Nearly everyone playing fantasy sports these days has either dipped their toes in the waters of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) or at least heard of the concept. Daily Fantasy is a booming industry that gives our must-have-it-now society their "fix" by allowing them to craft their teams each week from the entire pool of NFL players.
Still, many players are traditionalists who have been in their various fantasy leagues since the days where a Commissioner scored their games by reading the newspaper and mailed out the results to his leaguemates. Because of the long-standing traditions of millions of leagues across the world, season-long fantasy football will never become extinct. Both formats are great, so let's examine the pros and cons of both types of leagues.
Season-Long Fantasy Leagues
Much of what keeps season-long fantasy leagues alive for years (or even decades) at a time is the camaraderie that they bring. Many players find the most fun part of their league to be the draft. The draft is a time where old friends get together, talk about football, and mock each other's picks. It's as good as it gets for many fantasy footballers. Another plus is the proverbial "journey" that owners take with their players. To ride the ups and downs of a season and have the satisfaction of a head-to-head win against your closest competitor is incredibly satisfying.
Season-long leagues can have their drawbacks as well. If your first-round pick tears his ACL in Week 2, you're at a huge disadvantage for the rest of the season. If you start out 2-8, Weeks 11-16 of the NFL season can be more torturous than enjoyable to watch. Some leagues have "deadbeat" owners who don't compete in such situations and give a free win to a team in contention.
Daily Fantasy Leagues
In daily leagues, players compete against any number of opponents they choose – as opposed to the traditional head-to-head matchups each week. The contests vary by number of participants, amount of entry fee, and payout structure. Players get a new team every week, minimizing the impact that injuries can have. In DFS, injuries don't have a multi-week impact.
Daily leagues also afford owners the ability to own any player they desire. In a typical "snake" draft format, if an owner is picking 11th, they have virtually no chance to own players like LeVeon Bell, Rob Gronkowski, or Antonio Brown as those players are extremely likely to be selected in the top six picks of drafts this season. In DFS, however, if you're willing to pay the player's "salary," he's yours for that week. DFS can also eliminate the "bad beat" aspect of season-long leagues with its "50-50" structures, which pay out each player who finishes in the top half of the contest.
DFS does have its drawbacks, though. One of those is the loss of excitement gained by playing against opponents that are personal friends and family members. Much of DFS is competing against strangers who happen to have signed up for the same contest as you.
The Best of Both Worlds
With certain things, our society has gone off the deep end in thinking that combining two good things will always lead to a great result. Just today, I went to a restaurant that offered pomegranate iced tea and had a beer on tap that was a habanero pepper-infused IPA. I like all four of those things individually, but together they all sound terribly unappetizing. Going further down the beer road, I'm a bourbon lover, but I can't stand bourbon barrel beers. On the other hand, give me a bourbon like Angel's Envy that is finished in port wine barrels, and I'm loving that combination.
The moral of the story is that simply mixing two great things can – but doesn't always – yield great results. But in terms of fantasy football leagues, I'm here to give you a combination on the level of peanut butter and chocolate; dipping Wendy's fries in the Frosty; iced tea and lemonade; lobster and mac-and-cheese; steak and eggs; chicken and waffles. All of these items are very nice on their own, but when combined, they enhance the total experience. The same can be said for season-long and daily fantasy football. But how can players combine the two?
Fantasy players can start a "Fantasy Combined" League (this title was borrowed from the Super Combined alpine ski format, which combines a downhill ski run and a slalom ski run). A Fantasy Combined league would feature a different contest every week. These can be pre-determined by the league's Commissioner, or they can be a "Dealer's Choice" type of arrangement where the league members take turns selecting contest parameters each week. Feel free to insert your own dollar amounts that suit your league, but let's use round numbers here and assume $100 for the DFS side and $100 for the season-long side.
The optimal DFS experience would combine the strategies of cash games and tournaments from week-to-week. Perhaps the "default" could be a 50-50 game with three or four weeks of the season being a more risk/reward type of contest (for instance, in a 12-person league, only the top three owners would win money that week). Much like its season-long counterpart, certain weeks could be more significant than others, particularly late in the season when the stakes are high. A sample weekly contest schedule is below.
|
Week |
Entry Fee |
|
1 |
$5 |
|
2 |
$5 |
|
3 |
$10 |
|
4 |
$5 |
|
5 |
$5 |
|
6 |
$5 |
|
7 |
$5 |
|
8 |
$10 |
|
9 |
$5 |
|
10 |
$5 |
|
11 |
$5 |
|
12 |
$5 |
|
13 |
$10 |
|
14 |
$5 |
|
15 |
$5 |
|
16 |
$10 |
Note how the $100 is not evenly distributed each week, making certain weeks more impactful than others. Feel free to select your "big money" weeks in any way you see fit. I chose Week 3 because it was the last "full-field" week before bye weeks start. Week 13 was chosen because it's a big fantasy week in season-long leagues as it's the final week of the fantasy regular season. I avoided Week 9 because it has six NFL teams not playing and chose Week 8 because the bye week teams (BUF, JAX, PHI, WAS) aren't the most "fantasy-friendly" teams, Philadelphia excepted.
While each weekly contest would pay those who perform on a high level, the season-long "iced tea" to the DFS "lemonade" in this format would reward the owners who were consistently effective throughout the NFL year. The Commissioner of this league will keep a spreadsheet detailing each owner's scores during each week of the season. From this total, the lowest two scores of the 16-week contest (even in DFS, Week 17 can prove relatively worthless) will be dropped and the other 14 tallied. The owners who performed the best over the course of the season will earn the portoin of the "purse" dedicated to the season-long portion of the league. Feel free to do this however you see fit, but here's an example of the breakdown I will propose in my league:
- 1st Place: 60%
- 2nd Place: 30%
- 3rd Place: 10%
The Disclaimer
DFS sites are not allowed to run variable-sized leagues. So the private leagues that are created each week to facilitate the weekly portion of the league must stipulate league size. Therefore, if only nine of your 10 league members join, the contest won't run. This would obviously impact the season-long standings as results for that week wouldn't be tracked. Here's a recommended action to resolve this potential issue:
First of all, start every contest on Thursday nights. This way, if someone misses the deadline, you can have another contest starting Sunday at 1pm as a backup. Secondly, this has to be penalized due to inconveniencing the other league members. The Commissioner will have to keep track of this and assess a penalty. For the owner(s) that miss a contest, they get a "0" for the week. This hurts them in the yearly contest as it counts as one of their low scores that get dropped.
League Management
I've included a spreadsheet at the link below to help you manage the season-long portion of your own "hybrid" league. The sheet includes the following features:
- Has slots for as many as 15 players
- Drops the lowest two (2) scores of the season
- Highlights in red the two lowest scores for each player
- Highlights in green the high score for each week
- Calculates gross average, gross total, and adjusted total (which incorporates the dropping of the lowest two scores)
"Fantasy Combined" League Management Software
Questions, comments, suggestions, and other feedback on this piece are always welcome via e-mail hester@footballguys.com
