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By Steven Van Tassell (@SteveVT33)
Dynasty Owner, fantasy football in general, and watching NFL games is supposed to be fun. This is important to point out because sometimes things can ruin, or attempt to ruin the fun. Having an 0-9 or 1-8 Dynasty Owner team is likely not any fun. I didn’t list 2-7 because I have at least one 2-7 Dynasty Owner team and I’m still having fun (for now).
Dynasty Owner needs to be fun because other things in life sometimes aren’t. I have a friend who a bunch of us were group texting about a variety of topics the other day. He talked about how he got an internship on Capitol Hill when he came to Washington, DC for college. While it’s work, having an internship on Capitol Hill should be fun. This was before politics got miserable back in the mid-1990s with Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and government shutdowns. Working on the Hill and being a young person in Washington, DC should have been fun. In addition, we found out that he met quite a few “famous” people (famous in Washington, DC political circles, but not real life) before they were well-known, but hated the internship. It wasn’t fun and it led him to not want to work on Capitol Hill anymore. Everything is fine now and he’s probably better off because he changed career paths when he did. The point is that he did something that was supposed to be fun, and a good learning experience and other people made it not fun by being jerks. I could use worse words, but you get the idea.
I mention this story because occasionally things happen that can make football not be fun. Sometimes the not fun things are done to people, like getting fired as a coach (Matt Rhule and Frank Reich). In other cases, they are things like injuries that happen to people, but don’t involve anyone else. The injury that happened to Odell Beckham Jr. ($1,250,000) in the Super Bowl was a non-contact injury as his foot got caught in the turf. Nobody “caused” the injury and there’s not a person to blame. A firing or benching are caused by people. Someone has to fire the coach if the team isn’t performing well. The coach has to bench players occasionally if he thinks someone else will do better. Obviously there is somebody to blame for bad plays like interceptions, fumbles, sacks, and penalties. The referee will call out the player who committed the penalty and announce it to the crowd and everyone watching on TV. I’ve never played football and had that happen to me, but I’m pretty sure it’s not fun at all.
Back to Dynasty Owner. It’s fun to play and especially in the Dynasty Owner format with the salary cap making it more real than any other fantasy football platform. In other formats, you don’t have to make decisions on who to draft based on salary cap concerns. If you have Josh Allen ($43,005,667) or Patrick Mahomes ($45,000,000) in a non-Dynasty Owner league, you’re not limited on who else you can draft or have on your roster. But you are in Dynasty Owner!
I find it fun to draft a Dynasty Owner roster, make Free Agent Auction bids, work out trades (although sometimes those trade negotiations aren’t fun), balance bye weeks, etc. There’s a lot of strategy and more than a typical dynasty league, which makes it a lot of fun for me. I get that it’s not for everyone. Even something mundane like picking up a backup QB because the starter might miss a week is more difficult, more strategic and for me, more fun in Dynasty Owner.
For example, early in the week Josh Allen popped up on the injury report with an elbow injury and Matthew Stafford ($27,000,000) entered the NFL concussion protocol. It’s reasonable that one or both of them doesn’t play this week. Not fun if you have them on your Dynasty Owner roster. What can be fun is deciding which backup QB do you pick up? Do you go get Rams QB John Wolford ($895,000) who has yet to play this season or Bills QB Case Keenum ($6,000,000) who has mopped up in three games and scored 0.4 Dynasty Owner fantasy points so far?
If both of them are available in a regular dynasty league, you determine who you think is more likely to play, play better and make your waiver bid or claim. In Dynasty Owner, you have to factor in salaries and the salary cap before you even place your Free Agent Auction bid. If you prefer Keenum because you have Allen and want whoever is going to play for Buffalo this week, but don’t have $6 million in salary, then you have some tough real GM decisions to make. To me, that’s a lot of fun, even if it’s something that might not matter come Sunday.
What’s not fun about Dynasty Owner, or any dynasty league, is tanking or sandbagging. Whatever you want to call it, it’s not fun to be in a league with someone who’s doing it and affecting the fun for everyone else. Normally, I’m fine with letting people manage their teams as they see fit. If you want to make a trade that I don’t like or think is lopsided, that’s fine as long as there’s no collusion or favors being offered later on or in another league. You can run your team how you want. If it’s a dynasty league like Dynasty Owner and you want to trade good productive players for draft picks because your team isn’t going to make the playoffs, then go right ahead and do it.
However, if you’re trying to lose by picking up Patriots WR and special teams gunner Matthew Slater ($2,622,500) who has been in the NFL for 15 years and hasn’t touched the ball on offense since 2016. He has one career reception for 46 yards and two career rushing attempts for 11 yards. Picking him up off the Free Agent Auction and putting him in your Starting lineup makes it obvious you’re what you’re doing. It’s wrong and makes the league less fun for everybody else.
Starting Ravens backup QB Tyler Huntley ($895,000) over Lamar Jackson ($23,016,000) when Jackson isn’t on the injury report isn’t right either. This happened in Week 9 and Jackson played every snap, just as he has all season, while Huntley stood on the sidelines carrying a clipboard and wearing his NFL-approved hat. If you had Huntley in your Dynasty Owner Starting lineup and Jackson on your Practice Squad, you didn’t have any insider knowledge, but knew exactly what you were trying to do. It’s not fun when 2% are making it less fun to play Dynasty Owner for the other 98% of us.
I’m stepping down from my soapbox now and will focus on Dynasty Owner fun for the rest of the article. One thing that I think is fun is looking for a Match-up of the Week. I like finding an exciting game with a good angle – two undefeated teams, friends playing each other with first place on the line, a team who has not done well in the past but has built a contender trying to beat a long-time playoff contender, etc. I ask for submissions for Match-up of the Week but don’t get a lot of them, so I end up hunting for a match-up that fits one of those criteria.
This week, I did have WLN Savages in League #27443 reach out to me on Twitter about his matchup. His team is undefeated and playing the second place team who is 8-1. It could have been a great match-up to feature, but I couldn’t do it as his opponent has a tough bye week situation with Joe Burrow ($9,047,534) and Mac Jones ($3,896,588) as their QBs, barely over $1 million in salary cap room and quite a few injured players. They may not blow up their roster to make moves to win this week versus keeping an 8-1 team intact. That’s fine and their decision, but I’m not going to make that game the Match-up of the Week as a result. I do want to give Tommy a shout-out because he’s a great Dynasty Owner (he only has one Dynasty Owner team, but it’s undefeated) and a Queens Park Rangers (QPR) fan so check him out on Twitter (@tommysavs).
Instead, I found another Dynasty Owner with only one team who is also undefeated, so they are clearly having a fun season. Check out this week’s Match-up of the Week to find out the team and the league.
For the purposes of this article, ADP and Dynasty Owner roster percentage statistics were current as of the morning of Friday, November 11th.
Dynasty Owner Match-up of the Week
HawkNation vs. PACKER-H8TER – League #27465
Our Match-up of the Week wasn’t exactly offered up as a match-up directly, but Evan Eckert, aka PACKER-H8TER did mention that he was facing an undefeated team this week in the Livestream chat, so I decided to find out what team he was playing and feature it. Anybody who participates during the Livestream makes doing it and playing Dynasty Owner more fun. And having the opportunity to knock off an undefeated Dynasty Owner team and keep your team above almost everyone else is fun too. That’s the position that PACKER-H8TER is in as they are in second place in League #27465 with a 6-3 record, but they have the same record as another team (the team name is 21 – yes, that’s the team name, 21).They are just one game ahead of four other teams at 5-4. It’s an important game for PACKER-H8TER as a loss will likely take them out of contention for a playoff bye and could put them at risk of missing the playoffs completely.
On the other side, being the undefeated team in the league and just outside of the Top 100 of the Chase for the Ring would be pretty fun too. That’s the position that HawkNation is in. They are 9-0 and had 1,362.6 points after nine weeks, which put them only 5.5 points out of the Top 100. Having a chance to go 10-0 and seeing your team name on the Chase leaderboard sounds like fun. This also happens to be their only Dynasty Owner team, which makes it even better as they don’t have any bad teams to take away the joy of having an undefeated Dynasty Owner team.
Let’s see what the Match-up of the Week projections looked like before the start of Thursday Night Football.
Both teams have full lineups and HawkNation is projected to defeat PACKER-H8TER by 27.4 points. Not too surprising, HawkNation has a good team led by Jalen Hurts ($1,506,292), Jonathan Taylor ($1,957,287), Christian McCaffrey ($16,015,875), Davante Adams ($28,000,000), Justin Jefferson ($3,280,701) and Travis Kelce ($14,312,500). They also have Justin Fields ($4,717,989) as their Bench QB and not a single player on bye in Week 10. Not having any players on their bye week sounds like fun!
PACKER-H8TER needs to set an early alarm on Sunday as they have three players in their Starting lineup in the 9:30 AM (Eastern) Tampa Bay-Seattle game being played in Germany. Those players are Kenneth Walker ($2,110,395), Chris Godwin ($20,000,000) and DK Metcalf ($1,146,513). They also have the G.O.A.T. Tom Brady ($15,000,000) as their Bench QB and Rachaad White ($1,282,500) as a Bench RB. A high-scoring Buccaneers-Seahawks game would definitely be helpful and give them a chance to pull the upset.
Check back on Tuesday in the weekly recap article to see who won the Match-up of the Week. If you think it would be fun to be next week’s Match-up of the Week, or if you just see a fun match-up in your League that should be featured, let me know on Twitter (@SteveVT33).
Conclusion
Let’s keep focusing on having fun. It’s going to be fun watching some NFL football this Sunday with games starting at 9:30 AM (Eastern) and continuing pretty much all the way until 11:30 PM (Eastern). It’s going to be fun checking out my Dynasty Owner teams and seeing if I can win all of my matchups. Most of them are projected to be very competitive and my team is favored in the other ones right now. An undefeated Dynasty Owner week would be totally unexpected and a lot of fun if I can pull it off. A lot more fun than trying to lose.
Hopefully we have some upsets, which are fun, and also some undefeated teams who stay undefeated so we can look at all of them starting in next week’s preview article. Here is our current 2022 in-season publication schedule:
- Mondays: The stand-alone weekly Surprise and Totally Predictable Event article will start off the week on Monday morning. Jay Pounds will also preview the Monday Night Football matchup from the Dynasty Owner perspective.
- Tuesdays: The Dynasty Owner recap article that highlights the players who should have been in your weekly Starting lineup and those who should have been on the Bench appears on Tuesday. Jay Pounds puts together his weekly Free Agent Auction targets article for Tuesday as well. This article will help you figure out what players to bid on before the first Free Agent Auction run of the week is processed on Wednesday at 5 AM (Eastern).
- Wednesday: Matt Morrison – The Jerk started his Opportunity is (Almost) Everything series with QBs last week. He’ll look at RBs, WRs and TEs over the next three weeks. His weekly rankings also pop up on Wednesdays.
- Thursday: Every Thursday, Matt Morrison – The Jerk will preview the Thursday Night Football game and make his selection for “Value of the Game”. The Dynasty Owner podcast with me and Jay was released on Thursday this week. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on YouTube.
- Friday: My weekly Starting lineup and Bench recommendations article will get published as well later on this Friday. It also has a look back at the previous week’s recommendations.
Please read all of our articles and listen to the podcasts (including the Champions podcast). Watch the Livestream with me and Dynasty Owner CEO Tim Peffer as it happens on Wednesdays or catch it afterwards if you can’t watch live. Don’t forget follow Dynasty Owner on Twitter as well. Thanks for reading!
Steven Van Tassell is the Head of Content for Dynasty Owner
Follow us on Twitter: @SteveVT33 and @Dynasty_Owner