 Have you graduated from the basic season-long redraft league to play with your co-workers and family members and gotten a little more hardcore with keeper leagues? If so, I applaud you. Keeper leagues are a great way to take your fantasy football obsession to the next level. Here's my follow-up question. What's keeping you from taking your fantasy football addiction to an even higher plane? I present to you Dynasty Fantasy Football. So what is Dynasty Fantasy Football? Dynasty leagues are essentially keeper leagues on steroids. The basic tenet is, once you draft or trade for a player, you get to keep that player for as long as you want. Until you drop him, trade him, or he retires and is completely removed from the fantasy platform that you're playing on. In other words, you get to keep the whole damn team year over year forever. Want to be the Bill Belichick of your friend group? This is your shot. Because you get to keep players for as long as you want, Dynasty leagues typically have huge rosters. I've played a few leagues that have 33-plus spots, but the general standard is at least 25-plus. Those big rosters help you compete for both the short and the long term. Obviously, you're going to want to draft players that can help you right away, but it gives you a chance to grab still-developing players who may need a year or two or three to get to that point where they're fantasy relevant or fantasy stars. The Dynasty format really raises the stakes when it comes to player selection, and you got to be really careful weighing long-term goals with short-term gain. In one league last year, I traded away Chase Claypool to get a win now running back in Cream Hunt. However, unfortunately, literally a few days later, Claypool scored four touchdowns, broke out, and now he's one of the most valuable young Dynasty players. I would suggest not doing this in your league. And that's really what's so much fun about Dynasty is it gives you so much incentive to dig for diamonds in the rough, like Claypool. The rewards you reap for finding a hidden gem like that are exponentially larger than in a regular redraft or standard league. Pick a sleeper like Omar Jackson, Julian Edelman, maybe Stefan Diggs, and that guy is going to be paying dividends for you five, maybe 10 years down the line. Land the right guy, like say, a six-round quarterback named Tom Brady, and you have a real chance to build, wait for it, a Dynasty in your league. It's just an incredibly fun format. Speaking of format, Dynasty leagues run basically the same as any standard season-long league, at least during the season. You still have weekly matchups with your league mates. You still go head-to-head, week-in and week-out, and you can still talk shit to all your friends, and it's really fun. The one big difference, though, is that in Dynasty leagues, instead of drafting a new team year-in and year-out, you have one big permanent start-up draft, and then you continue to build your team through trades in the yearly rookie draft. Let's talk about the start-up draft. The start-up draft is essentially the big bang that lays the foundation for your league forever. Like any fantasy draft, there are several strategies that players can take in the start-up draft. Some managers choose to go with a win-now approach, picking players that can score a lot of points now, but maybe have a little bit less value long-term. Players like Julio Jones, Matt Ryan, Adam Thielen come to mind. Other managers choose to skew much, much younger, trying to find future superstars, maybe like Antonio Gibson, CD-Lam, guys like that. Some managers choose to go one step further and do what we call a productive struggle, trading back in the start-up draft in order to pick up future rookie picks. Basically, this is the fantasy football version of the process. You're going to suck in year one, maybe year two, but you're building up so much future draft capital that you're going to put together an unstoppable team. Of course, tanking so you can pick up a bunch of future picks comes with its risks, because, just like the NFL draft, fantasy rookie drafts are filled with busts too. So about those rookie drafts, every team is given an allotment of rookie picks when the league starts. Typically, you get one pick in each round, say rounds one through four, and like NFL teams, you can trade those picks either for future picks or for players. The draft order is determined by the final standings in your league or perhaps the playoff results. And every summer, you get to draft the incoming rookies. It's fun as hell. You get to dive into scouting reports, watch the tape, and look at analytics to try and find the best incoming rookies. Players like Jamar Chase and Najee Harris look like can't miss prospects right now, but the fun is, we just don't know. We'll have to see how they do once you get to the NFL. And, like the start of draft, managers can do whatever they want. They can use the picks to take rookies, or they can trade those picks away for established veterans and win now. Alright, just to sum it all up, I love redraft leagues, I love keeper leagues, but dynasty leagues really just cannot be beat. When I build a good team, I want to keep that team. I want that team to continue dominating my league mates year in and year out. To borrow an old Pete Carroll cliche, I don't want to just win one year. I want to win forever.