30 Why Rebuilds Are Misunderstood
• 2:03 What Is a Strategic Suck?
• 3:44 Core Elements of a Rebuild
• 6:37 Tanking vs Strategic Suck
• 8:58 Lineup Hacks for Rebuilders
• 13:51 Roster Management Hacks for Rebuilders
• 16:30 Why Leagues Need Rebuilding Teams
• 20:48 Don't Suck at Sucking
• 22:30 Losing Doesn't Mean Being Lost

Transcript

Not every team contends, at least not every year. Losing sucks, let's face it, but sometimes losing is the smartest path to winning. Today, we are embracing that Strategic Suck on Dynasty Compass.
[Theme music] ​
Welcome to Dynasty Compass. I am your host, Jeff Blaylock, the other Jeff B from Footballguys. Today, we are firmly in the South, the land of rebuilders. Now, in our compass metaphor, our ultimate goal is True North, which is perennial contention, and South is obviously in the opposite direction. It's a 180-degree turn from North.
When things go poorly, we've all heard the expression that things are going South, but South is not about losing. There is losing involved, yes, but South is about losing in order to build a winner; it's about rebuilding. It's about taking a low-performing roster and transforming it through intention, through patience, through strategy, and, yes, losing to turn it into a high-performing roster.
Now, rebuilding and, in our metaphor, the South gets misunderstood by a lot of people. People think it's giving up or it's quitting. It's throwing in the towel for the season. It's really not that. South is just a direction where losing is actually a tool. Losing becomes fuel for future winning. So it isn't resignation; it's more recalibration. 
The season in the south is painful in the moment, but it can be beautiful in hindsight.
However, losing without a strategy is just losing. Losing with a strategy is rebuilding. Just because a team is losing doesn't mean it's rebuilding.vLosing managers can panic and they can start making desperate moves to try to turn their fortunes around very quickly. That rarely works. It leads right into the number one mistake that dynasty managers make, which is making moves without a strategy, and desperation is most definitely not a strategy.
Acting out of desperation is managing emotionally. We want to manage strategically. With a losing roster, managing strategically means embracing what I like to call the "Strategic Suck." And the Strategic Suck is the intentional willingness to lose now, to take the steps that you need to take to help you win later.
Later, as in future seasons, not later, as in later this season. Now, this is a unique thing to dynasty formats because we care about the future timeframe as well as the present one. In redraft, when we've fallen out of playoff contention, it's just over. For us, it's simply over and we will get 'em next year.
But in Dynasty, we don't get that reset in August like we get in redraft. The calendar is not going to bail us out of a bad roster. We have to manage our way out of losing, and sometimes that means accepting more losing to get there.
There are several key elements of a Strategic Suck. The first and most important is a deliberate decision to prioritize future success over trying to save face.
Now, losing sucks, I get it. We don't like the trash talk that we're going to get from our league mates when we lose to them week, after week, after week, but losing is a critical component to this strategy. So saving face by winning a few games will get us a more respectable record now, but it's ultimately counterproductive. 
We try to avoid actions that are counterproductive to our strategy. Winning is really the only thing that is counterproductive to rebuilding, at least in year one.
There are ways of optimizing your lineup downward without tanking illegally, and that's another key element of Strategic Suck. We are intentionally scoring fewer points than we could be scoring and can do this in several ways. We could trade away productive players for non-producing assets. We can start low-ceiling players instead of higher-ceiling players. We can make defensible decisions that result in us starting our less than best possible lineup, and that's okay.
Another element of the Strategic Suck is assembling assets that will appreciate: things like younger players, draft picks, and broken toys. These are the kinds of things that give us flexibility in the future as well as production. 
We're also trying to extract maximum value from our veterans before they fully depreciate. We're exchanging them for draft picks, for broken toys, for developing talents. We're trying to avoid having to cut healthy players as we rebuild. If we need a roster spot, we need to cut somebody. It's a lot better if we can try to trade them to get something in return instead of just simply cutting them off of our roster.
Finally, the last aspect of the Strategic Suck that's critically important is protecting our own draft capital without violating league rules. Trading away draft picks is not really the strategy that we're trying to do. 
What are we trying to do? The point of the Strategic Suck is not just to lose. We could do that without a strategy. That's pretty easy. The point of a Strategic Suck is to maximize our own draft capital, which means getting as early a pick as possible. And when I mean our own draft pack capital, I don't mean all of the picks we have. I mean our specific pick, the ones that are assigned to us, my own first round pick.
These are the foundations of rebuilding.
So before we talk about how to suck strategically, we've got to deal with the elephant in the room. It's the word that nobody wants to say, but everyone is thinking about. It's the dreaded T-word: tanking.
If you look up the definition of tanking, it looks an awful lot like what I've just been calling the Strategic Suck. It boils down to losing games intentionally to improve draft position. There's some differences in the mechanics that are critical. 
Here are the hallmarks of tanking, and these are the specific things that we are trying not to do when we're in a Strategic Suck. The first of those is starting an automatic zero. These are players on IR, they're players on bye, they're players who are going to be ruled out. Starting one of those players is an obvious sign of tanking. 
So is leaving players who are returning from injury on our bench. If I have, if I had George Kittle earlier this season – he was out for a few games – if I continued to leave him on my bench, even though he was back and healthy, that's a hallmark of tanking. 
Another is claiming players who have no fantasy-relevant roles whatsoever off of waivers and then inserting them into our starting lineup. And finally, a very obvious one is just leaving blanks in our lineup, simply putting no one into a starting spot. That's either a sign we've given up for the season and aren't paying attention, or we are tanking, and none of that is contemplated in a Strategic Suck.
The bottom line is that any Strategic Suck strategy needs to be implemented within the rules of your league. Competitive integrity of a league is important. Being blatant about it hurts your reputation as a manager. And in my experience, it increases the chances that other managers are going to leave the league. We really want those managers to stay around. We want this to be a community experience with a group of people that we like to play fantasy football with. We don't wanna be driving them away by either violating the integrity of the league outright or by bending it so hard that it makes people question whether they wanna stay here.
So don't tank and call it a strategy. It's tanking.
So how do we suck without tanking? Well, let's get practical here. There are ways of executing the strategy without crossing the line. The most important of these is to set a valid, defensible starting lineup each week. No guys who are out are in our lineup. Everyone is active. We didn't leave our healthy players on the bench, our best ones. Unlike real sports, we don't have the excuse of giving someone a veteran rest day or holding out a player who's not 100% healthy. We need to have them in our lineups. 
But that doesn't mean that we have to set the absolutely best possible lineup. There are defensible ways of choosing players who are less likely to hit this week, but who aren't our fifth-string tight end. The first, and most important, of these is to favor floor over ceiling. We wanna favor a floor, a guaranteed lower level of points than risk somebody going off for two touchdowns on us.
So we want flex players with lower yards per reception or fewer fantasy points per touch. If I had to choose between Ricky Pearsall and Brandin Cooks – Pearsall is injured at the moment, so it's a very easy choice, but let's say he's not. 
Piersall has 20 catches, 327 yards, 16.4 yards per catch, 2.6 PPR points per touch. Brandin Cooks has 19 catches – one fewer – but he has half as many yards, 165. He's only averaging 8.7 yards per catch and is under two PPR points for touch. He has a lower average depth of target. He has fewer yards after the catch. Brandin Cooks is the one I wanna start over Ricky Pearsall, and it is defensible. He is one of the leading receivers for his team.
I also wanna avoid touchdown-dependent players despite their lower floor. So think someone like Nick Westbrook-Ikhine in 2024. He only caught 32 passes, but nine of them were touchdowns. He had an exceedingly low floor, which we like. We like low floors when we we're trying to suck, but he could score a touchdown at any moment. And in PPR formats, a touchdown is at least seven points plus the yardage. You don't want that. We prefer a much lower, safer floor. 
A second way of getting there is to choose a stingier defensive matchup. If we're talking about two primarily slot receivers, one is playing San Francisco this year, and the other is playing the LA Chargers. Well, the LA Chargers give up half the PPR points to slot receivers than San Francisco on average. So if I could defensively start the guy playing against the Chargers, I want to do that.
I can also play running backs who are in more ambiguous kinds of committee situations, start someone in a backfield where no one is typically getting 50% of the touches, and especially if we're talking about the guy who gets typically the second most of those. That is a way of starting someone that is defensible, who may not be the lead back on their team in that situation.
In PPR formats, we're also looking for running backs who don't play on third down. Why? Well, because third down is when you throw so third-down backs catch balls. We don't want that. We don't want those points coming to us, so we'd rather start running backs who are only on first and second down. 
You wanna start the WR3s on a good offense. You wanna start the WR2s on a bad offense. We wanna watch the weather and start players who are in bad weather events, except maybe running backs, may not wanna do that. And especially when a dome team is on the road in a cold situation or is in a bad weather situation outdoors. It's a great place to start their lower end receivers 'cause they're probably gonna have a really terrible day.
We also play guys on teams with a backup quarterback, especially if it's that quarterback's first start or if it's on the road. All of these techniques here are ways of lowering our points at the margins without blatantly tanking. 
What we're trying to do is pick the lower floor, lower point scoring options, but still defensible. They're still starting players in their situations. They still have fantasy-relevant roles, just may not be as relevant as someone else's role in any particular given week. 
By doing this, we can take between five and 20 points out of our starting lineup, depending on how many players we're having to start in our overall situation. Those can be the easily the difference between winning and losing. In this case, we really want the losing part, so we like to take those points out of our lineup. 
There are also some roster management hacks that we can do that will take away some of our points down the road. We can, for example, trade for a player who hasn't had their bye week yet. So when they have their bye week, we can't put them in our lineup. We can't get their points. They need to fit your overall strategy if you're gonna do this, but it's an effective way of essentially benching a starter in a week because they don't have a game. You're supposed to bench them. 
You can also trade for broken toys. In the last episode, we talked about the Island of Broken Toys, and what an important developmental tool that is for rebuilding teams, which we are. We're in the South, so go out and acquire a player who's not performing right now. 
We can't start an injured player. They can't score points for us if we send away a productive player for a broken toy. It's a defensible trade because it helps us in the future and also helps us in the present because we just took between eight and 15 points out of our lineup every week. 
You can also stretch the IR rules a little bit if your league allows you to keep a player on IR and let you set a lineup, even if they aren't eligible. I wouldn't push on this really hard. I certainly wouldn't do it for weeks at a time. But it is an ability that just lets you keep that starter in that IR slot an extra week, which keeps some outta your lineup.
And obviously you wanna avoid waiver-wire targets that are actually going to help you win this week. You want future value, not immediate value. So when you go out on the waiver wire as a rebuilder to bring someone in, you don't want that person to be a star in your lineup now. They can be one later, but you don't want them now.
And in some leagues, you're actually discouraged from making waiver claims at all once you are eliminated from playoff contention. And that's fine because that means you're not gonna be importing any talent that's gonna help you now.
The point of all of these Strategic Suck strategies is to reduce your chances of winning at the margins, not by leaving gaping holes in your lineup that will get you accused of tanking. We want to let variance work for us for a change, instead of against us. 
It's like in the movie Star Wars. When I was a kid it was just Star Wars. For many of you, it will be now Star Wars [Episode] Four: A New Hope. In any event, in the movie Star Wars, there is that scene where Han Solo tells Chewie to "fly casually." That's what we're trying to do with a Strategic Suck. We're trying to lose casually without drawing a bunch of attention to ourselves.
But honestly, a little bit of attention is okay because the the reality is that dynasty leagues need Southbound teams. Healthy leagues need rebuilding teams. Rebuilding teams play important roles without which a league is going to get stagnant.
Now we've all been in redraft leagues where no one trades with anyone. It's not just a lack of imagination or guts. It's just the system's not set up to encourage it, that no one is motivated to trade. Why? Everyone has the same goal: to win right now. So no one is really motivated to help anyone. 
Every team, every team in a redraft league is, in our way of thinking about it using the compass, they're all in the East. They're all in "wait and see" mode. Sure, there can be mutually beneficial trades that make each team better in the current season, but these are really rare. 
In my longest running home league, there hasn't been a trade in three years, and that was between me and another guy at the top of the standings. I sent him one of my four startable wide receivers for one of his three startable running backs, and we were both better because of it. 
But that kind of alignment in redraft is very rare because the valuations of the players are based entirely on current production, and a little bit by emotional attachment. There's very little variability in the way that we can value a player in redraft because the timeframe is right now. So waivers become the only source of talent acquisition in redraft leagues, and they are notoriously poor suppliers of difference makers. Leagues. 
Dynasty is a whole other animal. Rebuilding teams, as part of their efforts to rebuild, become critical sources of talent acquisition for contending teams, and they're a critical home for offloading non-performing talent.

In our Trade Winds episodes, we talked about how players can have different values depending on the situations that different managers find themselves in. The difference in valuation based on those situations, based on which timeframe that they are looking at, is what makes trading easier. It's easier to find ways to make both teams better: one in the present, one in the future. In redraft, we're both trying to make things better in the present. In Dynasty, we have this whole other timeframe to work with. 
In our most recent episode, we talked about broken toys. These are injured players who are not producing right now. In redraft, we just drop them because they're worthless in the lone time horizon we have: the rest of the season.
But in Dynasty, they are assets with value in that second time horizon: future seasons. And what's more, they are discounted in the current, present timeframe. They're not worthless like they are in redraft. They have value, they can return value. And where does that value come from for a broken toy? It comes predominantly from Southbound, rebuilding teams.
So far from tanking, the movement of producing players from non-contending teams to contending teams is actually a necessary feature of a healthy dynasty league. They get the non-performing assets in return. That cycle of talent allows the league's dynamics to shift from year to year. Otherwise changes would come very slowly with waivers and with whatever draft picks each team is awarded each year. Those being the only vehicles of improve.
So the Strategic Suck opens up a lot of avenues to move talent around the league to accomplish goals in two different timeframes that make both partners in the trade better. And, and as we've said before, that's the only answer to the question who won this trade is "both." We want both teams to be better. The Strategic Suck is what opens up a lot of those avenues to trades that make both teams better.
Now the only thing that can truly derail a Strategic Suck strategy is winning. We don't want to suck at sucking, and I have a rebuilding team that's doing exactly that. It has somehow won four of its last five games because I have hit opponents who have had absolutely rock-bottom performances from some of their players. I was in last place just four weeks ago to have the No. 1 overall pick. I'm now in eighth place with the No. 5 overall pick and find myself one game out of a playoffs.
But it'll get worse if I give into any kind of temptation to make a run at the playoffs. That would be a strategic mistake. Don't suddenly turn East because your team is in a playoff race, A rebuilding team is in a playoff race. Your team is not good enough to do that. 
And you definitely don't wanna turn West by acquiring winnow assets that completely undoes everything you've done up to this point. To build a successful suck, to have a successful rebuilding strategy, you need to stay on that Southerly course.
So pride, dreams of making an improbable title run, getting caught in the emotion of a unexpected playoff chase, all of these things can break a Strategic Suck. So dithering on this strategy is the equivalent of sucking at sucking. You don't want to suck at sucking. You just simply want to suck. 
You must commit and see it through. Yeah, losing sucks. I get it. And if you're losing, you have a few choices. You can do nothing and keep losing. You can act out of desperation to try to win and keep losing. Or you can embrace the Strategic Suck and lose for now to start winning later. 
All three of those choices – doing nothing, being desperate and embracing the Strategic Suck – all three of those choices share one thing in common: losing. But only one of them leads to winning, and that is the Strategic Suck. 
You may be throwing in the towel for this season, but that's to get stronger for future seasons. This is not a surrender, this is not a failure. You're not a failed manager if you have to rebuild. You're just simply a rebuilder. 
Losing does not mean being lost. You know exactly where you're going. It's a recalibration; it's a rebuild. Sometimes the road to True  North has to go through the South. Walk it with purpose.
Next week, we're going to explore the region between the four directions – I call it dynasty purgatory – and how to plot a course to, well, anywhere. When we are in that situation, there's not necessarily one strategy that gets you where you want to go, so we'll explore several.
So I wanna thank you so much for listening or watching today. Please, like, please subscribe, please review, please recommend to friends, please share on social media. I love all of that. That gives us an opportunity to get in front of a little bit bigger audience every week, to share our knowledge and to share the pathways that we are trying to create toward perennial contention, True North in our compass metaphor.
So go win your week, unless you shouldn't or you don't want to, and go win your league, eventually. Thanks for watching or listening. We'll see you next week.
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