Hammer the rookie RBs in all formats
And how you can play in a league against me in 2024
I started writing a few different things last week, but I’m a slave to pollen counts this time of year (for those unafflicted, that’s a reference to allergies; my hay fever brothers and sisters are nodding their heads), and I didn’t get anything completed. As a result, my first post-draft email is going to feature a few different thoughts, including some musings about best ball vs. dynasty, why the rookie RB class could be a key in 2024, and some thoughts about when we can expect to see Michael Penix play for the Atlanta Falcons.
Before we jump right in, a quick note that Fantasy Cares is doing their annual Eliminator series, and I have some leagues available to play in. These are 18-team leagues where the lowest score is eliminated each week until there is one winner. It’s a really fun concept where you have to balance floor and late-season upside, because to win you still have to outscore all the other best teams at the end.
But it’s all best ball with no roster changes after the draft. They also do funky scoring, and include kickers and even punters, plus head coaches if you want to go that far. Your starting lineup is only 8 slots each week in the best ball format, and they are all flex spots (with the only exception being you can only play a maximum of three QBs).
For each of these leagues, the coordinators put together a DM group on Twitter, and I’m always happy to chat in there and talk more about strategy and those things. I don’t think it’s a big secret, and I know a lot of people play in multiple of these things, so if you join one of mine and want to know how I’m approaching it so you can try to win some of the other ones, feel free to ask me in there. These are for charity and come with a requested donation of at least $10 for each league, and I’m hoping to fill as many of these as I can.
So far, I have two drafts filled and underway, and they’ll be posting my third league later today. Once that fills, a fourth one will be posted, etc. I’ll probably have them stop posting new leagues in a week or so, but if you want to come play in a unique league format against me, be sure to sign up here this week.
Let’s get to some takes.
Best ball vs. dynasty
For the majority of my time in the fantasy industry, rookie content was for dynasty sickos, and the post-draft period was focused on rookie drafts for leagues that not everyone was playing in.
It feels like that’s changed. Dynasty still exists, and I’m still in a handful of rookie drafts right now while hearing and seeing a ton of content around the format. I just recorded multiple episodes of Stealing Bananas about it, and it’s certainly fun to consider.
But in a lot of ways, best ball has simply cast dynasty aside. Best ball is easier to access, and there’s way less commitment at a time in the calendar when people don’t really want to be completely committed. Think about the difference in commitment level of acquiring a player in a dynasty league (either trading for him or drafting him) versus drafting him in best ball. It’s crazy!
If you get a little buyer’s remorse on the dynasty side, that’s brutal. I’ve had it. That’ll linger. If you get a little buyer’s remorse on the best ball side, you can just fire up a new draft, and then another new draft, and just not take the guy you realized you really didn’t feel great about drafting. All you have to worry about is the possibility that player was a negative piece on that one team you drafted, but the nature of best ball is that any individual draft is something of a throwaway anyway, and you’re trying to build a portfolio.
The flexibility that provides is incredible, especially as the draft and other key events on the NFL calendar impact our perceptions of players and teams throughout the offseason. You can be in and out on individual players at different times in the same offseason, which is great in a hobby where we’re notoriously not great at predicting and have to lean into uncertainty.
And this especially ties into rookies and makes best ball an easy way to get engaged with rookie analysis, which has always been a huge selling point of dynasty. I’m not really trying to shit on dynasty here, but I also get questions every year from people wanting to try it out, and I do like to give honest opinions. It’s definitely a labor of love. I’d written this part as an introduction last week, and then a great conversation in the Ship Chasing Discord sparked this comment a couple days ago, which is maybe not totally fair but is at least directionally accurate.
Like I said, this is maybe not totally fair, but I could see how someone might think it given how much activity is kind of required to be successful in dynasty, in terms of being engaged with trading and finding ways to gain value at the edges.
Also, while dynasty offers the promise of maximum flexibility to build a dominant long-term roster, it’s actually quite a bit less flexible in practice. We all love being able to hit on a star and have him locked up, but that alone doesn’t win you dynasty titles, and that feature is also a bug in that every single player in the league is locked up on a roster somewhere. If a leaguemate doesn’t want to deal with you in trade negotiations, you’re not actually able to get your objectives done.
Anyway, dynasty can still be a lot of fun in the right league, and I do still enjoy it. But a huge part of the point I want to make here is also that one of the things I’ve learned with rookie evaluations for dynasty — and trying to be successful at team-building long-term — is how much of it does come back to a shorter timeline.
The thing I used to always ignore in my early dynasty play was how it’s not really about whether that rookie becomes a superstar, or at least not fully. Instead, trade value from one year to the next is a very real thing, and you really don’t want a Jaxon Smith-Njigba situation where the player’s market value has fallen quite a bit, and he’s on your roster and never going to go anywhere because you’re destined to be above market on him for the foreseeable future (you’ll never trade him for what someone will actually give up). I’ve been there and done this with guys like Laviska Shenault and Skyy Moore, where I’ve always wanted to believe in their rebound potential more than was probably fair, at least in dynasty.
Which is just to say that dynasty for me has moved more toward a year-to-year game, in that I now heavily consider early-career production when making rookie-draft picks. That’s obviously the crux of the application of rookies in best ball, too, and it leaves me asking that if prospect evaluation really does just boil down to trying to nail the first-year breakouts in all formats, shouldn’t I just focus that energy on best ball, where I can be more fluid with my positions one year to the next?
I mean if you’ve already played all the formats and still really enjoy dynasty, you absolutely should do you. I just find it more enjoyable to be able to reevaluate every season, because I recognize I’m not in control of most things I’m analyzing. There’s just so much variance in our ability to identify player talent, and then on top of that every offseason NFL teams will do things that seem insane from a variety of potential angles, whether that’s how it positions them to get the most out of some player I love, or — setting aside my player takes — simply what I believe gives them the best chance to succeed and go win Super Bowls. This is why we say the NFL is always chaos, right?
So anyway, this is a major reason I’ve always stayed much further in the redraft lane than dynasty, because I get more joy out of attacking a new analysis once new parameters are known. And I guess I decided to pit dynasty versus best ball not to say one is better necessarily, but rather just to emphasize how much I enjoy what best ball offers — this low-impact way to scratch that same offseason itch dynasty provides.
It also helps you understand where my focus will be with some of my rookie evaluations. I want to place an emphasis on early-career production, because I’m thinking about it more from the perspective of where I want my best ball exposures for 2024 than where I want my dynasty exposures for their whole careers.
Hammer the rookie RB class in all formats
If you’ve followed any prospect information so far, you know the 2024 RB class has been widely discarded. Without a standout star, and with little buy-in from the league in terms of draft capital, it’s easy to just look past the RBs, especially since we as a fantasy community are getting so good at that in recent years anyway.
But I think they are one of the biggest keys in 2024 fantasy football.