Dynasty Tiers: Five Tips for Assessing Value (Fantasy Football)
Over the next month, we will be discussing dynasty tiers on the Fantasy Footballers Dynasty podcast. It is both a blessing and a curse knowing that people love lists and rankings for discussions but also it brings up an innumerable amount of “can’t believe you hated on [player x]!”
I’ve decided to work out my own tiers using the Ballers startup dynasty ranks and where I personally group them.
Important note: We tier every single player for redraft in the Ultimate Draft Kit. Statistical projections (“statting out” as we call it) are NOT part of dynasty rankings since we are looking at multiple years at a time with a giant amount of unknowns in how the NFL can change. Tiering players is more an exercise of “where would I group these players” if I was in a startup draft but they are often based on arbitrary values as I’ll discuss below.
Here are five tips I wish someone would’ve told me years ago about dynasty tiers.
1. Tiers are arbitrary.
You’re not going to like hearing this off the bat: tiers are made up. Yup, imagine that. In a game predicated on being fantasy, dynasty tiers are made based on personal choice. This isn’t meant to belittle your decisions or somehow poo poo on the process of creating dynasty tiers. It is more holding with an open hand how exact and precise this endeavor is supposed to be.
In this format, you are projecting over multiple years starting a dance between talent, age, pedigree, production, team situation, and contract status. You might value one or two of those traits above the others but they all should be factored in.
Certain sites like KeepTradeCut (KTC) use crowd-sourced decisions to try and calculate perceived “value” of each players. We reference this site sometimes on the Fantasy Footballers Dynasty podcast and certainly find it as a valuable part of the dynasty discussion especially considering we’ve been doing a KeepTradeCut segment on the podcast since 2016. However, I do need to bring up the pros and cons of “dynasty value” sites. The values and figures (based on people voting on the site) eventually condense into one number. This value might feel like a true number and it is true to the site. However, it is an arbitrary value better used as a 3rd or 4th tie-breaker in evaluating trades rather than a set figure: “this is how much this player is worth!“.
For example, take Garrett Wilson. We have him ranked as a top-10 dynasty WR. KTC has him as WR7. His “value” has remained in this top-10 dynasty WR window since the beginning of 2023 according to their site. 
However, Wilson, by no means, has given you top-10 value in your league. In fact, Wilson has been the LEAST valuable WR (on a fantasy points per target basis) since 2020. If you tried to acquire him based off a value chart alone, you likely feel behind the eight ball right now. Obviously, there is much more to the story (Jets QBs!) and Wilson is signaling towards a breakout in Year 3. Nevertheless, the lesson here is that while you might believe in Wilson, you also have to recognize the artificial value pumped into his stock. Which tier does he belong in? Well, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Fellow WR D.J. Moore was an annual poster child for this arbitrary value phenomenon as people kept using his age and spike weeks as reasons to rank him so high. D.J. Moore was ranked as a top-15 dynasty WR for years and yet only hit that mark ONCE in his career.
It is a conversation about production and value. You can value a player a certain way, trade for/away for a certain value, and receive certain value based on their actual fantasy production. Those are three different ways to see one player and we’re not even discussing future production or future value or their age curve, etc. The point isn’t to dive too deep into player takes but rather hold loosely the defining structure of dynasty tiers. And consider how easy it is to airball in dynasty projections…
2. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Whether people like to admit it or not, projecting fantasy point totals is a guessing game. We forecast usage while also acknowledging the fact that we don’t have all the info. There are many offensive situations where predicting player usage has to be met with humility. We don’t know everything and we shouldn’t pretend we do. I wrote an article entitled Forecasting 101: How to Project NFL Offenses Knowing You Could Be Wrong which highlights some of those points. There isn’t a perfect method but we are trying to set expectations regarding the possible results of a player while also recognizing there are so many more variables at play in football outside of our control. Whether it is off-the-field issues or issues with the coaching staff, each player also has intangibles that are immeasurable.
A locked-in WR in dynasty feels like the surest of assets you can have apart from a QB in SuperFlex leagues. I recently started a SuperFlex Dynasty draft with 3(!) WRs because of the security and ceiling outcomes I love building into my teams. However, as you can see here, there is movement year-to-year among the top WRs in dynasty.
An average of 3.5 WRs dropped from top-10 each year that sounds scary. But only 13% of these top-10 WRs dropped outside WR20. They hold value but there is so much more unknown than we realize in projecting over multiple years. Thus, grouping players in tiers involves guess work. Michael Thomas was THE #1 dynasty asset heading into the 2020 season. Why? Well, he was young, a PPR machine, and he had just signed a massive $96 million extension. He checked all the boxes you could want and yet, within a year, he wasn’t even sniffing the top-10. You could’ve held out hope and bought back in at a lower price but we know how this story ended. Thomas was a fantasy phantom and dynasty managers were the one left holding the bag.
Once again, this isn’t meant to but creating tiers in dynasty involves embracing the tension between “what do we know” and “what we do not know”. This isn’t a place for dogmatism.
3. Not all tiers are created equally.
Comparing players across positions is what ultimately allows you to “see the draft board” in a dynasty startup draft. You might have three WRs available in tier 2 while only one RB is left in your tier 3. Based on your roster construction so far in your draft, identifying who is “left” in that tier is quite easy. Some tiers are larger than others. While Tier 1 might only include 3-4 WRs, the third tier might have up to 12 names! Depending on where you feel comfortable, these tiers allow you to stretch yourself in the draft (or in trades) and gain an edge over your opponent.
There also will be a juxtaposition of both young players and old guys next to each other. There is nothing wrong with that! Are Garrett Wilson and Tyreek Hill in different stages of their career? You bet. The question of tiering them together is assessing what value both have in trades AND on a starting roster. Are they similar? Jordan Addison became one of five rookie WRs over the last decade with 10+ receiving TDs and looks like a big win for whoever took him over Quentin Johnston last year. However, he might be tiered alongside 28-year-old Deebo Samuel as they are nearly back-to-back in Jason’s startup rankings. These are different career arcs, player types, and ages and yet they might fetch the same value. The keyword there is might because (going back to Point #1) dynasty values are arbitrary.
4. Anticipate “tier jumps” in trades.
I often discuss players and their “range of outcomes”. Following the NFL Draft, our own Marvin Elequin penned a range of outcomes article on each of the major positions (2024 RBs, WRs, and TEs) using college production metrics to “bucket” the prospects with other players. I took a historical approach mixing in some of the Ballers projections in the Ultimate Draft Kit examining Jayden Daniels and recent dynasty history.
Whatever your method is, perhaps the best way to make trades is building in an outcome where a player “tier jumps”. In other words, if your trading partner has a player valued in a certain manner, a young player needs to (at least in your mind) locked-in to their current tier or have the ability to “level up” within the next year or two. “Potential” is the carrot on the end of the stick for dynasty managers as lots of WRs hold so much tantalizing upside we are willing to throw our brains out the window. We need some sobriety in our projection. If you want a deep diver on routes-based metrics, I wrote a big article earlier this offseason (Dynasty WR Thresholds That Matter) putting Year 1 & Year 2 WRs in certain “buckets”. This is a great way to mix in an historical assessment into your tier construction and build in a “tier jump” into their potential future.
Ask yourself the following questions trying to write down anything from generalized reactions to actual counting fantasy numbers.
- What is the most likely outcome?
- What is the best case scenario?
- What are you counting on for your team?
5. Compare & Contrast (after making your tiers).
The biggest issue in dynasty world is the level of groupthink running rampant. You saw one tweet from one list and forever this player is entrenched in a certain tier. We are quick to make up our minds and too slow to change them. This is true in almost anything in life. We tend to want to hear what we want to hear from the news sources, Twitter accounts, and friends that sound most like us. For players, we love what they could be and fall in love with potential or we close the door too early.
One of my favorite book recommendations for this subject is Superforecasting: The Art of Science & Prediction. It discusses (among a number of topics) the difference between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to be “big idea” people that use similar criteria over and over again to apply to problems. Foxes, on the other hand, see issues through multiple lenses and tend to gather together multiple perspectives. The tendency is to create a dichotomy and separate the two approaches as one being better than the other. But this is actually a spectrum in itself and a chance to not make a dogmatic statement about forecasting.
Foxes aggregate perspectives which really is the beneficial approach. However, if there are big ideas that have carried you through your analysis over the years, factor that in as well. When people ask me if I’m an analytics “spreadsheet bro” or grinding the tape as a “film guy”, I usually respond with “Yes!”. You don’t have to pick and choose or create a false dichotomy in forecasting in dynasty. Comparing and discussing is the only way to sharpen your skills and remove some of your blind spots.