Down and Dynasty

Championship so close you can feel it!!

Playoff season is just about here. Depending on how many teams make your playoffs this may be the final week of the season, or if you have a three-week playoff you have one more week in the regular season to compete for playoff seeding. Please don’t tell me your finals are in Week 17. If that is the case, fix it, it is broken!! I’m off my soap box, back to topic. We are going to be looking at roster construction and the kind of moves you should be making to secure your playoff run.

Since you are in the playoffs, you have already built a good or maybe even a great team, but as Monday’s news reminds us, we are only as good as the roster depth we have developed. Fantasy owners felt the heat today with Melvin Gordon being out two to four weeks, Jack Doyle, Marvin Jones, Jeff Heuerman and Andy Dalton going to IR, Leonard Fournette being suspended for one game, AJ Green, Joe Flacco and Mitch Trubisky still out and Blake Bortles was benched. The impact of losing these players is impacted by the size of your starting lineup, how many teams in your league and the number of players on your rosters. A standard re-draft team in a 12-team league will start QB/2RB/2WR/TE/Flex/K, maybe two flex with a total roster size of 16 or 17 players. In dynasty the starting lineup QB/2RB/3WR/TE/2Flex maybe three and a total roster size of 24 to 28 players, maybe more, plus a taxi squad and injured reserve. Obviously losing Gordon, Green and Fournette will have more impact than Dalton or Bortles.

So, the question is what can you do to protect your team. First, we build our starting lineup. Unlike re-draft where you don’t roster a second quarterback unless you are playing matchups, you get a second quarterback, maybe you have a third quarterback as well, probably a rookie or young guy that will be a starter in a year or two. Bortles or Dalton fall into that second quarterback range. You would start them on a bye week, or if your stud quarterback gets injured. But how do you protect against losing your back up or starter. In dynasty you roster someone like Jeff Driskell or Cody Kessler. You look at the rookie draft and where are quarterbacks being drafted. On different teams I have Josh Rosen, Lamar Jackson and Mason Rudolph on the taxi squad. Rosen is on a 2–10 team playing for the 2019 first overall pick. I am not going to activate him. Blake Bortles is my only other healthy quarterback so going into next week I will be spending my FAAB budget to acquire Jeff Driskell for Week 13.

Jackson is behind Drew Brees and Philip Rivers on a team contending for a playoff spot but not likely a championship team; he will not be activated this season. Rudolph is on a playoff team that starts two quarterbacks, Ben Roethlisberger and Marcus Mariota are the starters, but I also have Case Keenum for bye weeks. One is close to retirement, one is teetering between break out and bust and the third is a journeyman. For protection Big Ben is backed up with Joshua Dobbs, who will likely be the starter this season if Roethlisberger is hurt but will be in a competition with Rudolph when Roethlisberger retires. That team has the depth to withstand an injury at the quarterback position and the possibility to package a good starting quarterback with another position player for an upgrade if I feel like that move will win me the league.

Running backs are a little different, as it is the position that takes the roughest beating game in game out. Building your running back core to last the season takes creativity, patience and hard work. More than once I have spent at least than a week discussing trade options with another league member only to have the deal fall through and then come back up a couple weeks later and finally get done.

When drafting a team for re-draft a great strategy is to divide the position up into tiers. You want to do this when trying to improve your team. In a recent startup I took Ezekiel Elliott with my first-round pick. I hand cuffed Elliott with Rod Smith in the 18th round. I believe if Elliott were to suffer an injury Smith would be the lead back even though their styles are somewhat different. I started off 1–4 in this league and knew I needed to make a move or it was going to be over for me. I reached out to another team in a similar situation as mine and asked about Kareem Hunt. We ended up agreeing that I would send 19 and 20 first round picks and Aaron Jones for Kareem Hunt and John Brown. At that time, I was losing hope that Green Bay would ever give Jones the volume necessary to be the RB2 I needed and if this gambit were to succeed the draft picks would be late in a 16-team league. I improved to 6–5 after the Hunt trade and had moved into the fifth seed. The bad news — I close out the regular season against the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in the league. I lost this week with Hunt on his bye, I’m not sure it would have mattered, and dropped to the seventh seed and out of the playoffs. I still have a shot in week 13 against the No. 2 seed. I need to win and then catch another break or two to get into the playoffs.

Let’s finish up with receivers. The second, and often third wide receiver on a team will produce more fantasy points than the second running back. There are exceptions like Tevin Coleman, Kenyan Drake or Austin Ekeler, but that statement is generally true. As such starting lineups often have and additional wide receiver spot and flex positions are often manned by wide receivers. So, how do you build depth and protect against injury for the playoff?

I like to set my line up as a depth chart. Who is my WR1, WR2, WR3, Flex, Flex? What does the line up look like during bye weeks? When you plot it out you can see where your weakness is. On my 12-team Empire League we have three wide receivers and two flex positions. I start Adam Theilen, Mike Evans, Julian Edelman with flex options of DeSean Jackson, Sammy Watkins, Dede Westbrook, Donte Moncrief, DeVante Parker and Marcel Ateman. We start three running backs as well, and I have David Johnson, LeSean McCoy, Doug Martin, Elijah McGuire, Ty Montgomery, Jamal Williams and Justin Jackson. As you can see the four to six wide receivers are much better than the four to six running backs.

In a league this deep you need to adjust your expectations about how many points the seventh and eighth options are going to score. What will happen if I lose Theilen or Evans? This is a league with no trade deadline so I am looking to package a couple of guy for an upgrade, maybe Watkins/Moncrief for Emmanuel Sanders. It looks like a loss on paper. While Sanders has been more consistent that Watkins and Moncrief, he doesn’t have the up side that either of them have. Maybe a bigger move is the play and I can package Evans/Watkins for Stefon Diggs/TY Hilton. I’m not sure if I want both Vikings receivers, so I might have to re-think that. Another option could be to go get Chris Conley. If Watkins is healthy, he will play, but if he is not Conley seems to be the guy. I think Chris Hogan or Phillip Dorsett might fall into that same category behind Edelman.

So, it makes sense to look at your starts and see whose back up will get significant playing time should the starter be out. I treat tight ends very similar to wide receivers as you may find a deeper pool to pull a backup from after you get past the top three or four. Once you get into that deeper pool you look for the back ups that will step right in. I started the season with Tyler Eifert, who was having a nice bounce back after some injuries. In pre-season I traded for Tyler Kroft. Kroft had shown well last season with Eifert out and should Eifert get injured again he would step right in to the same work load. Well, as curses go Eifert went down to a fluky and gruesome injury. My first pick up that week was the Bengals former third-string, now second-string tight end CJ Uzomah. Kroft is now out with an injury and Uzomah has been playing well. And, while this is a dynasty column, Uzomah has been one of the hot streaming tight ends in re-draft.

Week 13 is here, I hope the season has been fun. There may still be time to make one more move to get that championship. Good luck in the playoffs!!

I am all over the place, give me a follow or tune in and listen. I am on the Fantasy Life App @panhandles, twitter @culture_coach You can catch me live at 1230pm est every Thursday and Sunday on the www.12ozsportsradio.com shows What’s Up, What’s Up Sports and on the NFL Pregame Show. The writers for the Fantasy Life All blog have podcast, The Fantasy Roundtable hosted by Matt Bruening, @roundtableff on twitter, that comes out daily Monday — Friday give it a listen.

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