In a keeper league I ran dating back to 1989, we started allowing the two worst teams in the league (after Week 12) to pick up ONE college football player that theyd be able to hold over as one of their three keepers heading into the following season. That would definitely make Sunday dinner at the in-laws (more) stressful! Logistics: Let this person handle the website duties, from league setup to roster cleanup to rules and scoring settings. If there are owners who do not have rivals, create rivalries! Make the smaller leagues entry fees about one-quarter of what the fees are for the big league, helping keep that league stocked with potential. It doesn't mean they are bad owners. (Make sure you can trade draft picks in your league settings.). New Fantasy Lineup & Waiver Ideas. College football Rivalry Week - The ultimate guide to the best Create rematches of last years playoff bracket or in final standings order. This will create an incentive for owners to check their teams each week and participate in league activities. Piggybacking on the battle royale week is the two-win system scoring format. Its a ton of fun. The guy who invented beer probably didnt have to buy another beer in a bar for the rest of his life. Some other ideas: Playing beer pong to decide who gets to draft when seems like an AWESOME idea. Auction off the top 50 players in Fantasy scoring from last season, and then do a straight draft for all the remaining teams! Pick a Racehorse: Find a horse race thats coming up and do a drawing for the horse names in the race. The Rebels (8-3) spit the bit last week in a dismal loss at Arkansas. Adding it to your fantasy football league would no doubt make things more interesting. Tight ends, like quarterbacks, have plenty of talent, but just one lineup slot on Fantasy teams. Make your Fantasy Football life colorful! Rule 4 -- The Psychic: We all know that luck often plays a bigger part than skill in the end result of fantasy football games. UGH! Schedule Generator : r/fantasyfootball - Reddit I am only in favor of this if there are five or more keepers, which makes it closer to a dynasty league than a keeper league. Besides that one week where you take out your workplace frustrations on Jeff in your office league, most Fantasy Football leagues don't have those kind of heart pumping . Its just another way to keep those in your league having fun and just makes your league better in the end. Choose one week during the season to have all of these rivalry matchups play out in the schedule. Previous Changes Rivalry Week formalizes these matchups that may or may not serve as mini-Super Bowls to your owners. The Fantasy draft lottery is always a fun event, and commissioners should think about changing how the draft order is chosen every year. Let those players build up for a couple weeks and have a Week 3 Supplemental Draft! In 2004, nine running backs carried the ball over 300 times. /r/fantasyfootball - Good For Your Season. I started a four-sport experts league back in 2001, and Engel was in charge of the CBSSports.com team (SportsLine back then). Members are one-upping each other, flinging deeply personal insults, and sending audio and video files expressing their deep-rooted hatred for their rivals. In Week 14, before the fantasy playoffs begin, have all your owners vote for a handful of awards each season, including Fantasy MVP, Rookie of the Year, Sleeper Pick of the Year, Free-Agent Pickup of the Year, Fantasy Bust, Worst Move of the Year, and most important, Fantasy Owner of the Year. Custom Schedules with an end-of-season Rivalry Week? (ESPN) 68 new rules suggestions to spice up your fantasy football league A dynasty league will keep you more active thanks to the NFL Draft and then what should be your rookie draft a short while later. Make Offensive Lines a Fantasy Position In Your League. By not allowing owners to make free-agent pickups after the draft, forcing them to wait until after the first two weeks of the season are over, then the worst teams in the league suddenly get a chance to add a superstar to their teams. How about having four wide receivers and no flex, then you can add a third running back slot, too. These rivalries could consist of matchups between: Basically, you just want to make each game to take on a little special meaning. That would make it a race for owners to pay you! Mock draft in minutes with our free fantasy football Draft Simulator. The big league would get the big table, and the smaller, minor league would have to do their draft at the kiddie table. Humiliation can be a great motivator! Cookie Notice If you're looking for a year-round option, this could be your big move. What if you set up your 12-team league so that every single week, each team plays against each of the 11 other teams. For a dynasty league, it has to be something everyone is on board with. Under this system, you play every team once and the two additional weeks you just need to finish with a top 50% point total. As the NFL changes, our fantasy leagues must change alongside it. Baseball has sandwich picks that are awarded to teams that lose certain free agents. Rivalry matchups can be created in a couple of different ways: Both options have pros and cons, but we suggest having owners choose as to avoid any push back on your choices as Commish. Now, that second tier of tight ends really mean something, and sleeper tight ends can start being drafted. The owner with the first overall pick would also have the 24th pick and the 36th pick, as well as the 37th pick to start off the fourth round. Run faster, drive faster, work faster! I never understood why more leagues dont award three-to-six points for home-field advantage to the higher seeds in the Fantasy Football playoffs. 66. The best week of the college football season is upon us. The Fantasy Football league ideas were few and far between back then!With a 13-week regular season for most Fantasy Football leagues, its really tough to gauge who the six best teams are, especially when you consider how many times a good team loses to a bad team, just because they had stars on byes that week. Is there anything worse than losing your first-round pick to a torn ACL in Week 4? There are a ton of different ways you can do your draft lottery, from as simple as drawing names out of a hat to holding a Skee-Ball competition at the local Family Fun Center. Some league services, like CBSSports.com, has league histories, which includes stuff like the standings every year, the draft results, the owner records versus other owners, and assorted other records, like highest points scored in a season, etc. Customize the layout, handpick the fonts and colors, and organize your chart and schedule precisely to your liking. This is especially true if you're expecting to have some downtime on an upcoming vacation, but even more especially true if you run your own league and have done so for what seems like an eternity. The quarterbacks position is one of the most important in the NFL, as hes often the leader on the field and in the clubhouse, and he makes the offense go. It doesnt solve the issue of playing two teams twice while playing every other team just once, but it removes the randomness of which two teams you play twice. Its fantastic. In the end though, I would much rather do it live versus an online, timed draft that only allows you a few minutes to make a selection and is over in an hour and a half. Im in a handful of leagues that always draft live. How Many Top Fantasy Football Rookies Are 1st Before & After the Season? Yahoo Fantasy Football. If you and your friends perfer just one fantasy league a year, then maybe a dynasty league isn't for you, it's probably better suited for those who do multiple leagues a year. For example, the owner with the 12th pick would now also have the 13th pick, and the 25th pick. Theres your regular-season schedule. All you have to do is enter your league name, a few league parameters, and your team names. Scott Pagel is Sports Editor for the Bethlehem Press and has covered Philadelphia Eagles training camp since 1997. To me, the flex is a copout, and this forces owners to make decisions. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. Deciding the fantasy draft order might be the most important event outside of the actual fantasy draft, so why not make it a bigger deal than just pulling numbers out of a hat? Split the season in two. A team with bad keepers has a real uphill battle year after year. Thats the worst spot ever! But if you're looking to keep your league engaged, a dynasty league could be a way to go. Or maybe you add it as a secondary league. Go to a restaurant or get together at someones home for beers, and do the drawing! Installing a transaction floor or ceiling could be enforced by using the deposit and fines system discussed earlier, or you know, the honor system. Obviously, its impossible for that to work, but thats not the case in fantasy. Add the amount generated to the pot for an even bigger prize for the winner. The "Us v.s. Start with FootballGuys.coms custom schedule maker and leave in place the generic team names (Team 1; Team 2; etc. Each season, have teams put in an extra 25 percent of the entry fee, which then goes into a pool that pays out to the champion four years from now in the Super-Duper Bowl! Have them face off in Rivalry Week, where the winner gets to change the losers team name and logo for the entire week after their game. Have your league vote on what theme you should use! Just make sure the sober people document the results. ! (I honestly dont 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.). (Someone also drafted Curtis Enis, HA!) Thanks in advance for your suggestions. Everything you need to know about college football's Rivalry Week - ESPN Gonos is senior editor for FNTSY.com and founder of SoCalledFantasyExperts.com. So one way you can fix that is by making more regular season games! I run a league website for us and have a page dedicated to rivalry week matchups with overall points differential, game highlights, and a record of funny bets that resulted. 12:30 p.m. Also, keep owner records, year after year, including the award winners and career win/loss records (overall and against specific owners). The good news is you can have a varying amount of keepers. This week at Harbor Park: Norfolk Tides welcome Durham Bulls, new OK, well, sometimes I lie. Give it a try! A bonus TD! There is nothing that generates more interest than a chance to win something. Keeping one or two players in a 10-team league should allow owners to come up with a similar set of keepers, talent-wise. Choose a week during the middle of the season and deem it Rivalry Week. We all have that one leaguemate that we just NEED to beat every time you two are matched up. The free agents that the owners pick up would have to be carefully researched in order to make sure that they are worthy of using a transaction on. Let owners draft Team Offensive Lines, sort of like how people draft Team Defenses. Then award five Fantasy points if that offensive lines NFL team rushes for over 150 yards, passes for over 300 yards or doesnt allow any sacks! A friend of mine recently quit his fantasy football league for this very reason, and while it may not seem like a big deal, it was a league thats had the same group of close friends for decades, and his leaving upset some longtime friends. Before we get into the new changes, I would be remiss to ignore aspects of fantasy leagues that should be universal. The Footballguys Schedule Maker can handle league sizes from tiny (6 teams) to massive (32 teams). This should also initiate some interesting lineup strategies as people forego sleepers at running back and wide receiver in favor of a backup quarterback or two. Once again, were trying to eliminate luck from the hobby, so a team that has a horrible Fantasy schedule (with the most points against) and the second-most points in the league, to go with a 6-7 record, gets rewarded with a playoffs spot. It will change the makeup of your roster, too. Overall, having good, responsible owners is half the battle when it comes to running a league. As the incumbent commissioner of an 11 year running FFL, Ive found that the vast majority of my job is to bring life to the league. Commissioners! (Thats a word!). Award Final Playoff Spot To Highest Scoring Non-Playoff Team Its always interesting to see at which point someone prefers the 12th or 11th pick over the seventh, eighth or ninth picks. While this can be an issue at a live draft, my feeling is its one day a year and I can deal with a slow draft. This makes those owners who might bail have a reason to return, and it makes for some interesting picks. Another option, if you dont want to have to draft two quarterbacks, is to just have the points scored by the NFL backup to an injured quarterback count for your team. Whatever it is, it will keep the whole league interested, even those who have not won a single game! But overall, a live draft is a great way to get together with friends, have a few drinks and laughs and draft some teams and could turn into the highlight of your league. But when January rolls around, get the league involved again by asking everyone to vote on some Fantasy league awards (theyre not allowed to vote for their own teams! First place versus second place, third place against fourth place, etc. Having a couple of keepers is probably the best way to go, at least to start with a change. For keeper leagues, one way to keep the bad teams interested as the season wears down is to have the two worst teams choose a college football player as a possible keeper. 21 Ways to Spice Up Your Fantasy Football League Great Fantasy Football league ideas have come across my desk over the past 27 years of play, and many of them, I have personally instituted in some of my leagues. So consider mixing the two, and doing a combination auction/draft for your player entry system. I dont work for Yahoo or anything, just a guy sharing my experience with the community. Both options have pros and cons, but we suggest having owners choose as to avoid any push back on your choices as Commish. No, I'm a California resident looking for the California Consumer Privacy Act form. Now that we have 18 weeks of an NFL regular season, allowing for a 14-week fantasy regular season, consider doing two half-seasons. You could also make the draft lottery a little more strategic. Through the years, the major changes to Fantasy Football leagues come to the lineups (flex positions, WR3s, QB2, super-flex, etc.). Once a counteroffer is accepted, THAT trade goes up for more counteroffers! You have gone 13-1 and have the clear-cut best team in the league. One of the biggest complaints about fantasy football is that it seems like luck has a huge say in the standings. This means the best teams would win more than they lose, and the other way around. Fantasy owners should be afforded the same options. Try a starting roster that looks like this: QB, RB, WR, WR, TE, WR/TE, WR/RB, flex. When I first started in Fantasy Football, back in 1989, we drafted large teams, so we had plenty of backups, but we wouldnt allow for waiver pickups in the traditional sense. like if the matchups you want for a rivalry are in week 3 swap out that entire week for week 6 and put week 6s matchups in week 3. in the regular season, too. Once two teams come to an agreement on a trade, the commissioner notifies all the other owners, who will then have a 24-hour window to try to beat the offers. Commissioners Corner is a multi-part series meant to provide tips to keep your league engaged all season long and tap even more into the fun that comes with playing fantasy. The longer fantasy football exists and the more popular it becomes, the better the community will get at improving the game and making it more enjoyable for everyone involved. Now, those backups that are seeing more snaps become cheap superstars! I would highly recommend implementing this in all of your FF leagues. Written by David Gonos (@davidgonos) for Athlon Sports. And the custom schedule maker makes it so much easier to institute a rivalry week. Schedule two weeks of double-headers (the week before bye weeks and the week after so everyone has full rosters), preferably against division rivals. Battle Royale Week One of my leagues experimented with this for the first time in 2018 and it was a huge success. For more information, please see our People dont take advantage of how exciting the draft and the draft lottery can be. Collecting league fees is always a pain every season. Part of the trouble with keeper leagues is that once a team gets some studs, theyre tough to shake from the top. This is also great for owner retention. This can also be solved by having Team QB instead of the individual player. This new Fantasy scoring rule also eliminates a running back or wide receiver getting a point for catching a screen pass and losing two yards. And what do [], Imagine its week 12. More tips for improving your fantasy league: Starting with the basics Why bylaws matter Building franchises Recognizing the champ, In Part 6 of the series, well dive into d, Yahoo Fantasy Football leagues are open: Sign up now for free, FootballGuys.com has a free custom schedule maker, Commissioners now have the ability to edit seeds. In the end, you at least want to give your owners the feeling they have a say in rules, especially if you don't really know some of the owners as well as others. You could also decide to do a lower sandwich pick, depending on the injury bust. Do your regular summer draft for the . Fantasy owners can still start three running backs if they wish. Through the years, the major changes to Fantasy Football leagues come to the lineups (flex positions, WR3s, QB2, super-flex, etc.). While we dont have plans to change anything for the punters, we can make the offensive line position more interesting from a Fantasy perspective. Here are the reasons why its so great: Trash talk is king and this week is the most active trash talk weve ever had. Rather than do playoff seeding by record only, consider giving that final playoff spot, whether its sixth in a 12-team league, to the team remaining with the highest points scored. Two intriguing picks for your 2017 draft would be USC quarterback Sam Darnold and LSU running back Derrius Guice. Maybe theyre your boss and this is your one way of sticking it to the man. That is why we switched to a 14-team league with a 13-week schedule. Consider giving fantasy owners more flexibility. Scott Engel loves to poke fun at me for this one. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Wouldnt that suck if you had a double-header to play and your first-round pick was resting on a bye? Take advantage of those backups to the stars that sit for the NFL Playoffs! Think of how much fuel you could add to the rivalry-fire if owners played for Player Pink Slips that week! This could be for a keeper league or a redraft league, and it really just punctuates how much everyone hates a winner! Consultation bracket winner get 1st pick in following year rookie draft followed by middle standing reverse order for the rookie draft I.e. Do it for your fantasy leagues, allowing each team to name a team captain each week, allowing that players score to be multiplied by 150 percent. Under the two-win system, a perfect season would be 26-0 as opposed to 13-0. Everyone loves to beat their rival in competition and they will no doubt look forward to doing it in fantasy football. Your []. Ive been doing this for what seems like forever, and Ive seen typical leagues and leagues with different sets of rules, so here are some of my top ideas for keeping your fantasy league going strong. Of course, for the Super Bowl, theres no home field advantage, as its played on a neutral playing field. Bills ( -8.5) vs. Lions. Bring one of our customized Fantasy Football draft boards with you to put in the stickers across the top! By doing the draft lottery ahead of time, you really increase the chances of owners working out some pre-draft trades! With all the choices, I dont like to give advice on league settings. So teams could choose to start a third (or fourth) wide receiver instead of a third running back. Obviously, once the playoffs start, it has to go back to one-on-one Head-to-Head play. Doing some things with your schedule is also a way to improve your league. Fantasy Football | Yahoo! Sports Everyone hates when an owner does not set their roster and there are 3 injured players set to start against the best team in the league, setting them up for an easy victory. This would make the draft a lot more meaningful as the players that you draft would be stuck with an owner longer than in other leagues. One of the most annoying things that happens with Fantasy Football trades is that people always say, What a horrible trade I wouldve given you a much better deal for that player! This is all predetermined before the start of the season. Use that same line of thinking to help the owner who suffered the worst injury bust last season (Keenan Allen?) The best solution Ive come up with is having each team list their bench players in the order in which they would replace injured starters. Rivalries are one of the major reasons why we love sports. We also have 4 divisions of 3 teams and we play division twice and everyone else once and I usually use the footballguys generator as well. At first, I protested. If a starter gets hurt in the first half and does not return to the game at any point, the replacement automatically takes his spot (it has to be automatic, otherwise fantasy owners could exploit this if the injured player happened to have a monster first half). Just like the NBA Draft, award the worst teams from the previous season with extra names in the hat during the draft lottery, improving their chances for landing a top-three pick. Adobe Express inspires you to think outside the box. Then the next year, it starts all over again, and the minor league will battle to get back into the majors! Here are a couple things that you can do to keep interest high throughout the season for all owners and maybe make things a little more interesting for you as well. r/FFCommish - Fantasy Football Commissioners - Reddit Once rivals are paired, you can go in to the league site and manually adjust schedules accordingly. 3rd place $150 2nd place $450 1st place $775. whatever type of league you play in is unimportant. Standard scoring. If one person doesnt want to step up to be the commissioner, separate the duties among three different people for a Commissioner Committee!