Shawn Siegele discusses the success of the dynasty portfolio in 2025, and explores how to use concepts like Perpetual Reloading and the Permanent Championship Window to supercharge different dynasty roster types in 2026.
The last two years have delivered crazy results for our portfolio in the RotoViz TriFlex Leagues over at the FFPC. With 18 total teams (nine teams times two years), we’ve won six titles, finished second with four other squads, and had two additional teams win the No. 1 seed for scoring the most points during the regular season. The FFPC structure offers payouts for teams that earn a bye, which means that 12 of the 18 squads were successful.
At the same time, only three of the 18 teams missed the playoffs, and all three won the backdraw to earn the 1.01 the following year. (This backdraw method for awarding the first six picks increases excitement and discourages tanking. In a similar fashion to what professional sports leagues are dealing with, most of my non-FFPC dynasty leagues have been seriously damaged by extreme tanking.)
Frequent readers know that we deploy a strategy called Perpetual Reloading in order to achieve a Permanent Championship Window. The purpose of marrying these two concepts is to build a “better than the best possible team” and then keep the team at that level permanently.
Of course, those are aggressive claims, so we both want to build a strong philosophical foundation and also do the little things right.
In today’s exercise I’m going to walk through the nine squads and discuss their development and results. With that as a framework, we’ll go deep in the weeds on the three main elements of dynasty.
- Draft Philosophy
- Trade Philosophy
- Build Philosophy
Today’s workshop is also intended as a flurry of mini-workshops all in one place. I’ll include short strategy sessions, or interludes, where I break down specific questions that are raised by an individual team’s choices within a dynamic context. For example,
- Once you open the championship window, do you ever make moves intended to supercharge that season’s chances? If so, how does that fit with the overall philosophy?
- If your trade calculator includes quantity bonuses and best-player bonuses, why do you often trade for volume? And why would you have recently declined a godfather offer that included the best player in fantasy?
- If your core tenets recommend a superstar QB and multiple foundation pieces at every other position, why do you also promote the idea that Zero QB is a savvy way to play Superflex?
- If FFPC leagues have 20-player roster limits during the regular season, what inefficiency are you trying to exploit by rostering 30-plus players during the summer? Please explain why more players lead to more picks (when the conventional wisdom emphasizes consolidation) and why you’re arguing that the FFPC’s Cutdown rules help supercharge your reload?
- Everyone wants to trade their solid veterans when rebuilding. Should you immediately trade your best young player when taking over an orphan?
- And finally, what are the consequences if we’re re-entering an RB Golden Age?
I wrote an early draft of this article before getting immersed in the Big Gorilla Blueprint, and I was feeling bad about the delay until we released Jesse Cohen’s trade calculator: We’re Not Done Yet — The Dynasty Dealbook Calculates and Reports. To say that his work on this project has made the article better, not to mention dramatically more fun, would be an understatement. But even that pales in comparison to what it’s done for our dynasty-oriented subscribers.
In this piece, I’ll incorporate the Trade Calculator in analyzing past trades, I’ll look at how some of the additional features can be used to navigate tricky trade environments, and I’ll use the Report feature to evaluate my squads not just on their past accomplishments but on their future outlook. Because Jesse includes features both to evaluate/rank your team based on our dynasty rankings and to evaluate/rank your team’s 2026 outlook based on best ball ADP, you can not only think in terms of multiple timelines, but you can look through an RV and a non-RV lens.
