Dynasty, in Theory: Fire and Ice

There's a lot of 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.

Taking a (Brief) Break from Value

We've spent the last few weeks looking at player values. Not the values of specific players, mind you—this is Dynasty, in Theory, we're loath to do anything so useful—but the very concept of player value itself. What is it? How do our values fall short of the perfect ideal? What can we glean from those failings? I think there's still much more to unpack there, but I wanted to take a brief break this week to look at something completely different. (Will it be related? Reader, it's all related.)

The core conceit of dynasty leagues is that, unlike redraft leagues, you don't start over from scratch every year. This means your team today will be your team next year, too. In theory, at least. But there are two glaring exceptions to this: when your team today will be someone else's team next year, and when your team today will be no one's team next year.

Why would that be the case? And more importantly, how likely is that to be the case?

The Half-Life of Dynasty Leagues

One of the most fun parts of dynasty is imagining possible futures, especially futures in which we dominate in perpetuity. But for many leagues, there is much less future than we might think. Some leagues burn out in a conflagration after a controversial move or decision. Others slowly freeze from dwindling interest until there's not enough momentum left to keep them moving. As the great American poet Robert Frost once wrote of his home dynasty league:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

If a league continues, sometimes not every manager will continue with it; even in healthy leagues, there's typically some annual turnover. My oldest dynasty league is in its 19th season; the longest uninterrupted stretch featuring the same managers was just five years.

(Do you recognize that some managers abandon their teams but believe it could never be you? Two of the last three vacancies in my home league arose after the long-time manager passed away unexpectedly. The third manager married a woman with teenage children and quit fantasy football entirely so he could spend more time with them. Life rarely takes the path we expect.)

How likely is it that your league will fold or you will leave it? That's a hard thing to estimate, especially for someone like me whose go-to move is thought experiments and reasoning from first principles. It's not really a "first principles" sort of question. But I can try to make a rough estimate based on my own history with the hobby.

Note that any extrapolation of dynasty history onto the future is going to be flawed. For one thing, the hobby was much smaller and more decentralized fifteen years ago, so the pool of leagues that could have possibly lasted fifteen seasons is a small fraction of all leagues available. For another, those leagues wouldn't necessarily be representative; the last fifteen years saw several unique challenges that impacted league survival rates, especially the lockout in 2011 and the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

But I'm not one to let a lack of data stop me from speculating irresponsibly, and a flawed estimate is (probably) better than no estimate at all.

How Long Have Managers Lasted in My Leagues?