Dynasty fantasy football is all about long-term player management, and it all begins with the startup draft.
Unlike the more common redraft league that holds an annual draft once a year around Labor Day, newly forming dynasty fantasy football leagues hold one massive startup draft where hundreds of players on both offense and defense are divided up among the participants.
Because this is the roster you’ll have in place for years to come, having the right strategy for your startup draft can make the difference between a contending team and one that is looking at a total rebuild after a season or two.
It starts with understanding the unique scoring and objectives of dynasty fantasy football and the importance of selecting for value. And it also takes the discipline to understand best strategy for a dynasty startup draft is sometimes having no strategy at all.
More about that in a minute.
Understanding Dynasty Fantasy Football Startup Drafts
Whether you’re joining a dynasty fantasy football league on a platform like Sleeper or FFPC or evolving your home league from keeper to dynasty, you’ll need to kick things off with a startup draft.
The startup draft will form the basis for all rosters and include both established players and incoming rookies. In every subsequent year, your dynasty league will have a separate draft just for rookies, but you start by drafting from a pool of every NFL player.
If you’re used to meeting at a bar with friends and knocking out your draft in a few hours over beer and wings, the dynasty startup draft could be a shock. Dynasty rosters typically include between 20 and 30 players, and multiplied by the average 12-team league that means somewhere around 300 players will be selected.
So a typical dynasty startup draft could take anywhere up to a week to complete as managers make their selections virtually. This is especially true if you’ve joined an online league where participants can be spread out across multiple time zones.
It’s very helpful to understand the structure of your league and the makeup of your roster. Many leagues take the superflex approach, allowing multiple quarterbacks in a given week and giving the position greater importance. Others add more weight to catches for tight ends, and there are a host of ways to determine scores for individual defensive players.
You’ll also need to understand what kind of draft your league has chosen. If you’ve found your way into a dynasty league, then odds are you’re a little more knowledgeable and committed than the average fantasy player and understand the different styles of drafts.
But for those who might not, here’s a quick refresher:
- In a snake draft, players pick in sequential order with the order reversed in each round. Round 1 picks from 1-10, then Round 2 picks 10-1 and so on until the end of the draft.
- In an auction draft, league managers acquire players by bidding on them. The highest bid gets the player. This is a more fluid draft but not as popular for dynasty leagues because it can take much, much longer to complete. This is especially true for leagues that are spread out across the country and not meeting in person for a draft.
Value-Based Drafting Strategy
In a redraft league, there are countless approaches you can take to build out a roster. Because the entire league and rosters are confined to one season (with the exception of keeper leagues), it’s really about finding a winning mix of players for that given year.
Some players employ the “Zero RB” strategy to avoid running backs until at least the fourth round or the “Hero RB” strategy to take a stud early and then punt on the position until later rounds. Any of them can be successful depending on the given season and how well they can spot talent in later rounds.
But in dynasty fantasy football, it’s generally a better idea to scrap any specific pre-draft strategy and instead hunt for the greatest value with every pick. (What do we mean by “value” and how do you figure it out by player? More on that below.)
To put this into NFL terms, value-based drafting is the equivalent of a general manager employing a “best player available” approach across the NFL Draft. Because you’re starting from scratch in a dynasty startup draft, you don’t have one or two roster holes to fill — you have one giant, black hole. When you’re using a value-based drafting approach, you’re not worried about filling each roster spot individually but instead filling that black hole with as much value as possible.
Some experts advocate planning nothing at all beyond this value-based approach. To them, if you’re going into a dynasty fantasy football draft with any specific strategy in mind, you might as well be showing up in handcuffs.
“In reality, the best strategy for a dynasty startup draft is to not have a strategy at all,” Avery Huffman of Dynasty Domain. “If you’re taking the value in a dynasty startup draft, you should be drafting the same way every single time.”
This is especially effective if your opponents don’t take the same value-based approach — Huffman describes this as “zigging when your opponents zag.” If they’re employing a “Zero RB” strategy that has gained so much popularity in redraft leagues, they’ll be leaving a lot of running back value on the board for you to seize. When there’s a run on tight ends, you can find value in the receivers they’re leaving on the board.
Here’s a common example: Many dynasty players emphasize stacking their team’s roster with youth. They may even have an age cutoff in mind, like not wanting to roster wide receivers older than 26 years old. That means they are likely passing up an established wide receiver who has more value relative to the average at his position just because he’s passed their arbitrary age cutoff.
So when it comes time to make your selection, that 27-year-old receiver who just got passed over is ripe for the taking.
Be Careful About Trading
If you’re employing a value-based drafting approach, you’ll understand that value is found everywhere across the draft board, from the first pick to the last. That means any trade where you’re giving up picks is forfeiting a chance to find additional value.
Huffman said he has a hard rule against trading up in a dynasty startup draft.
“Never, ever trade up,” Huffman said. “Almost always, the best teams are the ones not trading up. When you’re trading up, you are automatically operating at a disadvantage because of how much you’ll need to overpay to get there. Most of the time you’ll be able to stay where you are and get someone in the same value tier.”
Of course, there are always exceptions. Fantasy football writer Tommy Mo of The Undroppables noted back in 2020 that many managers were catching on to the benefits of trading back. If Huffman suggests that you “zigging when your opponents zag,” Mo believes you could do this with trades as well.
“This trend is starting to take off in the many startup drafts I have participated in the past two seasons,” Mo wrote. “Trade back for current rookies. Trade back for future rookie picks. Trade back for additional picks in later rounds. But to win at fantasy football, sometimes you need to do things differently than what the majority are doing. So what if instead of trading back, you decided to trade up in a startup draft?”
Mo suggested trading up to go all-in on top-5 players at every position through the first three rounds, then adding high-upside players later in the draft. This strategy does carry some big risks, especially if you end up giving away too much draft capital and leaving other positions bare.
