Dynasty Compass | Is Dynasty For You?

Is dynasty fantasy football right for you?

As the fantasy season winds down, many managers start asking themselves, "Do I want to wait until August for next season to begin? Or do I want it to start right now?" In this episode of Dynasty Compass, Jeff Blaylock explains what dynasty fantasy football really is, how it differs from redraft and keeper leagues, who should (and shouldn’t) play dynasty, and the best ways to get started.

If you’re looking for a deeper challenge, year-round engagement, a stronger sense of community and a true roster-building experience, this episode is your starting point.

Topics Include

• What dynasty fantasy football is
• Who dynasty is for (and who it isn’t)
• Key differences from redraft and keeper leagues
• Why rookie picks matter so much
• Startups vs orphan teams
• League culture and long-term commitment
• Why dynasty has no offseason

Chapters / Timestamps

• 0:00 – Do you want your season to continue?
• 2:12 – Who dynasty is for
• 3:02 – Who dynasty is not for
• 4:55 – What dynasty fantasy football actually is
• 6:06 – The biggest differences from redraft
• 8:05 – Deeper rosters, taxi squads, and waivers
• 10:35 – Trades, value, and multiple timelines
• 11:48 – The Dynasty Compass team archetypes
• 12:59 – Rookie picks as the currency of dynasty
• 14:40 – Why there is no offseason
• 15:25 – Dynasty vs keeper leagues
• 16:22 – How to get started: startups and orphans
• 19:49 – Why league culture matters
• 21:33 – Dynasty never stops
• 23:12 – Episode 20 preview: The Offseason Planner

Related Episodes

• Episode 1 — The Four Strategic Directions of Dynasty
• Episode 5 — Your Weekly Planner
• Episode 12 — Draft Picks: The Currency of Dynasty
• Episode 20 — There Is No Offseason (coming soon)

Useful Links

• Jeff's dynasty rankings on Footballguys
• Follow Jeff on Twitter/X
• Leaguesafe's classifieds (leagues seeking managers)
• Dynasty Compass website

Chapters

• 0:00 Is Dynasty For You?W
• 2:12 Who Is Dynasty For and Not For?
• 4:55 What Dynasty Actually Is
• 6:06 Differences Between Dynasty and Redraft
• 11:48 Four Strategic Directions of Dynasty Teams
• 14:40 Why There's No Offseason
• 16:22 How to Get Started in Dynasty
• 19:49 Why League Culture Matters
• 21:33 The Season Doesn't Stop
• 23:12 Episode 20 Preview

Transcript

Dynasty Compass - Episode 19
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Jeff: As the fantasy season draws to a close, I thought I'd take a step back and do a show for fantasy football players who are wondering if Dynasty might be for them. Perhaps you've mastered Redraft and want a new challenge. Perhaps you've been following this show or seeing people on social media raving about Dynasty, and you've wondered what it's about.

Maybe you're interested, but just not sure how to get started. Well, we're gonna talk about all of that next on Dynasty Compass.

[Theme music] ​

Jeff: Welcome to Dynasty Compass. I am your host, Jeff Blaylock. Thank you so much for being here and for being a part of this show. Whether you are watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast streaming platform, the show cannot exist without you. So thank you very much for tuning in today.

Our season is ending. For some of us in Dynasty, it has already ended, but we are still fighting for playoff spots in a few leagues. But we're also already looking toward next year. And so the question I have for you right off the bat is, "Do you want to wait until August for your new season to begin? Do you wanna start right now?" 

Now, I got into Dynasty a number of years ago because I just didn't want my fantasy season to end in December. It kind of comes to a crashing, sudden halt where all of a sudden the team is no longer a concern. You're not interested in roster moves and you can completely disconnect for eight months, and I just didn't want to do that. I wanted to keep the season going. 

Aside from winning more championships, I felt like I'd already accomplished what there is to do in Redraft. I wanted something more. I wanted something bigger to achieve. I wanted to build rosters. I wanted the thrill of the construction project or the renovation project or even a new build of a roster.

In short, I just really wanted to challenge myself to see if I could take my fantasy football playing to the next level. And maybe, perhaps you are feeling some of those things right now. 

I mean, that is indeed who Dynasty is for. It's for those who want the challenge of building a roster and sustaining its success over several seasons. For people who want to stay engaged with the season, and importantly with your league mates, all year long. And for people who are interested in learning more about the game of football, about scouting, about player moves, about coaching trends, who wanna follow more than just your favorite teams or just your favorite players.

Dynasty introduces you to all of those aspects. And successful Dynasty managers are people who can follow all of those different things and enjoy doing it.

Now, who Dynasty is not for our, what I would call, casual fantasy football players. These are folks who put in the minimum amount of effort, what I described as the Essential Tier of effort back in our weekly planner episode before the season began.

Maybe you're only interested in your favorite teams or players, or perhaps you play primarily in what I would call burner leagues. These are Redraft leagues that are set up every year with a different group of people. You play one season and then that's it. Maybe you don't have the home league experience within your Redraft league, so you're not used to that kind of a community.

Similarly, it's not for DFS players. DFS stands for daily fantasy sports. These are players who are used to getting a new lineup every week or maybe even every day. Well, Dynasty is a complete 180-degree reversal from that because not only do you not get a new lineup every week or every day, you keep the same one from year after year. 

Dynasty is also not for people who are afraid of commitment. Now, not, not that kind of commitment, but to a longer-term relationship with a league, with a group of people, and with your roster. If you're not willing to commit to that over multiple years, this isn't for you. 

And also it's not for people who tilt when they lose, although it can be absolutely hilarious wWhen one of your league mates tilts because of what's going on in the league. It's not a good spot to be in for a Dynasty manager.

And it's important to understand before you get into it that losing can actually be a key component to winning, that sometimes you have to lose to build your Dynasty. And all along you have to live with the mistakes that you make. That is a necessary aspect of this. You can't, in Redraft, you do that too, but only for a few weeks and then it's over. In Dynasty, your mistakes can have long shadows and can haunt you for years.

So that's who it's for and who it's not for. So now let me just pull back a little bit and talk about, "What is Dynasty? What is Dynasty Fantasy Football?" 

Well, in sports, a Dynasty is a team that wins several championships during a period of sustained excellence. And that's the idea of Dynasty fantasy football: perennial contention, winning multiple titles with the same roster. And in our compass metaphor, that is our True North: perennial contention., building a team that can contend for championships year after year after year. 

So Dynasty is simply a fantasy football league that is a continual work in progress. There's no reset from one season to the next. There's no starting fresh with a brand new roster. Each season you have your franchise that you were building from either the ground up or from however you inherited it, and it is yours to take forward.

So what are the main differences between Dynasty leagues and Redraft leagues?

Well, the biggest one, and the one from which just about all of the others flow, is that in Dynasty, we have more than one timeframe that we care about. We care about this season, we care about next season, and we care about the seasons beyond that. In Redraft leagues, you focus on the single year that's in front of you. There is no future. There is no next season. There is just now. In Dynasty, there is now, there's next season, and there are the years beyond that.

Well, some of the implications of that are that trades have longer effects. They last longer. Trades you make in one season may still affect you several seasons down the line. And also it means that we are looking at value of players beyond just this season. So we are not just judging players based on what they're doing right now. 

So one of those implications is that season-ending injuries don't make someone droppable in a Dynasty league like they do in Redraft Leagues. In Redraft this season, many of us had to shed a tear as we dropped our No. 1 pick, Malik Nabers, for the season because he injured his knee and is out for the year. There is not a single Dynasty manager who dropped Malik Nabers because we will be using him in our lineups next season. 

And because of these multiple timeframes, it also means that getting off to a bad start in your season doesn't mean that your season is over. Getting off to a 1-5 start in Redraft makes it very difficult to get back into the playoffs. Your season, while not technically over, is essentially over. But in Dynasty, there's so much more at stake than this season that a bad start not only doesn't mean that this season is over, but it might actually benefit you in future seasons.

Another key difference is that in Dynasty, you keep your roster from one season to the next. I know I've kind of hinted about that a couple of times already, but this is my — I'm gonna say it directly: you keep your roster, every player that's on it from one season to the next. 

So that means you get a real general manager kind of experience with Dynasty than you would get with Redraft leagues because keeping all of those players and making moves and transactions with those players is essentially like a general manager on a real football team trying to get their pieces in place for each season.

Dynasty leagues often have deeper rosters. What do I mean by that? Well, in a typical ESPN Redraft League, there are 16 roster positions. You have your nine starters and your seven bench players in combinations of the different positions, defenses, kickers, all of that. And, and that's what you have. You have 16 players on your roster.

Many Dynasty teams have 20 or 22 or 24 or even 28, 30 players on their rosters. So you have a lot of talent that goes very deep into the depth charts of NFL teams. These are players who you wouldn't typically start, perhaps ever, but they are players that you nonetheless have in case they develop — We call those Developing Talents — or in case you need them because of a really bad streak of luck in terms of injuries or bye weeks.

And also to accommodate these deeper rosters, many Dynasty leagues have something called taxi squads. And taxi squads are places to park rookies and sometimes second-year players who are not contributing to your scores this year, but you want to hang on to for next year and years after, but it don't take up valuable real estate on your active roster.

An implication of that is that waivers are pretty shallow, especially after the first few weeks of the year. You are not going to find a mega-talented, suddenly uprising, a rising up player on a waiver wire in Week 10. In a Dynasty league, waivers are typically used for up-and-coming players who are not producing now, or to take bets on players who may have a role later in the season, perhaps a team's RB3 or a wide receiver who's a backup, backup quarterback, someone who may have to step up into that role.

You can get them off waivers before they become a valuable commodity, and that's how waivers differ in Dynasty than they do in typical shorter Redraft leagues, shorter bench Redraft leagues.

And so that means that trades are the primary way of improving your roster during the season, which means that your league has very dynamic economics in terms of the players that are available and the players and the different assets that can be traded back and forth from each other.

Because in Dynasty, managers are going to have different goals, and it goes all the way back to this concept of different timeframes. Some managers are trying to win this year. Others are not trying to win this year. In a Redraft league, everybody's trying to win every year. In Dynasty, that's not necessarily the case.

So that creates some different dynamics for traders and specifically, you may have rebuilding teams. These are teams with lousy rosters that are trying to improve over the long term. You have win-now teams, which look more like a Redraft league team. These are teams that are going to push all their chips into the table right now to try to win.

There are your perennial contenders. These are strong rosters that are at the top of the league year after year, and you might have some folks who are kind of on the edge. They're waiting and seeing. They're waiting for their roster to develop. They're waiting to see if a different strategy may need to be maybe necessary for them to keep contending.

You'll notice that that was four different groups. Rebuilders, win-now teams, perennial contenders, and wait-and-seers. There are four cardinal compass points. One goes to each team. That's how the compass metaphor works. The rebuilders are in the South. The win-now teams are in the West. The perennial contenders are in the North. The wait-and-seers are in the East. If you wanna learn more about that, we've got a number of different episodes of the podcast already that gets into a lot of that kind of detail. We don't need to know about it today.

What's important is that there are various goals and various kinds of teams who are looking at assets and players and valuing them differently based on what their goals for this season and future seasons are.

And I've said a couple of times, players and other assets, and it's because you can trade more than just players in Dynasty. In Redraft leagues, you typically are only trading players. Maybe you are trading some free agent acquisition budget if you have that kind of a Redraft league. But in Dynasty there is an even bigger and more important asset that you can trade that is not a player and that is rookie draft picks. 

The rookie drafts are the other important way that you can improve your roster, but you can only do that once per season. So in Dynasty leagues, once you've got your rosters, initially, the only drafts that tend to follow are rookie drafts. So these drafts are much shorter, between two and six rounds, typically with three or four being the most common. Your goal with the rookie draft is to bring in new talent onto your team, and that's what you're focused on.

And that makes draft picks the currency of the realm. They are the currency of Dynasty because they are the ways that you can improve a team in the future. And if you are a contending team, now you shift that future improvement to someone else to get something, somebody that improves your team right now. It's where those different timeframes come into effect.

Why are rookie draft picks are often the most critical aspects of trades during a Dynasty season? The value of those picks is gonna vary based on where your roster is and what your goal is. Some managers are going to want picks and value them more; others are gonna want players and will value picks less. And into that equation goes how we value trades and how we're able to make trades that have seemingly different goals, seemingly different values, and make them work so that everyone wins in the trade.

And also because of the timeframes and because the rookies are so important, the game continues even after the season ends there. There really is no off season in Dynasty. 

Your league is gonna stay in touch all year. The best leagues are a true community. They have been together for years. Think about some of the best home league Redraft leagues that you've either ever been in or have seen. Dynasty is the same way, except that everyone stays engaged for those months in the off season, where in Redraft Leagues, you may not hear from anybody for six or seven months until it's almost time for the season to start. 

And the very best Dynasty managers are going to stay engaged with their league, with their roster, and with the NFL News all year long, not just from August to December.

Now, you may be familiar with Keeper leagues and perhaps maybe you are on one and wondering what the difference is between a Keeper league and a Dynasty league because at the heart of both of them, you are keeping players from one season to the next. The biggest difference is that in Keeper leagues, you're not keeping all of your players; you're just keeping some, and you churn the rest of them.

In Dynasty, there is no churning the rest of them. You keep all of those guys as well. And so those are the main differences between Dynasty leagues and some of the others we're more – maybe more – familiar with including Redraft, which is kind of how everybody got started in fantasy football, and Keeper leagues, which are sort of a mix between the Dynasty concept and Redraft leagues. I think of them much more as Redraft specifically, because in a keeper league you roll a lot of that roster over, you change that roster a lot from year to year. In Dynasty, you keep them.

So how do you get started in Dynasty? If this is something, it sounds like something you're really interested in, something you want to do or something that you're rediscovering, how do you get started? Well, there's really two primary ways of getting involved in a Dynasty league. One is a startup, and the other is to adopt an orphan. 

Let's start with startups. They are exactly what you think they would be. They are a brand new Dynasty league. They look initially like a Redraft league in the sense that everyone gets together at a common period of time and drafts their rosters. So there's this one big draft at the beginning of the season or at the beginning of the league, rather, it could happen at any point during the offseason where managers are gonna pick their teams. 

There may be an additional rookie draft after that, depending on when teams are picked, or rookies may just be part of the initial player pool, and you have to decide initially how you want to value those rookies against everyone else. The point is that you start at that moment with your roster, and that is your roster, not just for this season, but for future seasons. Unless you drop a player, trade them or they retire.

The second way that you typically would get involved is if a league already exists and an opening happens, a manager leaves that league for any reason. That means they have left behind an orphaned team. So we call those orphans. And so this is a team that has already put together, it already has a roster. It has some number of draft picks. It has whatever other assets it has, and you just simply take over management of that team from the previous manager.

If you're looking for an orphan, you can go to a site like League Safe, you can go to the Footballguys forums, you can go to other similar, what I would call, sponsored sites. These are websites or forums or community forums that are backed by one of the brands in the fantasy world, and you can see who's looking for managers.

And honestly, this right now, right now, at the very end of a fantasy season is one of the best times to do that. Because there are a number of managers in these leagues who have said, I need to get out for some reason. This, for whatever reason I wanna leave. I'm out of the league. And there's an opening right now. 

And as you get in and, and understand your team and learn your league mates before you have to make some really critical decisions in the rookie drafts, which are anywhere from early May through August. 

You get to usually see the roster that you're inheriting when you adopt an orphan. Typically, a commissioner will post either a photograph of the roster or will give you a link so you can see the players and the roster that you're inheriting. So you can make a decision before you join the league if, if that's the kind of roster you wanna deal with.

And if it's a paid league, which means that players – managers – put in money so that it creates a prize pool. Very often, dues for the orphan have already been paid or are discounted in some way so that it is a lower-cost entry point to any league that you can get into. 

So adopting an orphan is often the easiest way to get in because you don't need nine or 11 or 13 or 15 other like-minded people who wanna put a league together. But alternatively, if you get an invitation to join a startup league, that's another fairly easy way in.

But the important thing, the key to this, is to find a group of people that you want to be a part of for the long haul. These are people that you want to play fantasy football with, you wanna build relationships with if you don't already have relationships with them. 

So in a startup league, ideally, you know, ideally you know everybody, but you should at least know a majority of the players in that league before you joined it, or have a really good relationship with the person who invited you to to join the league. And if you are a commissioner, it is really important for you to know who are in your league because you are gonna set the tone for that league. It's better if you know who they are than if it's just some random collection of 12 people you found on the internet.

If you're adopting an orphan, it might be a little tougher to know the people in that league. I know the very first orphan that I adopted, I knew nobody in that league. I now know pretty much everybody; we can communicate with each other. So the trick there is just to reach out early and often and start building those relationships as soon as you join the league.

Also, talk to your commissioner. See how that league is structured. See how friendly it is, how competitive it is, how cutthroat it might be, how active it is. You want a friendly, active league. And it's a little bit competitive too, but not cutthroat. And so that's really the best ways to get started in Dynasty, adopt an Orphan or a startup league.

It's harder if you're starting your own league than if you're joining someone else's, but whatever you're doing, if you want to get involved with Dynasty, make sure you're getting in with the right group of people. The roster you can change over the course of several seasons, but the players in the league with you, that's a lot harder to change. 

So choosing the right group of people is really critical and is really important to having a very successful and very enjoyable experience as a Dynasty general manager.

And as I've alluded to, there just simply is no offseason with Dynasty. That to me is one of the most appealing aspects of it altogether, is that there is no offseason, that the season doesn't end when you're eliminated from playoff contention. It doesn't end when your league championship happens because there are always things that you will need to do to be a really good Dynasty manager and to really take the reins of your team and steer it in the direction that you want to go in. 

Whether that is perennial contention, whether that is winning in the next season, all going all out for that, whether it is the rebuild or whether it is, just trying to see what you've really got and letting that team develop and see if you can make a contender out of it without making some major moves.

You've got rookies that you need to scout and study. You've got NFL free agency that comes up. You've got – you've got OTAs, which are offseason workouts. You've got training camp. You've got news that comes out of all of that that can affect not only your stars, but also importantly your bench players who are gonna be starters later, eventually. 

These are all the things you wanna stay connected to, and that is one of the greatest appeals of Dynasty to me, is that the football season just doesn't end. It is football 12 months out of the year.

So at the very beginning, I asked you if you wanted to wait until August for your next fantasy football season to begin. And if the answer is no, then Dynasty is the path for you because there is no offseason.

Next week, in what will be our final episode of Season One, we'll take a little break until the end of January. Next week, we're gonna set up what you want to do for your offseason, to be your offseason planner.

Before this fantasy season started, we did an episode about what you wanna do each week. What's your weekly planner? This will be your offseason planner, so it will lay out for you what you want to try to do each month out of the offseason to be best prepared to manage your team, either toward a championship or at least toward the direction strategically you're trying to go each season.

So we'll look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you again so much for joining me this week. If you enjoyed the show, if you've learned something from it, or if you've gotten either a newfound love of Dynasty or you now remember why you loved it in the first place, please like, please subscribe.

Please drop a positive review. Please share on social media. All of these things help make this show possible and just make me very happy that I can be helping folks like you become better Dynasty managers who can build your Dynasty, dominate your league, and contend for championships year after year after year. 

So again, I'm Jeff Blaylock, the Other Jeff B from Footballguys, and I will see you next time on Dynasty Compass.

[Theme music] ​​