Passive Trading
The Art of the Patient Deal
Sometimes, The Best Deals Are The Ones You Never Make
How many times have you made a deal that you almost instantly regret? Or how many times did you mortgage your future with your draft capital on a player only to miss the playoffs that season? Between countless hours filling in cells on spreadsheets with the latest analytics, or overdosing on an ocean of content, it can be easy to obsess over our fantasy football teams and make these mistakes. But like a dark comedy, the results of our efforts are often ironic & cruel.
It’s not any of our faults either - we are limited by the structures of the traditional snake startup draft and the scarcity of ideal players that leave much to be desired when we first see our lineups. That’s why trading is so much fun! It’s not only the art of negotiating and the thrill of the deal but also the opportunity to take our rosters to whole new levels. The problem is that this road has many more paths to peril and destruction than glory.
It is pivotal to establish above all else that we need to leave a lot of room for error. As much as I believe in the power of data it’s important to temper expectations on what analytics can do for us today. I have a great deal of respect for anyone wanting to wrangle with the multiverse of unpredictable variables inherent in football, but we cannot forecast too much certainty on injuries, or if a player is going to breakout/fall off, if a new coach/scheme is going to be effective, or even which NFL teams are going to be bad! Even when we have a consensus view as a fantasy community, real-life football personnel like to remind us how often their thoughts are not aligned with ours.
We cannot avoid the impact these variables have on our fantasy football teams because they are out of our control. The only thing left for us to focus on is our decision-making. I believe the best results come from marrying a process of preparation with a commitment to patience in trading. If nearly everyone you are playing against is operating off the same ADPs, pieces of team news, and player projections, then the only angle left to pursue is towards your fellow leaguemates themselves. The following lessons are principles that will serve you well in remaining steadfast and calculated in trading throughout the fantasy season. There are of course exceptions to each of these rules that are largely dependent upon league settings, but for most of these examples please consider them in the context of players/picks of consequence and high value.
Learn from the Past
Before we get into the principles, we are going to take a painful trip (fun for you) down memory lane with my past dynasty leagues. I reviewed the off-season (from renewal until the 1st game of the regular season) trades of three different dynasty leagues that I participated in 2021 and 2022. The first league is 1QB with 42 off-season trades I appraised in 2021 and 36 trades in 2022. The second league is SuperFlex with 14 off-season trades I graded in 2021 and 17 trades in 2022. The last league is also SF with 1 offseason trade in 2021 and 15 trades in 2022. I did not include startup pick trades in my sample. I evaluated each trade by awarding one side a positive grade if I deemed it a clear-cut win. On average, only 1/10 of the trades I reviewed were either positive for both managers or had negligible results. There were a few key takeaways I gathered from this exercise:
Very few teams won more than 50% of their trades.
The teams that won the championship either didn’t trade in the offseason or won more than 50% of their trades.
The most apparent takeaway - the teams that were focused on pick acquisition accounted for the most won trades.
Not all leagues are the same - both SF leagues I reviewed had a higher percentage of won trades on the non-playoff side of the league (where picks were the focus), compared to the 1 QB league where the vast amount of won trades were accounted by playoff teams (where players were the focus). This makes sense considering QB’s and picks are a much higher value in SF leagues vs 1 QB leagues.
The teams that committed to hoarding picks through 2021-2022 are amongst the most intimidating rosters going into 2023.
It’s All About Timing
Regardless of how you play fantasy football, I would like to advocate adding a Risk-Adverse philosophy to your repertoire, where the focus is not only weighing what historical data has taught us (the odds something will happen), but mainly considering the multitude of things that can go wrong with a trade. We are limited by the perceived value of the current players and draft capital at our disposal, which in turn limits the chances to execute trades, and even fewer chances to strike out with bad trades before we find ourselves in a tough spot. But it isn’t enough to think of trades as ‘at-bats’ - to hit a home run you also need to consider 'when to swing.' We will cover when to swing in the next edition of this series Proactive Trading - Fostering the Right Deal.
DON’T SWING at Championships early in the off-season - Engaging in an arms race during the off-season for the most dominant starting lineup at the expense of your most valuable draft capital is a massive risk that often doesn’t work. It’s a bad bet to gamble with your picks on players before the NFL Draft, Free-Agency, or Pre-Season injuries in hopes your targeted players don’t lose value.
DON’T SWING too hard at the Elite Skill-Positions - It’s one thing if you are only going up one tier between players and the investment is tolerable. But putting 2-3+ high draft pick eggs into one basket that can get hurt, underperform, or have valuable touches taken away by another player is a great way of really setting your team back. It wasn’t too long ago that Jonathan Taylor was routinely being traded away for 3+ 1st-round picks. And despite remaining an RB1 in dynasty, the winds have changed on JT’s value following his abysmal 2022 season and you’ll be lucky if you can trade him for more than half his former value. The same can be said about Kyle Pitts, but I am hopeful for his situation to improve and his value to bounce back.
Of course, there are players like Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, and CeeDee Lamb that people will champion as exceptions to the rule. As much as I love these players and recognize the WoRP (wins over replacement player) they bring, the gap advantage isn’t the same as the elite QBs of the world have in most SuperFlex leagues over just about every other player, or Kelce once had over every other tight end. It is my preference to down-tier Jefferson and Chase into another elite WR with a plus on top or into an elite QB in an SF league.
The Iron Bank
Draft Capital is king in dynasty football. High draft picks (1.01-1.06) predominantly increase in value throughout their lifespan because the picks themselves can’t get hurt. They are also bolstered by the NFL Combine and Draft during a period when fantasy managers are starving for anything football-related. Lastly, they are attached to young prospects that we hope will dominate in the professional league. When you stockpile enough of these picks doors start opening and very often the best players become available to you for trading. The only catch to the Iron Bank approach is that it often requires an immediate commitment to a Rebuilding strategy at the inception of your league.
In a full-scale rebuild, the main assets retained are cornerstone QBs, draft capital, and the skill players who have not yet crescendoed in value. I would further expand this to tight ends who still have three-plus years of elite play left in 1.75-2 pt TE Premium leagues. Any other player on your squad should be put on the trade block with a price tag in mind. In this type of rebuild, you don’t foresee making a title run either this year or next year, but if done correctly then the third year is when you put the league on notice. Given this time frame, it doesn’t make much sense to target running backs given their shelf life or elite WRs that have peaked in value and would be more useful as assets that could be broken up into multiple high-valued pieces.
Your main objective in rebuilding is to feed and protect your war chest of highly valued picks. This means controlling the market on early to mid-rookie picks while rebuilding (3-4+ 1sts per class is ideal). One simple move to get this strategy rolling is to trade away any projected late 1st (1.10-1.12) or early 2nd round picks to a desperate manager for their next year’s first-round pick. It’s a better bet that the late pick you traded away will either turn into a better pick next year or can be traded for a better player in-season than the rookie you would have otherwise spent it on whose hit rate of a future top season is historically half the odds of a top 6 rookie player.
With this goal in mind, it is also advantageous to trade away the older, productive assets that won’t likely see the day you make a title run and whose point-scoring works against your odds of capturing a top pick in your upcoming rookie draft. This strategy works well when employing a passive trading mindset considering the peak value of these productive veterans is often mid to late into the fantasy seasons when championships hang in the balance. Just be sure to not sell great vets at a discount - be patient and wait for the need to arise late in the season (they always do).
Fade The Hype
The most common pitfalls I see that ensnare managers is when they deplete their caches of draft capital to go on spending sprees of the highest market-value players (which can often be less productive than their more experienced/cheaper vet counterparts) or overvalue the impact an incoming rookie will have on their fantasy production. In terms of the first trap, it can be quite easy to abandon the Iron Bank strategy when you have 8-10 1st round picks burning a hole in your pocket and the off-season drags on with no football in sight. Very rarely are these resources allocated towards the correct pieces for roster construction and with the proper amount of depth to endure a full fantasy season. Instead, they are often spent on the shiniest toys.
Just as tempting is the emotional draw rookies can have on our heartstrings. Peter Howard (@pahowdy) is the best in the industry regarding grounding our expectations of incoming rookies and their historical hit rates. His findings suggest based upon data between 2010-2021, that on average there are 2 QBs, 2 RBs, 3 WRs, and 2 TEs that are selected in the first three rounds of the NFL draft that have at least 1 top 12 fantasy season per rookie class. Overall, your odds of hitting on a top 12-24 contributor in the first round of your rookie draft is about the same as a coin flip. Those odds are cut in half for each subsequent round of your rookie drafts, with some positions faring much better than others (RB/TE being your best bets).
Following your rookie drafts, do not squander next year’s draft capital buying up all the rookies you missed out on because of some overzealous beat reporter who claimed that Trey Sermon or Terrace Marshall was the next great thing (it still hurts). You especially want to be wary of trading for any rookies selected in the 3rd round of the NFL Draft or later with risky profiles by waiting until the Pre-Season dust settles and the final depth charts are cemented (I’m looking at you Isaiah Spiller). Even if you suffer pre-season injuries it’s best to exercise restraint and fade the noise.
Final Kernels of Wisdom
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by:
Trading away good profile/good situation rookies too soon (unless a 1st Rd pick is involved, hold).
Trading away young, productive players after just one season.
Trading top dollar for a player that hasn't done much for multiple healthy seasons and the community has written off (later career breakouts are incredibly hard to predict).
Trading away your best starters before trying to trade your backups.
Trading away your best picks (1sts & 2nds) initially - start with smaller trades with 4ths & 3rds before ramping up to the higher picks before the trade deadline.
Trading away all your shares of a talented & young player because of a frustrating injury history. There isn't much sense in selling at a panicked discount, especially if you are rebuilding anyway. Deebo Samuel taught me this lesson.
Trading away valuable assets for pricey RBs early on.
Trading away picks before you confidently know their value.
Trading away top dollar for non-elite QBs.
The Hardest Choices Require The Strongest Wills
There is nothing sexy about patient trading, nor is it fun donating to your league pot for multiple years while rebuilding in the hopes of “next year is my year!” With that being said, adopting a rebuild strategy is a much easier pill to swallow when 25-30% of your other leagues are in “win-now” mode. Pairing this with a Portfolio Approach and diversifying the players across your various leagues should offer enough variety to keep your hands from becoming too idle. But don't confuse passive trading with being lazy; there is a lot of groundwork and research to be done throughout the off-season to help prepare yourself for the upcoming season. In today’s leagues, it requires a Thanos level of commitment, preparation, execution, and patience to win (and luck). Stay the course, and at the end of all your labors, you can finally rest and watch the sunrise on multiple championships.
