Dynasty Compass

Dynasty Compass is your guide to building a fantasy football team that lasts. Hosted by Jeff Blaylock—fantasy analyst, Footballguys contributor, and dynasty strategist—this show helps you find direction in a noisy fantasy football world.

Each episode delivers short, actionable advice for dynasty managers: trade strategy, rookie draft tactics, roster-building frameworks, and more. Whether you’re contending now or rebuilding for the future, Dynasty Compass helps you orient your team toward long-term success.

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🧭 Because in dynasty, you don’t need a GPS—you need a compass.

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Dynasty Compass

Dynasty Compass | Escape from Purgatory

December 11, 2025 • Jeff Blaylock • Season 1 • Episode 18

Are you stuck in Dynasty Purgatory — never good enough to win, never bad enough to rebuild, and constantly tinkering without making real progress?
In Episode 18, Jeff Blaylock delivers the cure. After diagnosing Purgatory in Episode 17, we chart the escape route this week.

Jeff breaks down the four universal laws that apply no matter what path you take, then walks through all four dynasty directions — South, West, North, and East — and shows you exactly when and how to execute each one. This episode gives you the tools to pick a direction, commit to it, and build real momentum for your roster.

If your team feels stuck, this is your map out.

Topics Include

The four universal laws of escaping Purgatory
Why cosmetic fixes keep you stuck
How to prioritize structural upgrades
Upside as the key to breaking free
The four dynasty directions (South, West, North, East)
How to choose your best path based on roster + league dynamics
Strategy playbooks for each direction
Why commitment is the shortcut to improvement

Chapters / Timestamps

00:00 – Stuck in Dynasty Purgatory
00:33 – Welcome & Episode Setup
01:53 – The Four Universal Laws of Escaping Purgatory
07:48 – Choosing Your Direction
08:31 – South: When to Rebuild
13:52 – West: When to Push All-In
17:36 – North: When to Build a Perennial Contender
22:11 – East: When Waiting Is the Strategy
26:52 – Bringing It All Together

Links Mentioned

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Episode 18 – Escape from Purgatory  
We have found ourselves stuck in Dynasty Purgatory, never good enough to contend, never bad enough to rebuild. And everything we've tried just doesn't seem to work. Last week, we diagnosed why we're in Purgatory. This week we are plotting our escape on Dynasty Compass.  

Welcome to Dynasty Compass. I am your host, Jeff Blaylock, the other Jeff B from Footballguys. Thank you so much for watching or listening today. This show cannot exist without you.  
Today is the second part of our two-episode discussion of Dynasty Purgatory.

In Part 1, we discussed how we got ourselves stuck. Maybe we were relying on a cavalry that either never came, nor it didn't save us when it got here. Perhaps we were needing luck to break our way, way much more than it should. Maybe we were having expectations that didn't match reality. And on top of all of that, perhaps we were using flawed reasoning to make our dynasty decisions.  
So now that we know why we're stuck, we can get moving again. Now our titular Dynasty Compass has four directions, and we're going to look at each of them today based on the circumstances of your team and the dynamics of your league. One of those four will be the most logical course.  
But before we can start a course, we need to take a look at the four universal laws of escaping Purgatory that will apply in any of the four directions we choose to go in.  
The first of these universal laws is to fix real weaknesses, not cosmetic ones. Now it's always tempting to grab the shiny object, even if it doesn't really help that much.

I mean, how many times has an NFL team in desperate need of offensive linemen drafted a wide receiver instead? We might feel the exciting rush of this fabulous new toy, but our underlying problem is still there. We can't protect the quarterback, so he can't get the ball to this deep threat wide receiver that we just drafted.

That's a vanity fixed. We've fixed a “need” by upgrading our wide receiver room, but that wasn't what we needed to do. We needed offensive line help. We've left a structural problem in place.

In an earlier episode, I used a metaphor about our patio furniture and how simply rearranging the patio furniture does not add value to the house. But fixing the rotting deck that it sits on most certainly does add value to the house. Now, rearranging patio furniture feels productive and it might even look good until it falls through your rotten deck. We haven't increased the value of the home. We've just moved the patio furniture around.

And in much the same way, dynasty managers in Purgatory seem to be moving patio furniture. They need to resist making cosmetic changes and go for the structural changes instead. If you don't have a true WR1, getting a third running back doesn't really help. And if you're in Superflex without two solid starting quarterbacks, then getting a hot prospect at tight end doesn't help either.  
We have to assess the actual needs of our team and then fix them, which brings us to the second law: make the most impactful moves first. Some moves are going to get us out of purgatory faster than others, and those are going to be the ones that have the most impact on our rosters.

So now that we've ruled out the cosmetic changes, we can prioritize the impactful ones and thus apply our limited capital to those kinds of investments. Now I'm assuming that if you are in Purgatory, you have limited draft capital and you don't have a lot of players that you can trade, otherwise you would not be in Purgatory to begin with.

So with this limited capital, we need to prioritize how we're going to spend it, but the important thing is not to spend the capital on small upgrades just because we can afford them. We should go after the biggest impact that we can make.  
One of those impacts is what Law No. 3 covers: upside, upside, upside. A decent floor is not going to get you out of Purgatory. Focusing on floors will keep you there, will keep you average. When you start players with decent floors, that doesn't change anything because decent floors are interchangeable. Anyone with a decent floor fits in your lineup just as well as anyone else.

It's probably very likely that you've got backups who also have similar safe floors, and these people are clogging your roster. We need you to aim higher. We need to increase the height of the ceiling with higher-upside players, not volume-based churners. And that may mean we need to part with players who have roughly the same floor, who we may have had on our roster for some time and we may insert into our starting lineups periodically.  
Now to be clear, when we are going after upside, this is not about chasing lottery tickets. We're not gonna get out of Purgatory by throwing darts. This is about running backs who play three downs, who get high value red zone touches. This is about wide receivers with high air-yard shares and high average depth of target, and red zone targets. This is about quarterbacks who run. This is about tight ends who are essentially big bodied, wide receivers who get more volume than a typical blocking tight end.

These are people who are going to squeeze a little bit more value out of every time they're on the field and every touch they have. Volume should be viewed as a bonus, not a requirement. That's a upside.  
The fourth law is commit. I've said it before, I will say it many more times: the biggest mistake that dynasty managers make is they make moves without having a strategy in place. Now, the second biggest mistake they make is to change strategies so often that they fight each other.  
Let's go back to our house remodel for a second. If we don't commit to the remodel, it would be like we're tearing out a wall to extend the kitchen, only to make it into a deck, which we then tear down to build a pool, which we decide to fill in for a vegetable garden so we can cook better in our kitchen. But the kitchen is still in ruins, so we eat out. 
Going in one direction consistently is the fastest way out of Purgatory, just as finishing one project in your house remodel is more effective than finishing—than not finishing—any and starting a whole bunch.

Now, finishing the job to get out of Purgatory may take more than one season. It may take multiple trades, it may take multiple drafts. So commit. It will actually take less time to get where you're going than if you don't commit. It turns out that commitment and consistency are the shortcuts.  
So if we're going to commit to a course, we really need to choose a course. We need to pick a direction, but that choice should be informed by the circumstances of our team and the dynamics of our league. Not so much our heart, 'cause what our heart wants may not match what we're best able to do.  
So let's look at each of the four cardinal directions starting with South. Now. In our compass metaphor, South is a total rebuild; it is the land of the rebuilders. If you are a middling .500 team, going to straight rebuild is dramatic, perhaps, but it's often the most effective way out of Purgatory.  
So when should South be the direction you should go? Well, there are several circumstances of your team and of your league that really play into this. So what we wanna see is how many of these actually apply to the teams that we have now. 
One of these is that your roster has low floor and low ceiling. It is consistently below league average scores. You'll need a lot of luck just to get your scores up to the league average.

You have few Cornerstones and there are multiple Next Man Ups in your lineup on a weekly basis. These are not the players that you want in your lineup regularly. You want Set and Forget starters. You want Cornerstones. If you have a number of Next Man Ups, you need upgrades in those positions. And maybe you have an aging roster where you have age not only in your starters, but also in your depth.  
Perhaps your roster is stagnant. You've had many underperforming players for a while. Maybe you drafted them several years ago. And maybe your roster is mismatched. You have too many people in one position and not enough in another, so that you actually have to leave a player on your bench who would score more points for you – who would be a better starter than someone you have to play because of positional constraints.

If you have veterans on your team that contenders could actually want and you have, or you can acquire, multiple premium draft picks. And importantly, that there is an active trade market in your league so that your veterans can be moved for those draft picks. Because in a rebuild, what we really want is our premium draft picks: first and second rounders.

So if those circumstances, or at least many of those describe your team, South is probably the best way to go. But why not go in the other directions? Well, first of all, we're not going to go North, the land of perennial contenders, because we just simply do not have enough talent and can't get there.  
And we're not gonna go West, the land of win-now teams, because we are too far behind the contenders to push all of our chips in responsibly. And we're not going to go to the East because waiting and seeing for our players to develop is not going to bring the necessary change that we need. We've got low floors and low ceilings. We're below league averages. If we don't do anything, we're going to stay right there.

So South becomes the proper turn. So how do we accomplish this? Well, the first thing that we're gonna want to do is trade our productive veterans and our aging veteran depth for picks and for Developing Talents.

We are looking to prioritize assets that are going to gain value over time. These could include Broken Toys. These are productive players who are injured and thus not producing this season. These are Developing Talents, players who just have not grown into their roles quite yet, usually rookies or second-year players. Maybe they are stuck behind somebody on the depth chart. Perhaps that somebody is a free agent and will be leaving at the end of the season. And then of course, draft picks, which are the true currency of dynasty.

We are also gonna look to consolidate quantity into quality. We're gonna consider two-for-one and three-for-one trades so that we can turn clusters of depth players into starters and for higher-value, which means high upside, depth pieces. And what we wanna do by doing that is reduce the number of players we have on our roster so we have openings to bring in new talent to use our draft picks without just simply having to cut people.

As we think about what those draft picks and those trades look like, we're going to build around our most critical positions first, which for nearly every league is going to be wide receiver, especially in leagues where you must start three or more. It's a tremendous upside position at various levels. From WR1s to WRs2 to WR3s, this is a place where you can get some big upside, and if you have to start a number of them, it is best to have really good ones. Now if we're in a Superflex League, quarterback is also quite critical. We need two quarterbacks to really be successful in Superflex formats.

We need to add upside. As I've been saying, we need to avoid the trap of overcommitting to some of these other positions, particularly to tight ends in TE-premium leagues. If you do not have an elite tight end, the fact that you get a half point or a point extra per reception for your tight end who catches two receptions is not going to help you very much.  
And running backs can be fixed last, even if that feels wrong. Now, even if you think to yourself, “I can get this really great running back who's 27 years old,” no, it's not the right time. Fix that last.

Then lastly, commit – our last law of our universal laws of getting out of Purgatory. Commit. Embrace the Strategic Suck and that full rebuild process. Don't just do demolition and then leave the renovation undone. See it through to the end.

Going South is not surrender; it's renovation. And it's often the most effective way out of Purgatory. It's not necessarily the fastest, and it might not even be the best, which is why we're going to take a look at the other three directions beginning with the West.  
Now the West is home of win-now teams. These are teams that have pushed all their chips into the table right now to win a championship. Why you'd want to take a middling roster and and go straight for a championship is because you've got high ceilings but you have inconsistent or weak floors. You have a couple or three elite players who are in their prime, and your starters might actually be fairly strong, but you lack depth behind them.  
You can't absorb injuries or navigate bye weeks and remain competitive. Your best players are skewing older. You have multiple premium draft picks that you could use, but more importantly here, we could trade them away for players that are producing now. And, critically, the league needs to have a dynamic trade market where active rebuilders are willing to trade their producing veterans for the picks that you are holding.  
So if West is the way we are thinking about going, if that's the way, if what I just described describes your team, why would we not go in the other directions? Well, we won't gonna go South because we now have too much top-end talent to just simply blow things up. We don't need a full on rebuild.

And we're not gonna go North because we don't have enough depth to sustain a long championship window. We are not going to be perennial contenders with the kind of depth that we have on the team now. And we can't just sit back and wait for our players to develop because other teams around us are improving. And so going to the East will mean that other teams will be able to pass us by.

So pushing our chips in and going for that championship now may be our fastest and best way out of Purgatory. So how do we do that? How do we turn West?

Well, we're gonna package depth and our picks to acquire difference-makers who are veteran players. Now you need be willing to sacrifice quantity and youth for higher-impact additions to your lineup now. So you're gonna especially be looking for age-discounted veterans who can come in and produce immediately.  
Now, this is less about fixing specific lineup weaknesses – unlike the other directions where we're looking at specific weaknesses that we need to fix – when we're going West. We just simply need to add more points to our starting lineup, however we do that. So we actually end up addressing the lowest-scoring slots on our team regardless of what that position happens to be.  
We also wanna pay very, very close attention to what's going on in NFL free agency and in personnel moves around the real football league, because players in new surroundings and new offensive systems might become very valuable producers for us, as well as players who are elevated by the departures of those players now, often to new surroundings. So stay ahead of your league mates and follow what's going on in the league so you can make moves before they realize exactly what it is that they just traded away.

And in any turn to the West, any win-now situation, we are willing to sacrifice the future in order to win now. And so that means that a turn South is ultimately coming, and it may be a difficult path once you have to take it, but the reward may be a championship in the short term. I have never met a dynasty manager who complained about their rebuild when they have a championship trophy sitting behind them.

Going West is a gamble, yes. But if you have a championship window that you can open right now, taking a swing at it might be in a very effective way, not only out of Purgatory, but getting that championship trophy.  
Another direction that we can go is North. North is where we ultimately want to go as dynasty managers because that is perennial contention, that is being able to challenge teams for a championship year after year after year. So why would you take a middling, mediocre team and go into perennial contention? What would be the sorts of circumstances that would lead naturally to that?

Well, the biggest and most important is that your weekly projections are actually above league average, that you don't really need luck to swing your way in order to win championships and to win in your league. You've got multiple Cornerstones and multiple, stable Set and Forgets at key positions. You may just be missing a couple of pieces.

Maybe you have solid but uneven depth. You can weather injuries and navigate bye weeks at some positions, but not others. Your roster across the board has a balanced age profile. You have a nice mix of aging veteran players in their prime and young Developing Talents. You have some draft capital, enough to maintain and reinforce what you're doing, but neither enough to overhaul your roster nor trade away for other assets.

Importantly, if we're gonna take an average, middling roster and go contend, there cannot already be a dominant superteam blocking our path. What we really are looking for here is a league where five people are all 9-5 and 8-6, 'cause that is the kind of a league you can contend in fairly easily. If you've got two teams that are 12-2, and you are 7-7, North is not a direction that you're going to be able to go. Those two teams are simply going to be in your way the entire time.

So why not the other directions? You don't want to go South because there is no need to rebuild. Your foundation is strong. And you don't need to go West because there is no need to sacrifice your future to win now. You're going to be strong enough to win over several years. And you don't need to go East because you are too close to putting it all together to just stand still and wait for things to happen to your team and wait for your players to develop.

So how do we make this turn to the North from purgatory? Well, we need to maintain and protect our quality depth on our team. We need to keep our flanks covered because injuries can derail us otherwise. We cannot trade away valuable handcuffs and backups to try to boost our starting lineup if we're going to end up losing those players – if we're gonna end up – if those players might end up injured and we can't replace them in our lineups. That is what a team in the West faces. We going toward perennial contention cannot face that.

We do not want to have weak backups in place. We don't want to give up strong backups that we have in order to get something else. So we're gonna make targeted trades to fill weak spots. We are not looking to make a splash. We are not looking for blockbusters. This is about strategic, lower-cost upgrades that boost your depth, make you better able to withstand the ups and downs of a fantasy season.

We're gonna try to move off of our aging players a year early instead of a year late, and leverage the win-now managers in the West by offloading aging veterans to them for starters and for high-floor depth. We're going to use our draft capital to reload but not rebuild, and we're going to have a balanced lineup with floor plays and ceiling plays.

We're going to have safe floors and we're gonna have high ceilings, and those may not be the same players 'cause a purely safe lineup with decent floors will get us back to Purgatory faster than it will get us to True North. We need to have week-winners, people who can win our leagues on a week to week basis, but we need the security of that safe floor to be able to compete when those players are not at their best.

So North is about sustaining success, and yes, you may not be successful right now as a 7-7, 6-8 team in Purgatory, but you've got several key pieces already in place. Your floors are steady. You just need to raise your ceilings and improve your depth.  
The final direction that we have is East, which is the land of wait-and-see as a strategy, standing by to make to see how your roster develops over the course of a season. So why would you go East, because it sounds an awful lot like Purgatory? 
Now you're waiting for something to happen that hasn't been happening. Well, obviously this is a now strategic decision. We're gonna wait on specific things to happen after we've evaluated our thought process, we've evaluated our expectations. If we can still expect growth, we may decide to wait for it.  
We would go East if our floor was decent, but our ceiling was unclear because too much is depending upon Developing Talents or develop or relying on players who need their roles to expand in the coming season. So we don't know exactly what the ceiling of this team is gonna be.

We may have a fuzzy core; there's some strong pieces to our team, but no identity, no real strong Cornerstones. No one really fears playing you. They look at your lineup and they don't see anybody who really scares them. You're good, but you're not going to put the fear into their hearts when they are matched up against you. And that's probably because you're weak at one or two positions, but it's not this huge, serious dropoff from your starters to your next level down, your Next Man Ups.

You probably have a younger roster. Not quite as young as a rebuild, but you're still fairly young and waiting on them to develop. You probably have little to no premium draft capital 'cause you may have traded those picks away amid efforts to get out of purgatory previously.

And the league does have several strong, dominant teams in it so that you are going to be hard pressed to get into the top two or three teams. You'll be fighting for that last playoff spot for the next couple of seasons, no matter how good you actually get.

So if that describes your league and your team, you may ask, well, why would we not go the other three directions? Well, you're not gonna go South to rebuild because you simply lack draft capital. You may be young enough, but you don't have a strong enough ability to continue that rebuild.

We're not gonna go West because we don't have a strong enough nucleus to compete against the super teams, and we're not gonna go North because we don't have enough quality depth until we get that development. So until that cavalry does indeed come in, in the form of players with expanded roles and players who have become fully fledged WR1s, TE1s, whatever, whatever we drafted them to become, that they become that.  
So how are we going to turn East? Well, we're going to be willing to upgrade our fuzzy core pieces for more focused ones, and that means we're gonna have to turn over some of the people that we know of as some of our better players in order to focus our roster on the positions that we really need strengthened.

So we're going to buy dips, we're going to sell spikes, and we're gonna upgrade without spending a ton. I like to think of it almost like we would trade in redraft, that we are giving up players who are in our starting lineups to get other players who will become starters, and that net trade will strengthen our team.  
We wanna preserve the draft capital that we have. We don't need more. We just need what we have. So we're not going to be able to trade away any remaining premium picks, but we are gonna be willing to package third rounders and some of our depth players in an effort to improve our lineup.

And, like some of the other directions, we want to keep our eyes focused on player situations in the NFL. You're looking for expanding roles, not shrinking ones. You're looking for more efficiency and opportunity, not less, and you're looking for chances where free agency either opens up a player for more work or moves a player into a better environment.

And, while we're waiting, we patch weaknesses. And part of why we're here now is the cavalry hasn't had time to muster itself. So we're not gonna give up on them, but we also have to shore them up just in case one or two or more of them are not gonna be able to deliver.

And the most important thing, because it's the easiest thing to do when you are in the east, is not to fall into complacency. We want to avoid that. The East is truly an active direction. It is a strategy. It's not just simply standing by and watching the world go by. It is not a passive strategy. It's Active. East is about giving our roster the time to come together, compete well we can, and bide our time before setting off to the North, perennial contention; the West, win now; or, if it just simply isn't working, going South to rebuild.  
So let's bring all this home. I know I've talked about a lot. There's been a lot I've thrown at you and there's a lot of details. So we've got four different directions. We've got multiple things we need to think about and multiple ways we can get there.

But whatever we want to do, whichever direction we're gonna go, we do need to follow those four universal laws. We need to fix our real weaknesses, not our cosmetic ones. We need to make the most impactful moves first. We need upside, upside, upside, and we need to fully commit to our course and see it through.

So, which course? We're gonna go South and rebuild if we need structural changes to a weak roster. We're going to go to the West, a win-now position, if we see a championship window opening and know it won't be open for very long. We're gonna go to the North, perennial contention, if we've got the key pieces, but we have an unbalanced roster, perhaps not quite the depth that we need. And we're going to go to the East if we need more clarity or more time to see what our roster truly is before we commit to a different course of action.  
So being in Purgatory is not about a lack of activity. It's about a lack of strategy. You're not stuck in Purgatory because you can't move or because there's nothing that you can do to get unstuck. It's because the moves you have been making just simply haven't gotten it done. Perhaps they were fighting each other. Perhaps they were based on flawed expectations. Maybe they were even rooted in fear.

After these two episodes, you now know why you're stuck and how to get moving again. So choose your direction based on what's best for your roster circumstances, and the best fit for the dynamics of your league. Follow that plan. Give it time to work, and you will feel the wind at your back once again.  
Thank you so much for listening or watching. And as always, if you have found this show helpful, please like, please subscribe. Please leave a positive review. Please share us on social media. Please tell your friends about us. That helps more than you know to make this show possible.  