Folks, football season is finally almost upon us which means that your Fantasy Football season to start up. It also means that you should be thinking about your Fantasy Football league and what changes you can make to it to enhance the experience and beat your friends.
It’s no secret that Fantasy Football has changed over the years. When I started playing back in 2008, PPR wasn’t standard, running backs mattered a lot more than they do today, and the game simply wasn’t as fun.
Fantasy has changed and it’s time to get your league caught up with the times. Here’s five ways to make your fantasy league more fun.
1. Make Your League a Superflex League
Guys, quarterbacks are the most important players in football. They should be the most important part of Fantasy Football as well. In standard PPR, Fantasy Pros has Josh Allen ranked 35th as their QB1. Patrick Mahomes isn’t the 45th best player in football. If you were drafting the NFL today, Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes don’t make it out of the top 2. They shouldn’t in fantasy football either. It’s time to make your league a two quarterback league or a league with a Superflex that allows teams to start two quarterbacks.
2. Make a Fun Way to Set Your Draft Order
One of my favorite ways to set a Fantasy Football Draft order came in Season 1 of The League.
However, if you don’t want to go through the trouble of ruining your child’s birthday party, you can always do one of the following: Pick a golf tournament and randomly assign members golfers, pick a NASCAR race and randomly assign members racers, use the home run derby, pick teams in a soccer tournament, or if your league members all live close to each other, have your own golf or bowling tournament. The bottom line is that you can’t just pick from a hat anymore.
3. Get Rid of Kickers
This one for me is simple: Kickers are entirely random and that variance doesn’t allow you to determine who the best team is. Fantasy Football shouldn’t come down to someone’s kicker scoring 15 points in a playoff game and another team’s kicker only scoring 3. The future of fantasy football doesn’t have kickers.
4. Add a Game Each Week Against the League Median
Have you ever had a great week in fantasy, scored 185 points, only to be bested by a team who scored 200+ points? It’s the absolute WORST. By adding a game against the league median each week, you can fix that.
How does it work?
You simply play two games each week: One against your opponent and one against the league median. So essentially the top five teams in scoring each week receive a win regardless of who their opponent is and the bottom five teams in scoring each week receive a loss.
This really helps balance out the league and it takes away from variance in scheduling. We did this in one of my dynasty leagues this year and the top six teams in scoring all made the playoffs in our twelve team league that had six playoff spots. It’s makes your league 20x more fun and both ESPN leagues and Sleeper leagues have this feature now.
5. Have a Captain who gets 1.5x His Points Each Week
This is an idea that I’m stealing from DFS but it’s one that I’ve seen is now starting to find its way into redraft leagues. Leagues are letting their owners select one captain each week who earns 1.5x points what they would normally score.
This is a strategic wrinkle that could have many different implementations and it’s something that will surely create roastable moments in your league.
“Dude, you took Christian McCaffrey as your captain and he got injured in the first quarter. Meanwhile Tee Higgins would have had 30 points for you!”
While this idea won’t be for every league, it’ll certainly make leagues more fun.
Featured Image Credit: All-Pro Reels, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons