Late-Round Perspectives: Scott Connor

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Scott Connor is a content manager at Destination Devy and one of the hosts of Dynasty Trades in 5 He's an eight-time FFPC Main Event Champion, he's an expert in Dynasty Game Theory, he loves Wins Above Replacement, and he's a running back Dead Zone believer. These are his Late-Round Perspectives.

Just starting these shows off, just with a little bit of background, one of the things that I see commonly, every once in a while, I'll be on Reddit or something, or someone will point me to Reddit, and if someone's talking about me or what have you, and I often see this connection between us, my name and your name, in that I'm doing a lot of my deep, deep research for Redraft. I play Dynasty, obviously, and I do a lot of research for Dynasty as well, especially in the Prospect game, but you do a lot of game theory stuff within Dynasty, which is a lot rarer than doing the game theory stuff with Redraft, because it's more difficult to do it with Dynasty, let's just be honest. There's just a lot more that you need to handle. You're not looking in that singular season. But one of the things that I've noticed at least since following your work and following what you're doing, which I absolutely adore, is that you care about more than just player analysis. There's a lot of analysts out there who simply, it's nothing wrong with it, who simply say, I like this guy, I don't like this guy. Follow my advice because of this.

But I think that the reason why you and me look beyond player analysis is because we both recognize that variance is a huge part of this game and that we're not always gonna necessarily be right. But what are some of the ways that you work with variance and sort of use variance then to your advantage? Specifically in Dynasty, but you can talk redraft too.

Scott Connor (1:50)

Yeah, I mean, I think they're becoming much closer together than they were even three, five years ago when it comes to Dynasty and redraft. I think the new era of Dynasty players are largely coming from an immediate gratification space. I have to give Sleeper a shout out for that as well. I think a lot of people are migrating over to Sleeper. It's very easy to start a Dynasty League over there.

At the same time, I think the new breed of player that's coming in. When I first started, you had to play Dynasty on either a site that didn't host Dynasty. So it all had to be manually done. So the barrier to play was a lot higher. And then even old sites like My Fantasy League, it was still a little bit cumbersome to run the league itself. So it was more of a niche thing. Now that it's on Sleeper, and I'm sure some of the other bigger platforms are also moving into maybe incorporating some sort of aspect of Dynasty into their platform, the game has changed in terms of how the typical player, I think, approaches things. Not that it shouldn't be from a long-term lens, but I think you have to realize that not all Dynasty Leagues are going to last for a decade. A lot of them aren't even going to last for 3 years. 5 years, if you're lucky. I think taking a shorter-term approach is the correct way to play it, and then you have the new players that are coming in, and a lot of them look at things through a very narrow lens, 1 to 2 years.

And then inside of that, within a season, Dynasty values, you've probably seen it, Dynasty values change week to week.

On a player, you go, there's nothing different about their profile or any of their historical production or metrics from two games ago versus now, but the Dynasty market has sure changed. So I think that that incorporates, A, a lot of the analysis you're talking about with variance in redraft, it kind of morphs into becoming a lot of what Dynasty has evaluated at. So the only difference there is, there's gonna be some variance of situations that change in the off season, but I think it's more in the psychology of the people you're playing with. Understanding the lens that they're going to view things a year down the road. It's not so much about what players are good, what players are bad, what players are hits, what players are misses. It is, can I invest in things that I know other people are going to want, other people are going to like? Does it have some staying power? And we probably talk about that a little bit more when it comes to draft picks and game theory, but you could argue there's certain ranges outside of the elite tier of players or rookies coming in.