13 Excellent Fantasy Football League Ideas
Aug 06
Back in my day, we had to wait until Saturday to watch cartoons. And we’d get detention for passing notes because texting didn’t exist. And my Fantasy league was TD-only scoring. The Fantasy Football league ideas were few and far between.
That’s right. Barry Sanders averaged seven TDs over a three-year stretch, making him a fleet-footed RB2 in fantasy, scoring 42 points a season.
We were barbarians, I know.
But everything evolves, including Fantasy Football over the past 20 years. From adding points for yardage, to adding a third wide receiver, to adding a flex position, to drafting IDPs, to auctions, to survivor leagues – a Fantasy Football league is always being modified every five years or so.
It’s time to start modifying again!
Fantasy Football League Ideas: Fixing What Ain’t Broke!
Peyton Hillis was an awesome Week 1 pickup for many eventual champions in 2010.
Before you click on the Twitter link to e-yell at me that I’m ruining the purity of the game that your great-grandfather taught you, just hear me out.
I’m not trying to make you throw your league out, start anew with European scoring rules or anything. All I’m saying is you’re probably in more than one league already. So think about making some alterations to one of your “other” leagues, with some of these Fantasy Football league ideas. You can even get the same guys from your one league and get them to try one of these alternative ideas.
You’re So Money, You Don’t Even Know It
1. COLLECTIONS: Collecting league fees is always a pain every season. Maybe the first six teams that pay their fees get a 10-percent discount and the last three teams have to pay a 20-percent penalty?
2. SUPER DUPER BOWL: In one dynasty league I was in, we instituted a rule where each year, all of the teams would pay 125-percent of the league fees. So we would pay $125 for a $100 league fee. That extra $25 would go into a kitty, and then, after four seasons, we had a Super Duper Bowl. This meant the champion that season would take home a prize that had been building for four seasons, adding up to an extra $1,200. The reason this was so great was because it added an extra layer of strategy, as some teams would adjust their strategies in Year 2 or 3 in order to gear up for a big Year 4.
I did not win. So Fantasy Football league ideas like this are dumb!
Feeling a Draft
My buddy George is Australian and he loves Fantasy Football. Did you know their Fantasy drafts go in a counter-clockwise order, and the 12th pick selects first and the first pick drafts last? OK, well, sometimes I lie.
But I do think people don’t take advantage of how exciting the draft and the draft lottery can be. Too often, we’re all so excited to get the draft going, that we zoom through the lottery and rush our way through the draft. Take a step back and enjoy it!
Playing beer pong to decide who gets to draft when seems like an AWESOME idea. Just make sure the sober people document the results.
3. DRAFT LOTTERY: Rather than just have the same old hat with the same old names being pulled out of it, mix it up. I read on Reddit where someone set up a beer pong table, and people tossed ping pong balls into mixed-up red solo cups that had a draft number on the bottom of it. That’s what determined their draft order! Be creative!
4. DRAFTING DRAFT PICKS: Also, consider allowing the lottery winner to choose where in the draft they’d like to pick. Personally, I’d rather have the third overall pick over the first two picks. You’d get one of the top three running backs (Arian Foster, LeSean McCoy or Ray Rice), and you’d end up with a higher draft pick in the second round than the other two owners.
5. WEIGHTED LOTTERY SYSTEM: If you’re in a keeper league, think about putting three names into the hat for the worst team, and two names in for the second-worst team. This gives them a better chance at a high draft pick, hopefully, counteracting the fact they likely don’t have great keepers. If you are in a dynasty league, they should automatically get the top pick. It might not be a popular Fantasy Football league idea with the rest of your league, until they need that rule next year.
Riding the Waivers
It’s not uncommon to see the teams that lose in Week 1 finding themselves in the championship at the end of the season. A couple years ago, Week 1 losers had a chance to snatch up players like Michael Vick and Peyton Hillis, or even last year with DeMarco Murray.
6. FROM WAIVERS TO FAAB: So rather than over-rewarding a loser, how about changing to a free-agent acquisition budget (FAAB) system? This allows everyone the same chance at all the players every week. They can bid on players each Wednesday, choosing to spend what they want, with a $100 budget for the year (free agents are free after Thursday).
7. TWITTER WAIVERS: Another fun Fantasy Football league idea is to have your waivers play out on Twitter! Players can be picked up and dropped at any time – even during a game! Talk about making Sunday dinner at the in-laws stressful!
The first one to pick up a player gets him – and whomever he drops is instantly available to other owners. This reminds me of a boiler room at some finance firm on Wall Street with people yelling “Buy! Buy!” and “Sell! Sell!” and “Who ate my sandwich!?!” (I honestly don’t know what goes on in those boiler rooms, but I like to think there are a lot of sandwiches being pilfered out of the breakroom fridge.)
“The Twitter” is underutilized by many fantasy owners. There’s a lot to be learned on there, and I’ve set up a huge list of 66 Fantasy Twitter people to follow that will help you for free.
More Fantasy Football League Ideas
Peyton Manning was an excellent college keeper in Fantasy Football leagues in the late ’90s.
8. RESERVES: In real football, depth is pretty important, as it should be in Fantasy Football. So your fantasy reserves should go up against your opponent’s fantasy reserves, and if you outscore their team, you get six bonus points added to your team’s score (but you don’t also get the points from your reserves).
9. HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE: Give the best teams in the regular season a three-point advantage heading into their matchups against the lower seeds. But remember, there’s no home-field advantage in the Super Bowl.
10. RIVALRY WEEK: Set up the schedule so that the second week of the season is a rivalry week – pitting natural rivals against each other in all of the matchups. Brother against brother-in-law. Father against son-in-law. Best friend against best friend. Inmate against warden. And then, give the winner the ability to change the losing owner’s team name to whatever he wants for ONE WEEK!
11. DOUBLE-HEADERS: Most commissioner services allow you to schedule double-headers in your Fantasy Football league, so why not make the first week coming off of byes into a double-header Fantasy extravaganza!?! That means Week 12, when many teams’ fantasy fates are still in the balance; there could be a two-game swing! You can even leave the matchups open until after Week 11, and face the two top teams off against each other, and the third/fourth teams, fifth/sixth teams, etc. Brilliant!
12. PLAYOFFS: Rather than go off of records for the sixth and final playoff spot, reward that last seed to the remaining team with the highest points scored total. For those teams that randomly lost games in which they scored the second-highest points that week, now they have a saving grace.
13. COLLEGE PLAYERS: This last one is kinda kooky (unlike all of the sane ideas above). In Week 12, just a couple weeks before the Heisman Trophy is awarded, allow the two worst teams in your keeper league to draft one college football player apiece. This makes for a great topic for debate in-season, and it injects some excitement into a normally detached group of owners. Peyton Manning, Randy Moss and Ricky Williams were all great college player picks in my old keeper league. Lawrence Phillips, however, was not.
Hopefully, you can install some of these Fantasy Football league ideas – or better yet, it inspired you to come up with some interesting rules of your own! Post a comment below or tweet them to me! (Grown men should not say, “Tweet.”)
Great article David. Awesome ideas and i love the idea of making the draft order a bigger deal. Keep up the good work. Jakaz22 – fantasy football beasthouse
Thank you, sir! Very kind! I love leagues that twist things up just a bit to make it something special.
Good ideas… one that I came up with for my league is a “lottery”. In our league 3rd place gets their money back. Out of what is left after that, 2nd place gets 20% and 1st place gets 80%. With the lottery we had everyone pay an additional amount on top of their entrance fee that is equal to the entrance fee divided by the number of people in the league. So if it is $100 to get in, and there are ten owners, then everyone would pay $100 + ($100/10) = $110, with the end result being we had an extra $100 in the pot. This went to the lottery winner. The 4th place team has the best chance to win it, the 5th place the second best, and so on… so basically it made it where even if you were out of the money (top 3), you still had something to play for as you have a better chance of winning the lottery in 6th place than you do in 9th.
To quote the great Prince Charles, “I EFFING LOVE IT!”
Great idea! Doesn’t screw over the league winners by chopping their winnings down, and definitely makes it a little more exciting for the have-nots at the end of the season.
We have every guy throw in and extra $20. Then the high score from each week gets 1/13th of the pool for that week. We also have the top two teams get a bye the first round. They play the winner of a super set of teams. Two three team games. This way we can get 8 teams in the playoffs and still get the top two teams a bye. It’s madness.
That’s pretty crazy, but I like that you guys came up with it. I bet it took on a few different versions before you got to the one everyone liked.
There is some really bad ideas here. Waivers on twitter as games are on on Sunday? Reserves vs Reserves for bonus points? Ugh.
You make some excellent points.
Great article. Happy to stumble upon it. I have been the commissioner of the FFL (Fantasy Footballers League) ran out of Indiana for 8 years. Our last few years we have “stepped it up a notch” if you will. A few things I’d like to add that we incorporate are -
Make Draft Day the best day of the year. It is a huge social gather of the fraternity of your friends and rivals. We did first round videos in ESPN draft format style, where I just edited pictures to look like they are drafted then put together highlight videos on a video editing software. Burn to a DVD and in all, you are out just a few hours, but at the draft everyone will be unbelievably satisfied. If you want some screenshots, a video sample or anything else let me know.
That’s pretty impressive! I would absolutely love to see that video! Or at least some samples of it. Did you put it up on YouTube? (Thanks for reading and the comment!)
Great article big fan of the super duper bowl have to try it in the next four years! Thanks.
Glad you liked it! Yeah, the Super Duper Bowl is one of those things to do in a league full of people that have all been in the same league for five or six years. It helps make people come back each year, and helps add another layer of strategy. Thanks for commenting, John!
Would love to see the draft video Brad! Were awarding our winner his check in Vegas, super bowl weekend. Good times!
Nice! That sounds like a perfect way to celebrate the end of another Fantasy Football season!
I enjoyed your column Gonos! My league actually has a meeting tonight and I am excited to bring some of your ideas up! Another idea I have come across is having prize money go to the teams who accomplish certain things during the year. IE: scores the most points in one week or wins by the largest margin during a match up.
Thanks! Yeah, all the money going to whoever gets lucky in the playoffs kinda stinks. In one league I’m in ($100 fee), we do $5 to the top scoring team in any given week. Ends up being $80 off the top, but takes a little of the sting out of an injured first-rounder in Week 10. Good luck, dude.