Anti-UTH

[ebsteelers]

I am thinking they play dynasty football because its fun and not for the money?

i wonder how many free/money leagues they are in? i think i heard Katie say she was in 38 total leagues.


I'd have to imagine at that pace it'd be a task to just break even every year, if you have teams that are in rebuild mode every season.

I think the uth way has some interesting points but it is not for every one because if you do play for money.. its difficult to say shell out 100 bucks a year for 3-4 years knowing your team is booty with the hopes of winning a title in year 4 or 5 to hopefully make some cash out of it.

[dlf_jules]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the sense that UTH goes beyond simply "build around young WRs" and takes it to the extreme. Ryan acknowledges that rookie picks aren't guaranteed to be studs. UTH seems to preach that rookies will be stone cold studs, and that younger is always better, no matter what.

I think you're wrong. My sense from UTH is that you will miss on rookies but that's OK because you're buying in bulk. This used to be an almost fool-proof strategy, but now it takes more skill because the relative prices of youth and production have changed.

[Orenthal Shames]

i think i heard Katie say she was in 38 total leagues.

I remember her mentioning that and it nearly gave me a panic attack thinking about it

[DynoScout]

One thing I want to add here that hasn't been said.
Despite the self-promotion and branding, UTH continues to be enormously misunderstood in general.
If anyone is reading this with an open mind, I definitely recommend reaching out to Chad. He's a good dude. He loves this hobby. He's not doing this just to make money.
Jump in, the water's warm.

[auggiedoggies]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the sense that UTH goes beyond simply "build around young WRs" and takes it to the extreme. Ryan acknowledges that rookie picks aren't guaranteed to be studs. UTH seems to preach that rookies will be stone cold studs, and that younger is always better, no matter what.

I think you're wrong. My sense from UTH is that you will miss on rookies but that's OK because you're buying in bulk. This used to be an almost fool-proof strategy, but now it takes more skill because the relative prices of youth and production have changed.

Gotcha, I am admittedly basing all my opinions off of twitter. So it's just giving yourself more darts to throw? Makes sense, but like you said, it's getting to be quite expensive.

[auggiedoggies]

One thing I want to add here that hasn't been said.
Despite the self-promotion and branding, UTH continues to be enormously misunderstood in general.
If anyone is reading this with an open mind, I definitely recommend reaching out to Chad. He's a good dude. He loves this hobby. He's not doing this just to make money.
Jump in, the water's warm.

I will second this, Chad is a really cool dude to chat with on twitter. Takes criticism well.

[btv802]

I'm a first year dynasty manager out of a dispersal, and it's funny I've been called out for being a UTH follower but it's not the case. I did my dispersal and made my first trade for '17 picks well before I ever heard about UTH (mostly from listening to Matt Kelley rant about it).

In reality my youth first approach kind of came out of two unrelated ideas/places:

a) To put it bluntly, the talent pool in my dispersal was garbage and I figured even if I wanted to be competitive right away it would most likely have to be at the expense of trading away my future completely. As much fun as it is to win, just didn't seem like the way I wanted to start in this format.

b) I'm a big fan of a soccer club AFC Ajax who are world famous for developing players through their own youth academy, and this philosophy just kind of resonates with me. I think that building through youth, while difficult, would just be the most fun way for me to play this game.

In the end I'm sure UTH provides a lot of great content, I just kinda think I can save that $50 and try to do this youth thing with a more well rounded approach taking scouting advice and roster building ideas from a variety of places, rather than just buying into one single approach.

[OhCruelestRanter]

Katie always sounds like she's out of breath, to the point that every sentence was a workout. She's also essentially the living avatar of the straw man argument people rail against when they talk about UTH and people who overvalue youth.

Tim has never voiced an opinion that stood out enough to be remembered.

Chad's pretty good.

I think they're selling snake oils. They constantly cite "the projection model" without making it available until you've purchased it. They almost never mention anything that they specifically see on film, and they almost never mention even basic analytics. Their whole gimic is to acquire young WRs, which is great if you play in a non competitive league, but of little value otherwise. It's comparable to telling an MLB GM who isn't Tony LaRussa that "hey, I think OBP might be important".

Sure, Dynasty Nerds doesn't bring much to the table, but at least they're tolerable on the ears and don't portend to have the answer to some secret dynasty fantasy football question.

[clarion contrarion]

Ryan comes across as less of a self-promoter. Personally, I think that's a plus.

Just to clarify, because McDowell doesn't specifically promote himself or his writings/methodologies it's A OKAY
But because UTH has it's own website and content all centered around the same idea essentially as McDowell advocates for and the only way to build a subscriber base and make money to keep the site going is to self promote, that's not okay?

All right

Nah, not what I was implying. You're not gonna find a bigger proponent of the glories of the capitalist system than me, so fair play to UTH for doing what they need to do. But DLF is ALSO building a brand by promoting their wares, and for my tastes they do it in a much less grating way than the guys at UTH, which is why I subscribe here and not there. But horses for courses and all that.

In football terms, I guess I'd use the analogy of Tom Landry versus Rex Ryan. Some are gonna prefer one style to the other.

yeah give me the landry way since he actually won something , all the youth forever dudes end up as casualties of my less rigid philosophy in that yeah youth and picks are valuable. But every year there is a older wr or rb (or several some years) about to have a big time season. A player left that a youth chaser is dying to part with scoop them up and beat the guys that are chronic rebuilders or youth chasers . The names change fitz boldin decker steve smith and now I see on the forum that demaryius or green are about to age out fine I will take them and win now and worry about 2017 or 2018 after the super bowl ! My roster changes drastically year over year but the ownership and the goal remains constant , win this season .
Dynasty gives you the ability to keep players it doesn't mandate that you must ; it is a series of 16 week dashes not a 3 year or a 5 year plan.For every guy in canton there are 20 or 30 that had a great season or two but injuries , situation or desire were a long term challenge, most flashes of greatness are just that flashes ,as sustained greatness is a much harder nut to crack so get in and out of your positions and don't get attached .... EVER ! dynasty day trading !
In my 1st dynasty league I joined I finished 11th then 3rd after crushing the league in the regular season and have won 3 of the last 4 years and only have randall cobb leftover from 2012 & 12 of the 24 from 2014 winner.
In another I have only jimmy graham left from a 2010 winner and only half the roster left of my 2014 title

[Orenthal Shames]

Love this mindset Clarion & couldn't agree more. I won last year and already have overhauled my roster to set myself up to try for the repeat while retooling for the future.

I got killed on different boards for dealing away Miller, Mariota, and Hurns, but as you said, I'm not attached to anyone. I'm going for rings.

[dlf_jules]

In a happy coincidence, Chad Parsons was on Dynasty Blueprint today. iTunes link

[GridironGuerilla]

I'm listening to it now.

[Dynasty DeLorean]

I can "confirm" that Chad is a good dude. I emailed him with a question a few months ago and even though he didn't use it for the show he still responded. And not just some one word response, we had a little back and forth going for a few emails. Not sure who else would do that, I imagine not many.

[Dookmarriot]

I can "confirm" that Chad is a good dude. I emailed him with a question a few months ago and even though he didn't use it for the show he still responded. And not just some one word response, we had a little back and forth going for a few emails. Not sure who else would do that, I imagine not many.

Jeff Miller did that for me a couple of years back. Way above and beyond. Big reason I came here.

[slightlyuntrue]

Katie always sounds like she's out of breath, to the point that every sentence was a workout. She's also essentially the living avatar of the straw man argument people rail against when they talk about UTH and people who overvalue youth.

Tim has never voiced an opinion that stood out enough to be remembered.

Chad's pretty good.

I think they're selling snake oils. They constantly cite "the projection model" without making it available until you've purchased it. They almost never mention anything that they specifically see on film, and they almost never mention even basic analytics. Their whole gimic is to acquire young WRs, which is great if you play in a non competitive league, but of little value otherwise. It's comparable to telling an MLB GM who isn't Tony LaRussa that "hey, I think OBP might be important".

Sure, Dynasty Nerds doesn't bring much to the table, but at least they're tolerable on the ears and don't portend to have the answer to some secret dynasty fantasy football question.

About that projection model...

A couple months back I decided to reverse-engineer the "PROD" production score, a key calculation and input factor in UTH's quantitative prospect evaluation. I took a sample of 85 players with observable PROD scores and their respective input variables, namely YPG, TD/G, YPC, TD% [TDs/Catch]. Once the data was flattened and scrubbed I ran a serious of regression analyses to test for correlations, with limited success. I then weighted & adjusted for production vs. age/height/weight baselines. I got close, but not as close as I'd expected. I also observed a strange phenomenon; the four input variables described above did not always equal those from my own data model. These are very basic calculations, so I was perplexed as to why they weren't identical in every case.

After much trial and error I determined the cause: Games played. The UTH PROD score includes all games for all players, even if that player did not post any receiving targets (WR/TE) or rush attempts (RB). My data model only calculated these per-game figures for games in which it's provable that a player actually played a role on offense, by a documented receiving target or rush attempt.

Example: According to cfbstats.com Nelson Agholor played in 13 games his 2012 season. However, he only received posted stats for 9 of those games. In the other 4 games, he didn't receive a target. I was unable to determine if he even played offensive snaps (he did return kicks in those games).

One can make an argument for both methodologies of calculating per-game production and efficiency. To me, the latter is clearly a better option as it provides insight into a player's actual production on the sample of games in which a player had an actual, observable opportunity to produce.

This was one of a number of intriguing findings during the course of the project. Thought it would interested to share this one with the group.