Photo: Mark Hoffman, USA Today Sports

August is one of the best months on the dynasty calendar. We get to see all the work we put in building up our rosters during the long offseason start to bear fruit. It is also a time of opportunity because we may still be able to buy low on some breakout candidates before our competitors realize what they have. While we want to avoid confirmation bias, this is a time when we should start to feel more conviction in how we are valuing young players if they show they are who we thought they were in camp. The opposite can also be true. We want to make room in our process for new information that adds uncertainty. Nobody is right about all of their offseason takes, and the ability to take in and process new information that challenges our preconceived notions is a key ability to being a successful dynasty manager. It is okay to get cold feet about a guy on your roster who is not performing the way you expected and try to salvage the situation by trading him for a player you have more conviction on. The key is to make sure you are contextualizing new information and applying fresh insights to gain an edge. The main focus of this month’s article is providing some tips on how to figure out which information should change your valuations and which information should be mostly ignored. One aspect of that process is narrowing your focus down to a more limited number of news items that you want to track more closely than others. We will go position-by-position to suggest some of these players you should be paying especially close attention to over the next month.

In this month’s dynasty trade value article, we will go deeper into the following:

• How to figure out what really matters during the preseason.
• The young player poised to potentially challenge for dynasty QB1 status.
• The running back room that consensus may be off about.
• The sleeper running back who you should be scooping off of waivers.
• The hyped second-year wide receiver who has major red flags.

The dynasty trade value chart is tailored to 12-team PPR leagues with a starting lineup of one quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers, one tight end, and one flex. It also includes trade values for Superflex leagues in a separate column. The chart is meant to serve primarily as a guide for trades but can also be a great resource during startup drafts. If the players and picks on each side of the trade offer add up to approximately the same number, the trade would be considered even. If you receive a trade offer that sends you players with a higher total numerical value than the players you are giving up, the offer is worth strongly considering. Each league is different, so pay close attention to the scoring and starting roster requirements specific to your league.

What really matters?

Bar none, August is the most challenging month on the dynasty calendar. There is an absolute deluge of new information to take into account when valuing players. Ignoring this information is folly. We are receiving important new data points, and one of the biggest keys to being a successful dynasty manager is reacting quickly and intelligently to the latest news.

With each passing year, we have access to even more information. If a wide receiver makes a sweet catch in a training camp practice, we are likely going to have video of it, and it is probably going to make its way into our Twitter feed (or whatever it is now called) via one of the many content aggregators. This is a great development but makes our task even more difficult. Every pass catcher is probably going to make some pretty plays over the next month. We have to always be mindful of context. By itself, it means practically nothing that Josh Downs made a one-handed catch in practice, and it was almost comical how many times the video of this grab was repackaged and delivered to my timeline. If you are adjusting your opinion of a player due to a single highlight, you are doing it wrong.

While a single highlight should not sway your opinion on a player, that does not mean you just tune out this time of year and remain locked into your offseason evaluations despite new information. Instead, you want to add all of the news you come across to help constantly refine your opinions on players and make moves based upon those updated opinions to try to upgrade your dynasty rosters.

Here are my tips on how to best dominate August:

1. Take advantage of smart analysis. Unless you have a whole bunch of free time, it is nearly impossible to stay up on all the latest developments via primary sources. Take into account the opinions and research of those you trust. The best example is one of my favorite things that we here at Footballguys do — Weekly Training Camp reports. These come out weekly (the first will be August 8th) and include approximately 1,000 words on all the fantasy-relevant news for each team. We also distill this down even further to a handful of bullet points for each team on the news that matters the most.

I want to offer a quick behind-the-scenes on how this is put together because it is a project I’m involved with personally and that I put a lot of time and effort into. For the teams I am responsible for covering (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Indianapolis) in this project, I go deep every week. I read everything I can from local beat writers. Listen to team-specific podcasts. Search Twitter for news and updates on the players and position battles that matter. I take a ton of notes throughout the week and save a lot of links to articles, videos, and tweets and then condense all of my takeaways into these medium size write-ups and then further into the quick bullet points. I couldn’t go this deep on every team so I concentrate on just a few teams and then lean on others who are doing similarly meticulous work on the other teams to truly stay up to date on all of the happenings in August. Anyway, I hope you take the time to check out these reports; we put a lot of time and effort into them.

I also want to quickly shout out a few other great options for staying up to date this month. Podcasts are a great option for many. Check out The Audible’s Preseason Watchlist series that goes team-by-team through all of the storylines and players to watch heading into camp. Also, we have a great new dynasty podcast featuring Jeff Bell, Kevin Coleman, and Christian Williams.

2. Narrow your focus. While you can and should try to stay on top of all the news using some of the suggestions above, it can also be very helpful to narrow your focus to a smaller number of situations you hope to try to figure out. For example, one of my known unknowns this offseason has been the projected breakdown of running back touches in Buffalo. Is this going to be the James Cook show, or are we going to end up in a full-blown committee? Picking some situations you are most interested in trying to figure out helps drown out some of the noise. A big focus of this month’s article is making some suggestions on which situations you should be paying the closest attention to. Being early to see a player exceeding expectations either in ability, projected role, or both can give you a leg up on the competition.