Issue #256: Table Minimum

By Derrick Ernst

March 01, 2026

Aggressive

T-minus eight days until free agents can agree to terms with teams.

T-minus ten days until free agents can officially sign with teams.

Things are about to get good. I will admit, it sucks seeing other teams make splashes in free agency as your team sits on the sidelines. Here’s to that not being the case for your favorite squad. The talk of the town here in MIN is what they’re going to do at QB, but you already knew that. Switching gears, if you haven’t taken a look at our “Poker” issue from a week or so ago, I encourage you to give it a read. Consider it a prelude to what we’re going to dive into today. Admittedly they’re a bit deeper than surface level.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with table minimums at a casino. Heck, it’s the only thing I play, but it has been awhile since I’ve sat down for a table game at a casino. Why do we play table minimums? One thing that comes to mind is that it’s the best way to extend your time at the table. At the end of the day, a casino is a form of entertainment. You want the most of it for your money and it doesn’t help any if you blow threw everything you have in a couple minutes. Even if you lost everything, wouldn’t you prefer to have it last hours, assuming you have nothing better to do with your time?

Do you know what fantasy’s equivalent is to a table minimum? Just making the playoffs.

Let me take it one step further. Just making the playoffs and losing in the first round.

I’d argue this is the worst pain to feel in all of fantasy. Yes, even worse than losing by 0.1 point. Why? Because of time. Losing by a decimal point only has a lasting impact of a week. Lose in the first round and you question what the last four months was for.

As dumb as it sounds, you can get the job done in fantasy by doing just what it takes to make the playoffs, but wiping away the competition until you cross the finish line. This is another of way of saying you take the regular season to experiment and leverage your findings in the playoffs.

In a lot of ways, I think fantasy managers play the game in a fashion of trying not to lose instead of playing to win. We try so hard not to make any mistakes that our conservatism is the mistake. I took me years to realize this about my own managing. Playing scared is another way to lead to conservative decisions. Have you ever had someone new to your league (better yet, new to fantasy) come in and wreck havoc? They’re not playing scared because they have nothing to lose. They don’t have any bad habits to lean on. The more you play fantasy, the more you develop them, whether you realize it or not.

Let me get back on topic a bit. One of the things that I will be leaning more into this offseason is the idea of being aggressive. If there’s a theme to TDF this offseason, it’s that. I want us to go swinging. I want us to not just make the playoffs, but to take home the hardware. We’re not going to get that by leaning into players that will just get us by.

This doesn’t mean recommendations and rosters will be made up of risky assets stacked upon risky assets. It means taking calculated risks and playing for the upside. We try doing that today, but when looking at our Draft Guide from last season, I was unenthused with the amount of “splash” that I was seeing. The caveat to this is that players like these need room to run. You can’t cut ties with them too early. Doing so defeats the purpose of seeing their game through.

I went out to ChatGPT and said give me the strengths and weaknesses of aggressive and conservative approaches. I think it did a pretty good job. Note the weaknesses of playing conservative. Bingo.

We’re going to cut it at two pages today. Our flight is about to land and this was as far as I was able to make it. I have a few other things to say on this topic, but we’ll save for our next issue.

If you email in, I’ll likely be delayed in responding. Take things easy this week. We’ve all earned some R&R.