Photo: Thomas Shea, 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, and 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.

So You Have An Opinion...

This title this week is deliberately provocative. You don't need me to teach you how to arrive at an opinion-- there's a bevy of off-color quips that attest to that. Forming opinions is so easy that if you ask five fantasy football managers what they think about a player you're liable to get seven different opinions about him.

Do I perhaps mean "how to ensure your opinions are more likely to be good than bad"? Again, no. That would be an incredibly valuable article (more realistically, it would be an incredibly valuable corpus, because that sounds like an entire life's work), but it's not what we're here for today.

Instead, today, I want to ask something more along the lines of: "Given that you already have an opinion, how should you act on that opinion so that you receive the most benefit from it". Consider this an etiquette guide, a recommendation on how opinion-havers should comport themselves in public. And like all who purport to teach proper behavior, I suppose I should begin by modeling it myself.

Recounting That One Time I Had an Opinion

I'm generally not a fan of making rankings simply because players serve different roles on different rosters. Players serve three primary functions on a team: a source of production, a means of exchange, and a store of value. All players will naturally differ in how well they accomplish each role, so a team's preferences could shift dramatically based on which area is the greatest need. Travis Kelce is a nonpareil source of production, but the pool of potential trade partners is fairly limited and his long-term value expectations are fairly low.

With that said, I think few things impose discipline quite as well as producing ordered lists. You can say you love a player, but until you stack him up against the alternatives and commit to a preference, it's just empty words. So from time to time, I like to sit down and make a list for my own sake. Last weekend I did just that for the wide receiver position, talking through my process on Twitter as I went.

Final rankings:
Jefferson
Chase
—
Olave
St.Brown
Brown
Lamb
—
Hill
Smith
Wilson
Waddle
Diggs
Pittman
Puka
Nico
Higgins
—
JSN
Adams
Flowers
London
Addison
Keenan
Ridley
Aiyuk
Deebo
Kupp
Metcalf
Watson
—
Dotson
McLaurin
Jakobi
Diontae
DJM
Hollywood

Rough first pass.

— Adam Harstad (@AdamHarstad) October 1, 2023

Now, remember, the point here isn't "how to form an opinion", so I'm not going to focus on how that list was made. (You can click through the thread if you're curious about that.) And it's not "how to make sure your opinions are high-quality", so I'm not even concerned with questions of whether that's an especially good list or not. (I happen to like it, obviously, but many will disagree.)

I just want to talk about what comes after. Now that I have an opinion, what do I do about it? How can I use that list in a way that maximizes the chances that my dynasty teams succeed in the long term? Here's a quick rule of thumb I like:

Believe You're Right, Act Like You're Wrong

Let's focus attention on names 13-15 on that list: Puka Nacua, Nico Collins, and Tee Higgins. Based on my rankings, I would prefer both Nacua and Collins to Higgins. Again, setting aside questions of whether this opinion is right, it's clearly actionable. KeepTradeCut.com maintains crowdsourced dynasty rankings and currently has Higgins as the #17 receiver, Nacua at #19, and Collins at #27. At the time, Higgins' lead was even larger.

If I believe what I believe (and I do), does this mean I'm offering Tee Higgins for Collins or Nacua on teams where I have him? Yes and no. I did, in fact, offer Higgins for Nacua.

But I didn't offer him for Collins, despite that being a roughly equivalently good deal in my opinion. And there are two big reasons why, though both essentially get back to the importance of hedging your bets.