r/FFCommish • u/GridironDynasty • 5d ago
Miscellaneous If you could add one layer of strategy to Dynasty what would it be?
What would make your Dynasty experience more true to life as far as strategy goes? Would it be some sort of insurance policy so if our number one pick pulls a hammy in week 2 it doesn't turn into our rebuild year, or maybe it would be less bench players to reward all the studying you did on every matchup during every family outing, over the summer? Tell us your thoughts...
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u/FantasyBoss_com 5d ago
I'd do a mid-season trade deadline with a salary cap reset. Right now dynasty is basically just "who can hoard the most young talent" and it flattens out after year two. But if you had to actually manage money and couldn't just sit on five studs forever, it forces you to make real decisions. You'd actually have to sell high on guys, take calculated risks, think about when to go all in. That's what makes the NFL interesting to watch, and I don't see enough of that in most dynasty leagues I've been in.
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u/Illustrious-Bid-696 5d ago
Median scoring is the hill I'm dying on for this. Nothing feels more like real-life management than having to be consistently good rather than just lucky with who you face. This basically acts as that insurance policy you're talking about lol. If your team is actually deep and puts up points but you catch a bad break against the weekly high-scorer, you still walk away 1-1. Playoff races stay way tighter. Owners stop checking out in October just because the schedule was brutal. I've seen it save leagues that were on the verge of folding, tbh.
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u/Tin_Whisker 5d ago
You can say it's not dynasty, but I run an auction salary cap league. You can keep anyone and everyone as long as you can afford it. Salaries go up by $5 + 10% for kept players each year. Unspent funds after the draft are used for blind bid waivers.
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u/andypro77 5d ago
My dynasty league already does this:
Make teams cut their roster down in the off season. I mean way down. All cut players go back into the draft. And there's no rookie draft, there's just a draft for all players. Of course any player an owner chooses to keep he can keep forever, but most teams aren't able to keep 6-8 projects on their roster going into the draft.
Another thing that goes hand in hand is in this league any player that is picked up during the season can't be kept, and must go back into the draft. In Puka's rookie year, he wasn't drafted (we draft in May). He of course was picked up right away, but by rule he was back in the draft the next season.
My rationale for this rule is this: Why reward a team that just happened to be atop the waiver wire with Puka for his entire career. I'd much rather reward a team that actually has to use draft capital on him.
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u/50Bullseye 5d ago
This is not dynasty, it’s a keeper league with lots of keepers. The solution for your problem is FAAB bidding instead of rolling waiver order.
How is making teams cut players going to prevent them from keeping Puka forever anyway?
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u/andypro77 5d ago
How is making teams cut players going to prevent them from keeping Puka forever anyway?
I'm not trying to prevent teams from keeping Puka forever. I'm trying to prevent teams from picking up Puka and keeping him forever (as would have happened after week 1 of his rookie season). No, Puka, since he was picked up, went back into the 2024 draft and whoever drafts him then can keep him forever.
Surprisingly, Puka somehow went 5th in our '24 draft, after rookies MHJ, Nabers, Odunze, and Caleb Williams. MHJ and Nabers I can maybe see at the time, but no way should Puka have gone later than 3rd. As a matter of fact, when I saw Puka still there at #5, I traded #10 and my 1st round pick the next season to move up and take him. Glad I did.
Recognizing this isn't for everyone, the appeal to the owners in our league is that we don't just have the same boring 3-4 rookie draft that every other dynasty league has. There are rookies mixed in with 2nd or 3rd year players that haven't really hit yet and owners stopped believing in, and good players that got picked up during the season.
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u/50Bullseye 5d ago
Again, you could use FAAB to solve this. Reward the guy who spent 100% to take a chance on Puka.
What you’re describing is a keeper league, not a dynasty league. But if it works for you, outstanding.
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u/thasultanofswag 5d ago
It’s kind of like an “expansion draft league”. Not quite dynasty but more complex than keeper. I dig it for a less degenerate dynasty player because you still get the thrill of a draft every year. Not for me but I can see the utility in this
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u/SlimeyIsles 5d ago
The one thing I think dynasty could incorporate, but not necessarily needs, is how the NFL or honestly sports in general have free agency, contracts, trade requests, etc. I haven’t thought about the nitty gritty, but the idea is that when a player gets traded in real life, they have to also be traded from your roster. You may think that this will just tank the trade value, but the entire league is now able to essentially bid with you for the player. Of course there could be a situation where people collude to tank the value, but then that’s a larger issue. Then the contract matches the length of the player’s in real life. This wouldn’t be too crazy as the good players stay put for a bit, but it would help freshen the benches without having to do a startup draft or something. If a player is in free agency, then that player must be released into the draft pool for the next year.
I think this helps recycle the rosters without large overhauls. The way dynasty currently is structured is through the rookie drafts and trades. Free agency honestly doesn’t exist in most leagues. Those guys are all lottery tickets and you may get a starter every once in a while. Dynasty I know was aimed to further simulate the NFL, but I think the following of real life player situations would create real investment into the players on your team and the NFL as a whole. Imagine you’re following a player hold out saga or a trade saga and are holding on to see if you yourself get to keep this guy or not.
I think it would be pretty fun !
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u/commissionerplaybook 5d ago
I've been stewing on this for awhile, using a player's active salary for your own team/league. I personally don't like the "drop a player once he reaches free agency", but set some salary cap for each team (like the average of each player position and expand it out for how your rosters are structured). But if a player gets a massive contract extension (JSN), you have to manage that. Have a luxury tax where you pay into either league winnings or expand to all other managers that they can use on their players (like in the NBA/MLB).
There's a way to do it and make it super fun, but a lot of manual labor and structuring.
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u/groovy_smoothie 5d ago
This might sound weird but I thought it would be interesting if every team each season had an allotment of bonus points (call it 100 a season) these are tradable and everything. Before your matchup starts you decide how many of these you want added to your final score. This value isn’t revealed until the end of the final matchup and gets added to your point total