I want you to steal this idea…no really, please do. It’s a ton of fun and unlike anything else you’ve ever seen.
Traditional fantasy football leagues are good but there are many flaws: you only get to draft once and if you draft a crappy team or a player gets injured your season can be over pretty quickly. That’s why I’d like to introduce you to the next greatest thing to happen to fantasy football: The weekly auction draft league. Here’s what we are doing:
We have created a weekly fantasy football auction league where you draft a whole new team each week. The draft is the best part of fantasy football. It’s the time when optimism for your team is at an all time high and you can take pleasure in other owners mistakes. Unfortunately this only happens once a year for most leagues. Not with this one. We do a draft every week including week 17 (which all of a sudden makes week 17 just as relevant as week 1). If you haven’t done one before just know that auction drafts are somewhere between 5 and 100 times better than doing a snake draft. You want Adrian Peterson and Aaron Rodgers? For the right price you can have them both. You don’t have a fixed draft slot so any player is a potential option for your team.
One drawback to regular fantasy football leagues is that if one of your key players gets injured (ex. Jamaal Charles, Kenny Britt) your season can be ruined. Once this happens you put it on autopilot, watch the losses pile up, and wait another 11 months for next year to arrive. With our league being a weekly redraft league you never have to worry about this. Because you are drafting an entirely new team every week injuries to star players don’t effect you.
Similar to losing a key player to injury, sometimes a player(s) don’t perform up to the level that you were hoping (ex. Roddy White, Chris Johnson). If you own both of those guys this year then there is a good chance that your team is a pile of crap. Once again you lose interest and have to wait until next year to get excited about fantasy football. Because you redraft a new team each week guys that give you a turd sandwich for production one week never have to be on your team ever again. You get to start fresh and come up with a whole new team/strategy.
Here’s the scoring and format:
6 owners, $125 auction budget, 9 positions (2 qb, 2 rb, 2 wr, 3 flex – the flex can be anything except for kicker and D), no bench, no transactions, traditional scoring, no playoffs (just overall record). We run the league through Yahoo!
One concern that people have is that this league would take too much time since you are drafting a new team every week. In order to alleviate this problem we have limited the draft to only being one hour long. In most instances we are able to do this pretty easily. From time to time we may run 10 minutes over because of making fun of each others picks. If you don’t have one hour out of your day once a week then you are either lying or are the worst person at time management ever. Just think of this fantasy league like you would a beer league softball team. Once you just build it into your schedule it not only is easy to do but something that I look forward to every week.
Most people are in more than one fantasy league and aren’t looked to spend more time managing another team. With our league the team you draft is the team you are going to be starting for the week. There are no bench players and no transactions. Like the Ronco Rotisserie Cooker, “Just set it…and Forget it!”. Because you can’t make any transactions that makes the draft that much more important especially when it comes to elite players and injuries. This week Michael Vick has broken ribs and is listed as questionable to play. Are you willing to purchase him for half of what he normally would go for but also risk the chance that he might not play and get you zero points? We hold our draft on Tuesday’s before a lot of the injury status updates come out so it is a really big test of how risky you’d like to be with your team.
It can be hard to get 6 people together in one place at the same time every week. While most of us make our best effort to try and get together for the draft (because it’s way more fun with others around) sometimes it’s just not possible to be there in person. Because of this we use Google+’s Hangout feature (which is similar to Skype) to get everyone together and allow us to still be able to see each other/run the auction live. We haven’t run into any problems doing the draft this way and this would be a perfectly fine way of running things for people who run a league where no one lives in the same city.
Because a league of this format hasn’t been created before (to our knowledge) we do have to perform a small manual task in order to make it work. Yahoo! doesn’t currently have a weekly auction redraft feature. Because of this each week we have to go in and drop all of our players and pick up the new ones (which takes less than 5 minutes). Yahoo! also has a feature where you can’t just drop all of your players at once and pick up new ones because you need to have as many players as starting positions. Therefore in order to make this work you need to set up the league where there are the 9 starting positions we listed with 9 bench spots (the bench spots will remain empty).
Payout:
Our league has a $50 entry fee that is winner take all. Whoever ends up with the best record at the end of the season gets $250 that he has to use towards the purchase of a new football jersey. The owner that finishes in last place also has to purchase a keg for everyone else to enjoy at a party. On top of the overall prize we also incorporate a weekly bet into every matchup to make things even more interesting. Each week the two owners that play each other come up with a bet. This can be as big or as small as you’d like. Some of the bets that we’ve seen so far are: Be a vegetarian for three days, Eat with only a spoon for four days, lick the couch for a minute (it’s where the dog liked to sit), Grow a mustache for a week (not during Movember), Winner gets a a 6 pack of beer of his choice, Loser has to do 100 pushup’s whenever the winner wants (it doesn’t have to be all at once), Loser has to go to a movie on a Fri/Sat night by themself (and pay for it) that the winner gets to select. This just adds another level of excitement to the week aside from just winning or losing in the standings.
Drafting a new fantasy team every week is awesome. Every week you get a possible shot at redemption (in the event of a loss) and it is the ultimate test of who is the best at fantasy football. I encourage you to start up this league with your friends and do it now. There are still 7 weeks left in the season so you’ve got 7 weekly auction drafts left. If you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments and I’ll respond back to you.
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