Dynasty Compass | Your Dynasty Offseason Planner

There is no offseason in dynasty — but there is a right way to use it.

In this Season 1 finale of Dynasty Compass, Jeff Blaylock builds a practical offseason planner from January through kickoff, breaking down what matters most at each stage of the NFL calendar and how Casual, Competitive, and Pro-level dynasty managers should approach the offseason based on their effort and time commitments.

This episode isn’t about doing more — it’s about aligning your effort, attention, and expectations so you enter the season prepared without burning out but ready to win your league.

Topics Include

• Dynasty offseason calendar overview
• Casual vs Competitive vs Pro effort levels
• What to focus on and when
• Keeping it fun and avoiding burnout
• Aligning effort with expectations

Chapters / Timestamps

00:00 – Intro & Season 1 Finale
01:20 – No Offseason in Dynasty
02:15 – Effort Levels Explained
05:15 – January: Reset & Orientation
07:55 – February: NFL Combine
09:40 – March: Free Agency
11:10 – April: NFL Draft
13:55 – May: Rookie Drafts
15:30 – June: OTAs & Minicamps
17:05 – July: Training Camp
18:45 – August: Preseason
21:45 – Time Commitments by Effort Level
23:40 – Aligning Effort & Expectations
25:40 – Season 2 Preview

Related Episodes

• Episode 3 – Separating Training Camp Signals from Static
• Episode 5 – Your Weekly In-Season Dynasty Planner 
• Episode 12 – Draft Picks: The Currency of Dynasty
• Episode 17 – Dynasty Purgatory: Why Your Team Stays Stuck
• Episode 19 – Is Dynasty Fantasy Football for You?

Links Mentioned

• DynastyCompass.com
• Downloadable Offseason Planner
• Matt Waldman’s Rookie Scouting Portfolio

Support the Show

If you’re enjoying Dynasty Compass, please subscribe, rate, and review the show. Your support helps us grow the community and bring in expert guests for Season 2.

Chapters

• 1:20 There Is No Offseason in Dynasty
• 2:15 Effort Levels at a Glance
• 4:10 Offseason Calendar Overview
• 5:15 January
• 7:55 February
• 9:40 March
• 11:10 April
• 13:55 May
• 15:30 June
• 17:05 July
• 18:45 August
• 21:45 Time Commitments
• 23:40 Aligning Effort and Expectations
• 25:40 Closing Thoughts & Season 2 Tease

Transcript

Dynasty Compass - Episode 20
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We did it. We've reached the end. The fantasy season is over for most leagues. Hopefully, you are celebrating a championship, a successful navigation of a long and winding season. Maybe even longer than that. Perhaps it's a rebuild years in the making and it's finally culminated in a championship, perhaps several championships.

This football season is over. It doesn't have to end, because in Dynasty there is no offseason. The end is merely a transition. It is the beginning of a new season. This week we are building our offseason planner on Dynasty Compass.

[Theme music] ​

Welcome to Dynasty Compass. I am your host, Jeff Blaylock, the Other Jeff B from Footballguys. This is Episode 20, our Season 1 finale. I want to thank you so much for being a part of this first season and for being a part of the Dynasty Compass family. Rest assured we will be back at the end of January with a whole new season, including our first-ever guests.

But today we're going to build our plan for the next eight months, January to August. Now I'm going to refer to it as the offseason because there are no meaningful NFL games being played. But the NFL doesn't stop. It doesn't go to sleep for months at a time. There's always something going on, and the best dynasty managers are tuned into the league's activities.

That's why I say there's no offseason in Dynasty. Indeed, there are lots of activities that go on in the league, but you as a dynasty manager don't have to pay attention to all of them. Taking an organized and thoughtful approach to the next eight months will better prepare you for next season, so we're going to try to maximize the value for whatever time that you have to devote to your offseason program.

Now, all the way back in Episode 5, as this, before this regular season was kicking off, we built a weekly plan for the fantasy season from waivers to trades to injury reports to lineup setting, and we based this on three levels of effort and commensurate—three commensurate—time commitments. Those are Essential, Competitive and Pro.

The Essential level are the tasks that every dynasty manager must do at a minimum to play fantasy football. At the Competitive level, this would be devoting additional time to following what's going on in the NFL and consuming fantasy content and putting that into your management of your teams. And at the Pro level, these would be deeper dives into the things that only the very best dynasty managers do, and that's what makes them the very best managers. 

So we're going to keep that structure in place for our offseason program, but I am going to make one change. I'm going to rename Essential to Casual. I'm doing that because the only essential task in the offseason is your rookie draft. Your team will go on even if you otherwise ignore it and everything in the football world until Week 1 begins in September. And by casual here, I'm referring to a level of effort that feels more like being a football fan that follows a favorite team or some favorite star players.

And I want you to understand that effort levels here are patterns of paying attention and habits. They're not intelligence, they're not football smarts. They're not street smarts. You do not have to be super smart or nerdishly analytical to be a successful fantasy manager, but you do need to have a plan for how to use your limited time in the best ways possible. And that's what we're going to do today.

So let's look at this offseason calendar. I like to think of the NFL offseason as being divided into two time periods: before the NFL draft and after the NFL draft. 

Now the NFL draft occurs at the end of April, almost right in the middle of the offseason. So in the pre — the period leading up to that — the pre-NFL draft period, our focus is going to be on evaluating our roster's needs and scouting the rookies in preparation for our rookie drafts. And then the post-NFL draft period, our focus shifts to the roles that players are going to play, whether it's for a new team, for new coaches, or even the same team and the same coaches.

Now we're going to find all these details available in a downloadable offseason planner that's linked in the show notes or down below if you're watching on YouTube, so you can find a link to it there. You can also find it on our show's website, dynastycompass.com. And because I'm going to do that for you, I'm not going to dive into every single detail on every task and every month so that we can move through this fairly quickly. I want to hit the super high notes for you here. You can study the document when you download it.

So let's start as the calendar starts: in January. The main things that are happening in January are coaching changes. Black Monday is the first day after the last last game of the regular season is over. That is when coaches tend to start getting fired, so coaching changes will start immediately when the regular season of the NFL ends.

College players are also declaring for the draft. They're already doing this this week, and by mid-January, all of them have to have declared, except for those who are in the national championship game. They get another seven to 10 days. And at the end of January you have the Shrine game and the Senior Bowl and their related practice periods, which is the last chance for rookies to shine before the NFL Combine in front of a legion of scouts that go to attend those all-star games.

So let's look at this by level of effort in the Casual level of effort. Honestly, it's time to just take an emotional reset and step away for a month. The world will go by just fine without you paying attention to it. You can reconnect later. The one thing that you do need to do as a Casual dynasty player, and this goes to everybody else as well, is to recommit to whichever leagues you are in. Or decide to leave them so that your commissioner can fill your spot if you don't wish to play again next season, or you don't want to be in the league anymore.

At the Competitive level of effort, we're going to be auditing our rosters. We're going to be identifying our offseason priorities, and we're going to be watching for who's declaring for the NFL draft, particularly the underclassmen who are declaring. These will typically be who the first- and second-round picks of the NFL draft will be, and thus the first- and second-round rookie picks for you. That's who you'd want to pay attention to.

At the Pro level of effort, you want to pay attention to the Shrine Bowl and the Senior Bowl practice reports, because the practices themselves are actually more valuable than the games themselves. And the game may produce some stellar highlights for someone, but it's that week of practices leading up to it and the reactions that NFL scouts have to those and the coaches have to those that's very telling. So that's what you want to pay attention to at the Pro level. 

You'll also want to be putting out market feelers to your fellow managers, thinking about whether you want to trade picks or not, or do a pick swap or for players. And you also want to track potential late-round risers. So these would be the third round and beyond, and translating that also into the rookie pick. So looking even deeper down the pool of talent available to the draft and to start doing that in January.

Now in February, the big deal will be the NFL Combine. This is in Indianapolis. It's broken down by position group windows and takes almost two weeks to go forward. Most dynasty managers will pay attention just to the last week of that when the offensive skill players are out there.

At the Casual level, really there's no action required. Just pay attention to the headlines that are coming out of the Combine that that will get you started. At the competitive level, you want to start forming rookie tiers. That's taking the rookies that are doing very well in the Combine that are highly touted and starting to think of them in tiers so that as you approach your NFL draft, your rookie draft, rather, you have players that are roughly equivalent value right together so that you can pick and choose among those players.

You also might want to start seeking out some expert analysis of the rookie class. Things like the Footballguys draft guide, things like JJ Zachariason's guide and others that are available from different fantasy brands. Those would be great places to look as well to start your draft preparation a little early.

And at the Professional level, you want to build your initial draft board. You want to be conducting your own analysis, looking at film yourself, looking at additional experts for, for guidance, using more advanced expert guidance such as Matt Waldman's Rookie Scouting Portfolio.

You want to be identifying pro prospects who are mispriced. Maybe they are running a little hot for their skillset. Maybe they are sleepers and you want to be paying attention to those. But the thing you most want to be guarded against is overreacting to the Combine. Back when we were talking about training camp, we were talking about signals and noise. You want to be looking for signals and you want to be ignoring the noise.

When the calendar turns to March, the big deal in the NFL is going to be free agency. That is when players are going to sign for their new teams. That really kicks off in earnest in the middle of March, although that period leading up to it will be filled with all kinds of rumors and we'll start seeing the dominoes fall.

At the Casual level, you want to follow the major signings and the major free agent acquisitions that are happening. At the Competitive level, you want to look at all of them and you want to look at the roles these free agents are expected to play on their new teams. At the Pro level, you want to consider the impacts of the free agent departures and arrivals on the other players on the rosters that are affected in any potential role shifts.

So if a team's WR2 leaves in free agency, someone else has to become the WR2. If they don't bring in a free agent, that's either going to be a draft pick or it's going to be someone already on the roster. So be thinking about who that might be. And it's an opportunity to acquire them inexpensively before your fellow league managers realize that that's going to be the team's new WR2.

So you want to buy these sort of slighted players at a discount and you want to sell free agents that are going into suboptimal situations such as that WR2, who's going on to a team that runs the ball a lot and throws mostly to tight ends. They're not going to have as big of an impact on that team as they had on their previous one.

When we get to April, we have minicamps that are beginning. These would be for the veterans only because we haven't had the draft yet. That is at the end of April and is probably the signature event of the offseason for the NFL. 

At the Casual level you want to be—you want to be focused on draft night itself. You really should watch or at least pay close attention to Round 1 and see where those landing spots are for those top rookies. And then begin to identify some of your priority draft targets based upon the NFL draft, and based upon what you've garnered from your headline watching and what you picked up during the offseason.

At the Competitive level, you want to be honing your tiers and paying attention to what the analysts are saying about the different draft picks and how they fit with the new teams that have just gone—they've just gone to. So you want to watch the first round, you want to study day two, Rounds 2 and 3, and then you do want to see at least a review or writeup of what happened on day three. 

And you want to be paying attention to the buzzier risers and fallers, people who slide down the draft boards, people who move up the draft boards. Those are the kind of things that will help you to identify the players that you're going to want to draft in your rookie drafts the next month or, or later in the summer. 

At the Pro level, you've already got your initial draft board. So now we are refining that. We are looking at detailed analysis of the drafted players and their potential roles. We're going to exploit some landing spot overreactions, such as the player going to a really good offense, but there's no clear role for them. That would be a good time to sell them. 

Of course we are talking about rookies here. So we may not have those yet on our [fantasy] teams, so we're paying attention to the the roles so that we know whether we want to pay for a full draft price for them, or not. But I'm also talking about veteran players. I used this sort of nameless WR2 example a moment ago. We can look at what the draft did to that potential role, and possibly sell that player if we think that he is a little hot for what we—if he's going for a little higher than what we think his role is going to be. 

And then at the Pro level, we also want to be following the minicamps, so that we can get our first glimpse at how the veterans are going to be used even before the NFL draft. 

And at this point, we are entering the post-draft portion of our calendar. So what do we know? We know the coaching staffs of each team. We know the free agent signings of each team. We know the players that have moved around who have been veterans, and we know the rookies that were drafted by each team and where they are. But what we now don't know is how all of those pieces might fit together, and that's what we start learning after the draft.

In May, we begin to see rookie camps, which is where the rookies are first reporting to their new teams, and at some point we are doing our Dynasty rookie drafts. They can be as early as May, and they can actually be before the NFL draft. I certainly prefer to wait until after, but they can be from that point anytime until August. The earlier they are, the more you've needed to be paying attention to the rookie class so that you are in a strong position to make those draft picks. The later in the summer that draft is, the more that a casual level player can catch up and be ready for their draft in time.

So at the Casual level, we're going to be engaging in trades to get our guys; we're going to draft our preferred players when it is time for our rookie drafts. The Competitive level, we're going to be using those tiers that we've been creating and refining. We're going to draft within those primarily for the needs that we have. We're going to target players who are falling in value, and we are going to engage in trades to increase the value of either our picks or our players. 

At the Pro level, we're going to draft using our board that we've put together. We've got individual players ranked on our boards, and we're going to be drafting primarily for talent. As we get closer to the drafts, we will talk about that distinction between drafting for need and drafting for talent. 

We're also going to be engaging in trades that maximize value overall. And the thing for the Pros is to avoid hype traps, just being caught up in the hype over a player over some highlights or over the the key moments of the Combine and not looking at their broader scope of work.

When we reach June, we finally have OTAs. Those are organized team activities. We have the mandatory minicamps, and at this point we know for sure if there are any veteran players who are holding out or any rookies who are not signing their contracts for whatever reason.

Now in June at the Casual level, there's really nothing required of you, unless your rookie draft is in June. You can kind of fade back into the background again for a little while. Although it's good to check in with your league periodically to review any trade offers and, and just to see what your league mates are up to.

At the Competitive level of effort, you want to track major storylines. You want to monitor the holdout situations and what impact that might have, especially if a player ends up— first of off—they end up not signing at all. But secondly, even if that holdout does sign, but they wait until almost the start of the season, that means they probably haven't had any practice at all, and we need to adjust our expectations of that player accordingly.

And at the Pro level, we're going to follow daily camp reports. We're going to track usage and alignments, and we're going to have to try to guard against confirmation bias as we see things in usage and coaches' comments and coachspeak, the things that confirm what we think is going to happen. We need to make sure that we are not biased into just accepting that as confirmation and not looking at the other things that are being said or the other things going on in the field that might be contrary to what we are thinking so that we don't get caught with a preexisting expectation of a player that cannot be met during the season.

When we reach July, training camps open and the preseason begins towards the end of the month with the Hall of Fame game. At the Casual level, we are following major storylines. We're starting to reconnect with football if we have taken most of the offseason off. We're following our favorite teams. We're following the players that we drafted. 

At the Competitive level, our scope is widening. We're following most teams, we're following analysts and summaries of training camp and what's been going on during the summer, and we begin to adjust our strategy and make trades based on what we're seeing from training camp.

At the Pro level, this is where we really start ramping up. We are tracking weekly practice usage. We are listening to coachspeak. We are selling buzzy players whose talent or opportunities don't match their highlights. And we are buying unheralded players whose talents or opportunities just aren't making the headlines or the highlights.

And now we're in August when preseason games are happening. We hit the dreaded cut down week, which is when NFL teams drop to their 53-man rosters. And then injuries that we're monitoring, as sadly injuries are part of this game. They start all the way back in training camp. We can lose star rookies or veteran players for an entire season before they've even taken one snap of NFL action for the year.

At the Casual level, we're going to watch a few preseason games and we're going to follow significant stories. We're going to be reconnecting with our leagues. And the thing to avoid is panic trades, just walking into a situation a little cold and panicking because something you've heard and making a transaction without thinking through the strategy of it.

At the Competitive level, we're going to watch multiple preseason games and read the recaps of each game, keeping an eye on camp storylines and on weekly recaps. Footballguys, for example, has a team of writers looking at every team's camp and every week writing up a review of what happened during that week at every position group. So it's very easy to follow. You can, you can in just that couple of hours of reading that in a week and learn everything that you need to know basically about the entire week of practice just right there.

And in the Competitive level, you want to set your final strategic course for the season. You need to decide if you're a contender, if you're a rebuilder, if you're a wait-and-seer. And if you are a contender, are you headed North? Are you a perennial contender, just reloading for another championship run? Or are you on an aging roster that needs to win now and moving West in our compass metaphor. The rebuilds are going South. The wait-and-seers are going East. Your strategic direction course you set here in August, if you haven't done so already, therefore you identify the players that you need to move and the players that you want to target.

And you make another critical decision, which is do you need points or do you need picks? If you're moving more in a rebuilding direction, you want to stockpile picks. If you are in a contending direction, you want to bring in players who are going to help you win in the nearer term. We're going to adapt to injuries and we're going to go ahead and set that Week 1 lineup so we know outside of injuries who we're starting in Week 1 when we get there in September.

And at the Pro level, we're going to watch as many of the preseason games as we can. Maybe we catch the all-22s or we watch the summaries of them on NFL Pro or NFL Network. And we're paying, but, but as we watch the games, we're going to pay much more attention to the practices themselves because, in reality, the preseason games are secondary. They're an opportunity for a player to impress the coach in a real game situation—real game adjacent, anyway—but it's at practice where they really have their impact and where they're really going to earn their spots on the team. So we want to pay very close attention to coachspeak, to what the coaches are saying about their players and about players' roles.

Going forward, we're going to look at some daily recaps as best we can, and we're going to exploit the uncertainty and injuries by making trades that maximize our value, either because we want to acquire players who are injured and stash them for later, or because we want to take advantage of an uncertain situation, say a committee at running back. But we have a really strong belief that one of those players is going to emerge as the leader, so let's go ahead and acquire them while there's still uncertainty around that locker room and the player, the manager who may have that player may be a little uncertain as to what they want to do. They may be willing to offload that risk to you for a discount. So those are the activities that we want to do at the Pro level. 

And just like that, it's Week 1 of the next NFL season.

So I laid out a whole lot in a very short period of time, and all these different effort levels. And so let me go back for just a second and kind of frame the time commitment of these effort levels.

At the Casual level, we are talking an hour or two a week, wherever that happens to be in a month, even around your rookie draft. Basically, the more time you spend analyzing your rookies, the better you're going to be at drafting. But if all you have the time for is just to have your draft, you just need the few hours a week in order to get there.

At the Competitive level, we're really talking about three or four hours a week, just to get a little deeper into the things that I was talking about, to do some more reading, to listen to podcasts. In particular on your—if you're a commuter—you can listen to podcasts on your commute about football, so you can learn more about that.

And at the Pro level, we're really talking about eight, you know, six to eight, 10 hours a week spent. And I know that seems like an awful lot, that means you're really serious. That's why the Pro level is not for everyone and only a handful of my dynasty managers are really there. That's the level you need to be in order to have the full advantage that you can have for yourself and for your rosters in your dynasty leagues. If that sounds like too much, then focus on trying to get to and stay within that Competitive level.

Find out what you also enjoy, because if you don't enjoy watching preseason games or reading practice reports, then that's probably not something that's going to help you. You should probably just take that time and either listen to podcasts or do something else. Because what we don't want to do is burn you out before the season even starts because there's plenty of opportunity to burn out during the season. We don't need to do it right off the bat.

So, the trick for me here is that you want to remain connected to football, and the degree to which you want to do that and the time you want to spend doing that is an indicator of your expectations for success. But it does not by itself guarantee success or lack of success.

So, at the Casual level, you're really in this to have fun, to be part of a league, to be part of a group of people, a group of guys. You want to seek that thrill of winning, but you know that you're going to face an uphill climb against more prepared managers every season, and that's okay. Because you're going to enjoy the football season and you're going to enjoy it as more than just a fan of a single team because you've got players to follow and you've got players that you're playing against.

At the Competitive level, you are in this to earn a playoff spot to be one of the better managers, so you seek the experience of winning and you have some competitive advantages, but you still are going to face even more prepared managers. And you enjoy this game of football and you are willing to separate your fandom from a single team to your fantasy roster. That's not to say that you can't cheer your team all the way to a Super Bowl. I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that your focus is not just, your fandom is not just on the single team, but it's on every player on your roster, even if they happen to be on one of your favorite team's most-hated rivals.

And at the Pro level, you are in it to build your dynasty, to be a perennial contender. You want to seek an inevitability of winning that you, that everyone knows in your league that you are the team to beat because you have competitive advantages over all of your league mates. You simply have a better roster that you've put together because you've put the time into it in advance. 

You are a student of football and you love to get into the weeds about players, schemes, stats, coachspeak. It's being a student. It's just the love of football. It goes well beyond being a fan of any team. It is being a fan of the game and wanting to understand it at the most fundamental levels you can.

So whatever that level is—Casual, Competitive, Pro—it's not about, as you move up in that level, it's not about more, necessarily. It's about focus. It's about what you are paying attention to. It's about how you go about preparing for your fantasy season, how you want to use these eight months to get ready for the four that will determine whether you are a winner or a not-winner, a rebuilder or someone in between. 

That preparation that you do over the next eight months is going to go a long way to deciding how your season is going to go. The frustration that can come out of Dynasty is a misalignment of your effort and your expectations. If you are at the Casual level, you should not expect to have a dominant team that wins dynasty leagues year after year after year. That that expectation is a little, uh, is a little much for, for the effort you're putting in.

But there's no right level of effort. Either there's just the match between what you want to get out of the game, what you're willing to put into the game, what you want to learn about football, what you want your relationship with the game of football to be, and the time that you have to devote to that. 

And that more than anything else because, at the end of the day, yes, we're trying to win championships, but this is supposed to be fun. Fantasy football is supposed to be a lot of fun. And winning doesn't necessarily have to be part of the fun. But it is a lot more fun when you win.

I want to thank you so much for joining me this season on this initial journey of Dynasty Compass. We've gone through 20 episodes. We have talked about a lot of the strategies and the tasks and the mindsets that are necessary to succeed during the regular season and the playoffs. We are now to the point where we will start talking about those things during the offseason. We will go into a lot of detail over many of the things that we've talked about today. 

But what's important really to me, as the person who manages this show, is I'm not going to be the only one doing it. From this point forward, we're going to have specialists and expert guests who are going to help you prepare for your rookie draft and your upcoming season, offering their unique insights and expertise and analyses that will also go along with the ones that I have to offer. 

And I'm really excited about the season that's coming. So, please like, please subscribe, and please stay tuned toward the end of January, right around, just before the Super Bowl. Dynasty Compass will return for Season 2, and I'm looking forward to sharing that with you.

And I hope you, you like it and you're learning from it. And, we will see you in about a month. So thank you so much for being a part of the Dynasty Compass family.

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