We’re at the time in the fantasy football calendar where most dynasty rookie drafts are long over. The few leagues still holding out are likely waiting until just before the start of the season. But if you’re still feeling that dynasty drafting urge, now is a great time to do a dynasty startup draft. We’re here to help with some dyansty startup draft advice specific to maximizing the return on investment of your picks.
It’s always a great time to do a dynasty startup draft. However, startup drafts are risky, especially for less experienced dynasty managers. A few wrong moves can doom your entire fantasy future. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some basic strategies to help maximize the value of your dynasty startup picks.
- Dynasty Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Dynasty Rookie Draft Simulator
- DBro’s Dynasty Rookie Draft Primers
- Dynasty Fantasy Football Rankings
Dynasty Startup Draft Advice
Find Rankings You Trust
Especially for newer dynasty managers, the single most important piece of advice I can give is to find a source of dynasty fantasy football rankings you like and use them to inform your decisions. You don’t have to blindly follow the rankings, but it’s not a good idea to reach for a player well before they are ranked, particularly in the early rounds.
FantasyPros’ dynasty expert consensus rankings (ECR) are a great place to start, and I also recommend checking out the crowdsourced dynasty rankings provided by KeepTradeCut (KTC) and FantasyCalc.
Know Your Format
I lied in the previous blurb. This is the single most important piece of advice I can give: Rankings are useless if they aren’t for the correct format. Dynasty leagues tend to have more extreme roster and scoring settings than redraft leagues, so knowing exactly how your league is set up is paramount.
Active roster and bench size, the number of starting slots for each position (especially the number of quarterback spots), the number of teams and specific scoring settings can all have huge impacts on how you should approach the draft. Not paying attention to these settings is one of the easiest ways to mess up a startup draft, while accurately adjusting is one of the fastest ways to get an edge on your league.
Pick a Strategy
Unlike in a traditional redraft league, where everyone is trying to win the championship in the upcoming year, dynasty leagues allow for managers to take multiple different approaches. You can go all-in with a core of old, productive players, build for the future with rookies and potential breakouts or tread the middle with a mix of both. While the title of this section is “Pick a Strategy,” the best move is actually to enter your startup draft with no strategy in mind and then decide your approach based on how the board falls.
Which strategy you choose is less important than simply having one, as the worst possible outcome is ending up with an incoherent roster where you immediately feel pressured to trade a player or two. If you do want a more in-depth guide to different startup approaches, I wrote an article last offseason breaking down the most common strategies and how to choose one.
Tread Trade Carefully
A dynasty league’s startup draft is often the single most active trading window in the entire lifespan of the league (this is part of why startup drafts are so fun). With each manager taking a unique approach and every team having future rookie draft picks available as liquid capital, there is tons of room to maneuver. It’s also much easier to make win-win trades in a format where not every team is 100% committed to winning every season. Trading to fit your chosen strategy, or simply trading out of the top of tiers and into the bottom of tiers, is a great way to maximize the value of your startup draft picks.
With all that said, trading is also the easiest way to sink your dynasty team for years into the future. Especially if you are new to the format, be careful when making trades. Check your moves using the dynasty trade value chart or the trade calculators provided by the aforementioned KTC and FantasyCalc. Don’t give up future rookie draft capital, especially future first-round picks, unless you are getting something valuable in return. Be extra suspicious of any deal where you give up one elite asset for multiple OK assets — five pennies aren’t normally worth a nickel.
Don’t Stress About Positions
In redraft fantasy football leagues, the draft is all about building a championship-winning lineup. While filling out your lineup is still important in dynasty, a startup draft is also about building a valuable roster. Deeper rosters, the longer relevant period and a more liquid trade market all make it less important to focus on filling out your starting lineup.
For example, drafting a third valuable quarterback in a Superflex league where you already have two studs is viable. Alternatively, you don’t have to be too concerned if you don’t fill a particular slot in your lineup until very late in the draft. If the rest of your team is ready to compete, you’ll be able to buy a productive vet before the trade deadline. If not, having a relative zero in your lineup could help propel your team to that juicy 1.01 rookie pick.
Have Fun
Unless you’re playing in a very high-stakes league, your number-one goal in dynasty, like all fantasy football formats, should be to have fun. For me, fun is found in maximizing slight value edges and dominating my high school friends, which is what this article is all about. But that’s not the case for everyone. And I’m here to say that, if you’d rather root for the rookie quarterback on your favorite team than increase your chances of winning a championship by 1%, go for it.
After all, we’re all going to be wrong anyway. At this time last year, Anthony Richardson was a first-round pick in Superflex startup average draft position (ADP). Kimani Vidal and Ezekiel Elliott were being drafted ahead of Chuba Hubbard and Bucky Irving. Travis Etienne was worth more than Saquon Barkley. Jake Ferguson was above George Kittle. Go back any farther than a year, and the draft board becomes entirely unrecognizable. With that in mind, get your guys.
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Ted Chmyz is a fantasy football contributor for FantasyPros.com. Find him on Twitter and Bluesky @Tchmyz for more fantasy content or to ask questions.
