If your relationship with season-long fantasy football has grown stale due to the monotony of your own relentless winning, then we would strongly encourage you to take the next step in your personal fantasy journey.
It’s time to get yourself involved in a keeper or dynasty fantasy football league.
Pretty much every hardcore fantasy player will agree that while they may find all formats entertaining, it’s their dynasty leagues that actually become an obsession.
Basically, the concept is that you are making a commitment to your fantasy squad that extends beyond a single season — or, more accurately, you are making a multi-year commitment to your best fantasy decisions while discarding your worst ideas.
In a keeper league, each manager is allowed to retain a specific number of players from one season to the next, usually in exchange for corresponding draft picks. In dynasty, you simply retain your entire roster from year to year — or, as much of it as you like — and the league’s annual draft is focused on incoming rookies. Both formats allow the league’s managers to remain active and engaged all year, not just from September to January.
(Naturally, Yahoo offers tools to support keeper and dynasty play. We won’t force you to track every last detail via spreadsheet, so no worries on that front.)
Generally speaking, when a league makes the leap from redraft to keeper or dynasty, no one involved ever regrets the decision. There’s nothing in nature quite like the bond that exists between a dynasty manager and the players they retain over multiple seasons. It is honestly not much of an exaggeration to say that any player you keep on a roster for three or more years will begin to feel like family — perhaps not immediate family, but like an agreeable cousin who’d be welcome in your home for a short visit.
Seriously, you should get a dynasty league or two in your fantasy portfolio. It’s the best version of fantasy football.
As a way to demystify the format and onboard new managers, the Yahoo fantasy crew (and various fantasy-adjacent friends) recently assembled to produce a dynasty startup mock draft using otherwise typical settings (half-PPR, one QB, two flexes).
You can find our full round-by-round results right here:
It should be perfectly clear from those first 10 picks above that the guiding principles at work in startup dynasty drafts are not the same as in your other leagues.
For one thing, no player selected in our first round is older than 25 and none of them have more than four years of NFL experience. These guys are nowhere near the decline phases of their careers. This fact should come as no great surprise, because, again, we’re making indefinite multi-year commitments to these players. We aren’t merely drafting the 2024 version of Marvin Harrison Jr., but rather all future seasons of his career.
However, the process of valuing players for dynasty isn’t quite as easy as simply crossing the names of all the old dudes off your redraft cheat sheet. Which brings us to an essential reminder for all dynasty managers …
You’re actually allowed to try to win this year’s championship
Weirdly, this fact is overlooked by many longtime dynasty players. You should never get so caught up in wishcasting some far-off future run of consecutive championships that you completely ignore the current season. Someone is gonna win this year’s title; it might as well be you.
In our mock, Dan Titus was the manager most willing to draft veterans and 30-somethings, which of course might give him problems in 2028 yet also leaves him as one of the clear title favorites in 2024. His starting backfield of Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry have a combined 14 years of NFL experience and over 3,200 carries, but they are also inarguably one of the best running back tandems in the mock. Dan’s receiving corps includes Cooper Kupp (31 years old), Davante Adams (31), Deebo Samuel (28) and Keenan Allen (32), along with first-round pick, Ja’Marr Chase (24).
Team Titus, obviously, is loaded. Three years from now his squad won’t seem so stacked, but, hey, championship banners fly forever. I can respect the all-in approach to 2024.
Unlike Dan, I undertook a more ageist dynasty build that focused primarily on players who are 25 and under, although I veered from that path when upper-tier vets reached inappropriate rounds. Tyreek Hill, my overall WR1 in redraft, slipped to the middle of the second, where he’s a gift in any format. I also grabbed Travis Kelce in the sixth and Stefon Diggs in the eighth, two players who remain elite-ish options for at least the current year.
Patrick Mahomes, my fifth-rounder, can be viewed as a vet pick as well, but he’s also the player I’d likely keep longer than anyone else on my mock roster, because …
Different roster positions have different time horizons
One of the more entertaining and informative aspects of managing a dynasty roster is that you begin to think about positional value and timelines in the manner of actual NFL teams.
At age 28, running backs are generally staring at the edge of the age cliff, whereas quarterbacks are just getting started. Consider the fact that Todd Gurley is 29 years old as of this writing, only one year older than Mahomes.
Also, the nature of the running back position is such that we probably shouldn’t think beyond a two-year window when ranking them in dynasty. In fact, if you chose to ignore the keepability aspect entirely when valuing RBs, you’d rarely get burned. Christian McCaffrey shouldn’t get any sort of massive downgrade relative to other backs in dynasty, despite his age (28) and mileage, because no player at the position is a multi-year lock. It’s a short shelf-life spot.
Mahomes, even at 28 and with seven NFL seasons under his belt, can still be viewed as a viable 10- or 12-year investment in dynasty formats. Under normal circ*mstances, I’m not a particularly aggressive early-round QB drafter, but I’ll make an exception in leagues in which I can roster a difference-maker for a decade.
Wide receivers and tight ends don’t typically thrive deep into their 30s, but the best of them often remain productive at 31-32. Any or all of the first-round receivers selected in our mock can certainly remain fantasy-relevant for the next 6-8 seasons.
Let’s hit one additional big topic before we roll out full mock rosters …
In a dynasty startup, draft for value and ceiling without respect to position (and with zero regard for schedule)
Your startup draft is a one-time foundational event in the lifespan of the league, so it’s exactly the wrong day to be thinking about roster balance, schedule strength, bye-weeks and other short-term concerns.
If you conclude your draft feeling as if you’re a little light on running backs, it’s fine. If you draft three tight ends in a league in which you’re only required to start one, no big deal. One more quarterback than seems sensible? Totally fine.
A little mild roster imbalance on day one of a dynasty league is not a serious worry. It probably means you took the proper approach at your draft, which is to simply grab as much talent as possible without the burden of overplanning. In the months and years ahead, you'll have plenty of time to reshape your roster to fit the demands of specific seasons. At your initial draft, just load up with as much total value as you can find.
Team-by-team results
If you're interested in seeing the complete team builds, you can flip through this table to see each of the 10 rosters.
