It’s been a long offseason without football. It maybe hasn’t been as long for you if you play fantasy football in one or more dynasty leagues.

Dynasty leagues provide an excellent source of year-round fantasy football entertainment, but they also present additional challenges that your run-of-the-mill four month leagues do not. Below are 10 tips for navigating the choppy waters of dynasty leagues in 2024. I’m going to try to work in as many examples from real trades I’ve made in my dynasty leagues as possible, but it’s important to note that dynasty trade value has a ton of subjectivity to it.

1. Have a defined team-building strategy and stick to it

The world of dynasty fantasy football offers a myriad of possibilities for how to build your team, but with so many options at your disposal, it can be easy to become enamored by options that don’t make sense for your team. It’s important to have a sense of where you’re trying to go and what you need to get there at all times.

The goal in fantasy football, as in NFL football, should always be to compete for a championship. But if you assess that your roster doesn’t currently measure up to other teams in the league, it’s extremely reasonable to reset your roster with the goal of being more competitive in the future. There is viability in being in win-now mode, tanking and being somewhere in between, but it’s most important to know which one you are at any given time and to try to execute that plan to the best of your ability.

2. Know your league

There are definitely ways to consistently gain the upper hand in dynasty leagues, especially through trades, but a lot of “trade value” is solved publicly by charts and trade calculators. The best way to gain value in a trade in a dynasty league is by knowing what your league mates want and need, especially when you can exploit an emotional response or overreaction.

One example of this is knowing your league mates’ favorite teams and leveraging that to improve your squad. During the draft of my SuperFlex league in May, I traded Demario Douglas out of a crowded WR room to the Patriots fan in my league for a third-round pick I used on Commanders rookie TE Ben Sinnott. I had offered Douglas to a different manager for an earlier third round pick, and that manager didn’t even know who Douglas was. Douglas didn’t have any value to that manager, but the Patriots fan liked him enough to make that swap, and Sinnott’s dynasty value on KeepTradeCut has steadily risen throughout the offseason.

I was on the other end of another type of trade like this in 2021. Experiencing my first early season success in several years buoyed by a stack of Matthew Stafford and Robert Woods, I was in panic mode after losing Woods to a season-ending injury. Having just drafted Kyle Pitts in the spring, I chose to trade 32-year-old Travis Kelce for Mike Evans, and Kelce ended up as the highest scoring TE by nearly 50% more than the TE2 in 2022. It isn’t the worst trade I’ve ever made, as Evans was my most valuable player last season and carried me to the playoffs, but I emotionally sold too low on Kelce.

3. Age is just a number

No element of dynasty fantasy football differs more from redraft than the value of a player’s age. A great example of that disparity is Bears rookie WR Rome Odunze, the 9th overall pick in the 2024 draft. He currently ranks as the WR47 in Fantasy Pros’ half-PPR ECR and the WR15 in KeepTradeCut’s dynasty rankings. Obviously, Odunze has way more draft and trade value in a league set to play with the same rosters into an unknown amount of future years than a league playing one year and resetting completely in 2025.

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