Dynasty, in Theory: The Injury Bounce

Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea, USA Today Sports

There's a lot of really strong dynasty analysis out there, especially when compared to five or ten years ago. But most of it is so dang practical-- Player X is undervalued, Player Y's workload is troubling, the market at this position is irrational, take this specific action to win your league. Dynasty, in Theory is meant as a corrective, offering insights and takeaways into the strategic and structural nature of the game that might not lead to an immediate benefit, but which should help us become better players over time. (Additionally, it serves as a vehicle for me to make jokes like "theoretically, this column will help you out".)

On Markets

Markets, or places where buyers and sellers gather, are a subject of constant fascination for me. When they operate efficiently, they're far and away the single best tool ever developed to find out what something is "worth". (There are many reasons why a market might not operate efficiently, including hidden information, asymmetric bargaining power, regulatory capture, and so on; these are beyond the scope of this post.)

Markets are by no means perfect, and there are always opportunities for arbitrage, but one of the key features is their ability to constantly update. Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics found out that on-base percentage was mispriced in baseball. The market caught on to their discovery (writing a book about it probably didn't help), and suddenly on-base percentage wasn't mispriced anymore.

For fantasy managers, this property of markets is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because you can rely on information gleaned from markets to be fairly accurate given our current level of understanding. This is why, for instance, NFL draft capital is so strongly predictive-- the draft is a market. It's why dynasty ADP and trade values are so useful because those are negotiated by buyers and sellers in a competitive marketplace.

But it's a curse because when you work hard and finally find an inefficiency in the market, you're only able to exploit it for so long until the inefficiency closes. When I started playing dynasty in 2007, managers treated older running backs like they'd play forever. Shaun Alexander was a 2nd-round startup pick in my first league despite being 30 and coming off the worst season of his career as a starter. (I'm not casting stones; my first dynasty pick was a 28-year-old Brian Westbrook.)

For a couple of years, you could have made a substantial profit by fading older running backs. And that was true until suddenly it wasn't anymore; Alexander and Westbrook and LaDainian Tomlinson and Clinton Portis and the rest of the top older running backs had virtually all fallen off a cliff by 2009 and the market, now burned, corrected.

This idea that inefficiencies close as quickly as they're identified is one of the cornerstones of my dynasty play style. And yet... and yet...