“Never overpay for aging running backs in dynasty.”
It’s a sound premise and generally acceptable strategy, for sure — why pay for aging players on the decline when younger athletes with longer career arcs exist?
If we’re to understand the longevity of the league and the time these players spend on our roster(s) matter in dynasty, we ought to care about factors like age and declining value, of course…
… but why?
I ask earnestly when you last sat down and asked yourself where your views and perspectives on dynasty come from. What article, podcast, or person got through to you to a level of understanding? How has that belief grown from its inception in your mind?
The very nature of the industry that enables me to write this article right now is predicated on introducing information and ideas to folks of similar interest who don’t possess either the free time or understanding of statistics or all the other hubbub that goes into creating fantasy football content.
It is, in fact, the lifeblood.
You subscribe to X company to gain Y information and Z-level analysis so that you can win your league(s), right?
An exchange between parties, both monetary and in measure of free time for consumption, is agreed upon. It’s up to the analysts to know “the thing” you want to know so that you understand “the thing” and then can use “the thing” to be good at winning money from and establishing dominance over people you know through a pretend game.
But what if the analyst is wrong?
When I say “wrong,” I don’t mean someone being incorrect about ranking a wide receiver in the top 24 only to have them finish as the WR30 — that happens sometimes. I mean someone who pushes an idea or approach to play the game of dynasty that causes you to develop bad habits and struggle to win titles. Are you still trustworthy of them?
The spread of information, how it reaches you, and your ability to be discerning as a consumer are powerful tools.
Instead of parsing through a specific concept or approach to dynasty, let’s open our minds in this article and explore the mechanisms behind how information is spread throughout fantasy football content as a whole and how we can all be better-informed participants in dynasty leagues.
The Availability Cascade
I became very interested in journalism and sociology in college.
It is fascinating to take a broad view of how events in the world happen and how they affect our experience and understanding of that same world.
While I am not an expert in either field, these studies taught me about the concept of availability cascades.
Per the ever-reliable Wikipedia, the concept of the availability cascade “is a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs. A novel idea or insight, usually one that seems to explain a complex process in a simple or straightforward manner, gains rapid currency in the popular discourse by its very simplicity and by its apparent insightfulness.”
Basically, you must think of information as something that comes from atop a proverbial hill and trickles down to you. A thought or observation from those in positions of expertise disseminates from whatever platform they have (an article, a podcast, etc.) and eventually reaches the masses.
For an example of how this works, think about the first time that aging curves were explained to you. We can even use the contributions of our own Ryan Heath’s study of this concept from 2023 as an example:
Generally, RBs take a big step forward from Year 1 to Year 2. Years 2-6 are peak years, with that peak production largely remaining stagnant. Year 7 provides the first hint of a steep and precipitous decline toward irrelevancy. From Year 8 on, RBs are usually worse off than when they were rookies.
WRs typically underwhelm as rookies, before making a big leap in their sophomore season. (WRs generally “break out” in Year 2 or Year 3). Unlike at RB, WRs gradually improve through Year 5, their best season on average. A slow regression to the career baseline occurs in Years 6-9, with a sharper drop to rookie-level production occurring in Year 10.
The sophomore TE breakout is among the most powerful and reliable laws of fantasy. Typically, they hover around this baseline for two more years before hitting their peak seasons in Year 5 and Year 6. A steep decline begins in Year 7, when the curve becomes a bit misleading.
These key takeaways, devoid of any context in the broad study of this heavy topic, will leave you with the distilled and simplistic understanding that “young = good” and “old = bad” when it comes to dynasty, right?
Yes, that simple shorthand is encompassing enough for you to get the gist of the idea, and you technically never even had to read the article to find this out.
By the time information like this becomes pervasive, the need for you to initially find out from the original source isn’t even particularly necessary in reality.
The natural progression in this availability cascade is that a large and complicated concept can be simplified into an easy-to-remember idea that your brain can carry with you at all times without a complete spectrum understanding of the subject being necessary.
These items you carry as shortcuts are called heuristics, which the Britannica Dictionary defines as “a process of intuitive judgment, operating under conditions of uncertainty, that rapidly produces a generally adequate, though not ideal or optimal, decision, solution, prediction, or inference.”
You don’t necessarily have to know the minutiae of any subject or concept as long as you learn enough about it to serve you in how your approach to things manifests simply.
It’s how we know something like wearing a seatbelt makes sense when driving a car, or more cynically, why people come to believe there is a false correlation between unrelated phenomena.
The Dynasty Content/Strategy Cascade In Action
Aging curves serve as a specific and effective example, but for the sake of further exploration, let’s zoom out and look at how information is spread more broadly.
There’s a podcast you listen to regularly, and the hosts are very high on a particular player. This group of people give convincing arguments, whether in the form of an analytical study or a film-based evaluation, and you believe them based on the parasocial relationship that’s built between you and the folks who hit the record button and told you about this player.
Not only that, they were high on Puka Nacua before anyone last year, and that’s why he’s on your roster! It’s all thanks to this podcast — they know their stuff.
This particular new player (call them Player A) whom you don’t roster is now on your radar, and because you’re trusting through exposure to the source the analysis came from, the odds that you invest in shares of Player A have grown exponentially.
At this point, a point of passive consumption has been reached.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, assuming these people are correct in their evaluation of Player A, but the danger involved is that there’s a chance you’ll fall into an echo chamber or, more plainly, a positive feedback loop.
Even though market analysis through sources like KeepTradeCut or what have you suggests Player A is only worth a rookie second-round pick, everything you’ve been told and engrained to believe says that’s wrong — Player A is absolutely a first-round value! Everyone else in the community who listens to this program agrees with you, and now you find yourself in a hivemind of disproportionate belief.
You might’ve only heard the podcast segment talking about Player A once — how much of it do you recall? Did you do any independent follow-up research on this guy? When asked about why this athlete stands out, could you describe why you like Player A?
Regardless of the eventual outcome of Player A’s future performance, how much extra effort you put into evaluation means that, hypothetically, you performed one of two actions:
- Sending a rookie first-round pick for this player, an overpay despite their market value, because you believe it’s worth it.
or
- Sending the appropriate market value second-round rookie pick for this player because you believe Player A is worth a first, and you’ve successfully identified a market inefficiency.
Think of it like how the value of Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Josh Downs is perceived now.
He’s been exceptional with Joe Flacco under center and leads the team in every meaningful metric over the past few weeks, but the looming return of Anthony Richardson makes Downs’ cost tricky.
The sheer difference in acquisition cost is the determining factor in what’ll eventually be the defining factor behind whether you overpaid/underpaid for Player A and how much your dynasty roster can experience a setback if the people you rely upon for information are incorrect.
At that point, it was less about being correct in the specific player evaluation and more about whether the process was sound.
Conclusion
The number of avenues that can be explored within this topic is expansive, and honestly, it’s all entirely too dense to fit inside the confines of just one article.
For that reason, we’ll be wrapping up things here, but it’s important to reflect on why awareness of these potential biases and trapdoors of consumption is essential. If anything, the purpose of understanding the function of availability cascades ties into some of the lessons outlined in my article exploring The Prisoner’s Dilemma and why strict adherence to particular approaches can be harmful.
Just like you can’t go out there and be the harsh aggro carnivore in your negotiations based on some ill-conceived notion of how dynasty works, it’s important to be mindful of what you’re consuming, where it’s coming from and whether or not the approach you’re taking even makes sense to you if trying to explain it out loud with purpose.
Is this all to say that being a contrarian should be everyone’s modus operandi? No, not necessarily.
But you ought to be able to attack any aspects of an evaluation you consume and form your basis for why it’s essential on your own terms. I demonstrate this well in my introduction to the “TTO Quarterback” theory and how it uses the foundational aspects of the Konami Code concept to bring new context to how the evaluation of the position should work.
After all, embracing an unfamiliar subject head-on to grow your knowledge base and problem-solving skills is the very foundation behind the academic concept of “productive struggle.”
Oh, does that sound familiar to you as well?
Okay, let’s dig into that further next time, then…
