I’ve been playing fantasy football for over ten years now.  I found early on that I enjoyed it but typical league settings were flawed.  Some of the issues I had with typical fantasy football leagues were the following:

• Way too much emphasis on the final week(s) of the season
• Quarterbacks and defenses have little value because each week you could easily pick up a QB or DEF playing a soft team
• One player can have way too much influence on the outcome of the league (see Marshall Faulk 2000)
• For team defenses, not enough value placed on points given up
• Depth made no difference since you rarely played any players outside your top 8 or 10

Because of these issues, I decided to create my own league settings in hopes that it would be a better league.  That was back in 2002.  I also made this league a keeper league and I can say that this league is by far the best, most fun fantasy league I have ever played in.  While all of my other leagues (football, baseball and basketball) have broken up, this league has had the same 10 members since we started.  As we enter our 9th year, there is no sign that anyone is going to leave the league any time soon.  And we haven’t wanted or needed to change any settings since it began.

Anyway, the league has been such a success that I feel the need to share it with the world.  If you are looking for a new fantasy football league, I highly recommend using these settings.

Starting Lineups & Rosters

Ten Team League – these settings and rules are made specifically for leagues having exactly ten teams.

• QB (2)*
• RB (2)
• WR (3)
• RB/WR (1)
• TE (1)
• K (1)
• Team Defense (2)*
• Bench (9)

(*Each team in the league can have a maximum of 3 starting QBs and 3 team defenses at any time to avoid situations where teams can’t field a full squad)

Adding and extra QB and an extra defense gives each of these positions much more value.  When only 10 QBs play each week (in a typical fantasy league), it is really easy to coast through your season with 1 or 2 mediocre QBs.  But when you have to start 2 QBs each week and have 3 QBs available on your team at all times, it gives them a lot more value.  QBs should get drafted higher and teams with weak QBs will be a significant handicap.  Same goes for defenses… in a typical league you can easily avoid taking a good defense in the draft and just pick up a team to start each week off the waiver wire.  With two defenses starting each week (and most teams carrying 3 defenses), you are going to need to have at least one good defense and you’ll be better off with 2 or 3 decent squads.  As you’ll see when we get to the league scoring settings, defenses are going to have a big impact each week.

As for the other starting positions, 3 WRs, 2 RBs and 1 RB/WR makes depth at these positions crucial.  Anyone can draft Chris Johnson with the #1 pick then cruise to easy wins.  But with 6 RBs and or WRs playing each week, you better have some depth at these positions or you will not be able to coast on one big performance every week.  As for the 9 bench spots.  With such a high number of players starting each week, you need a big bench for bye weeks, injuries and backups.

Scoring

Passing
25 Yards: 1 point
TD: 4 points
2-point conv: 2 points
INT: -2 points

Rushing/Receiving
10 yards: 1 point
TD: 6 points
2-point conv: 2 points
Fumble lost: -2 points

Kicking
FG made 0-39 yards: 3 points
FG made 40-49 yards: 4 points
FG made 50+ yards: 5 points
FG miss 0-29: -2 points
FG miss 30-49: -1 point
Pt after made: 1 point
Pt after miss: -1 point

Defense
0 points allowed: 16 points
1-6 points allowed: 11 points
7-13 points allowed: 6 points
14-20 points allowed: 2 points
21-27 points allowed: 0 points
28-34 points allowed: -5 points
35+ points allowed: -10 points
Sack: 1 point
Int: 2 points
Fumble rec.: 2 points
TD: 6 points
Safety: 4 points
Block kick: 2 points

Scoring for passing, rushing and receiving are pretty standard.  Kickers get rewarded for better performance and penalized for missing easier kicks.  Scoring for team defenses is tied more closely to actual performance by increasing the emphasis on points allowed.  If you have a team defense that gives up a bunch of points, that should matter a lot in fantasy scoring.  You would be surprised how many defenses give up 35+ points and fail to get and fail to get any positive fantasy points.  And that’s -10 points in this league.  On the flip side, if your defense shuts out their opponent, they should be rewarded for it.  This scoring system combined with the fact that two team defenses start each week makes managing and drafting defense much more interesting and fun in my opinion.

League Champion, No Playoffs & Payout

I never understood why the champion of fantasy football is based on “playoffs” for the final few weeks of the season.  This makes no sense for any fantasy league since the actual players are not playing with any more urgency than they are earlier in the season – in fact, in many cases at the end of the season they are playing with much less urgency or even not playing at all.  Every major soccer league in the world (sorry MLS) determines it’s championship by playing out a season and the team with the most points (best record) is the champion.  Under a system like this, all games are of equal importance.  Fans of American sports might not get this, but I can tell you that its a wonderful thing… imagine if regular season NBA, MLB or NHL games actually meant something?  That’s what global soccer leagues have and it is outstanding.  If it’s good enough for the Premiership, it’s good enough for this fantasy league.

So we do away with playoffs – 17 weeks of head to head games and the team with the best record is the league champion.  Three places win money in this league: the champ gets 65%, runner up gets 25% and the team with the highest point total of the remaining teams gets 10%.  For example, in a $100 league, the winner would get $650, runner up would get $250 and the team with the highest point total of all remaining teams would get $100 (basically their money back).

Other Rules

Waivers – all players go on waivers when their game starts then come off on on Wednesday.  Waiver order is a continual rolling list which starts as the inverse of the draft order.  I can’t stress how much I hate a waiver wire where the worst team gets first dibs on players each week.
QBs – as teams change their starting QBs, it is possible that a team may get in a situation where they have more than 3 starters.  In this situation, the team must drop a QB asap or risk a forfeit their upcoming game that week.  This has never been a problem in our league.

Keepers & Draft

You could do this league without keepers, but if you want to do keepers, here’s how we did it and it works great.  Each team can keep up to 4 players, with no restrictions.  Here is how we do the draft:

• The draft has up to 4 supplemental rounds that take place before the rest of the draft
• Teams keeping less than 4 players participate in the supplemental portion of draft, where all non-keepers are available
• Teams keeping no players draft in all 4 rounds, 1 keeper teams draft in 2-4th round, 2 keepers draft 3-4 rounds, 3 keepers draft just round 4
• Teams keeping no players draft the first round of the supplemental (order is the inverse of the previous year’s standings- i.e. worst team drafts first, champion drafts last )
• Teams keeping one player jump in the supplemental draft in the second round using same draft order (no snake)
• Teams keeping 2 players joining the draft in round 3 and teams keeping 3 players joining in round 4
• After the 4 supplemental rounds of the draft, all teams should have 4 players and the regular draft can begin
• The next round of the draft begins (same order as supplemental draft) and everyone now drafts, from here on out the draft snakes (revere the draft order each round)

This works out great because there is a ton of pre-draft strategy.  Everyone has to decide who to keep, how many to keep, who could be available and where they might pick.  The first few years of the league, most everyone kept 3 or 4 players.  Now, we have people who keep 1 or none every year.  And this makes for a lot of posturing between league managers about who is going to keep who heading into the draft.

Looking at all the rules listed above, it seems extremely complicated, but it’s really not.  I encourage anyone looking for a new fantasy league scoring system to try the league settings as listed here.  I can say that it has worked great for us.  Try it and I guarantee a better fantasy football experience for you and your league!