Dynasty, in Theory: A Heuristic That's Hard To Follow

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.

Buggy Software and Limited Resources

At its very best, fantasy football is a game of resource management. You want to draft everyone but have a limited number of picks. You want to add everyone but have a limited number of roster spots. You want to use everyone but have a limited number of starting spots. At the same time, all of your competition is laboring under the same constraints. The man or woman who manages to best utilize their limited resources will walk away the champion.

Dynasty leagues are like this, only more so. You want to dominate now, but you want to dominate in the future, too. With limited roster spots and limited rookie picks, owners must be flexible and willing to give up one type of resource to acquire another. The owners who are best able to manage their tradeoffs win.

The problem, of course, is that managing tradeoffs is hard, and we're fundamentally bad at it. From the very first Dynasty, in Theory column, I've been writing about our faulty mental software. Our instincts are unreliable, and that unreliability needs to be accounted for.

A lot of the ways we can account for our flawed mental software are difficult. Some, however, are easy. This week, we're talking about one of the latter.

Well, it's not really easy-- by definition, it's kind of the opposite. But it's simple, at least. When you're faced with a decision between two courses of action and all of your analysis says they're pretty comparable in value… do whichever one is harder.

Hard Is... Good?

This seems like a pretty dumb rule. Why should something be better just because it's hard?

It's not. Lots of hard things are bad. It would be hard for me to trade away Patrick Mahomes II, but I'm not using that fact as an excuse to start shopping him.

But we're not talking about the section of n-dimensional representative ideaspace consisting of all hard things you could potentially do. We're talking about the very limited subset of that space that you have evaluated to the best of your ability and consider pretty even... but still find hard despite that.