Should i have divisions in fantasy football

The long answer is that until you completely eliminate head to head play and play in just a total points league, there are going to be a number of years where the champion isn't the best team. What both of my leagues have discovered works is this: have a prize for total points champion through week Don't award 3rd or 4th in a typical 10, 12, or 14 man league. Many times the points leader will win twice.. Maybe that team already peaked around week 10 and isn't the best team from week I've found that in a typical league that allows 6 teams in teh playoffs for a 12 or 14 man league But award the other two spots on "power ranking" which is a component of record, points scored, and all-play record.

Sure sometimes that means a team qualifies over a team I like having divisions. I like a HTH schedule. I like one and done in the playoffs. The closer it gets to a total points league, the less interested I am in the league. It really doesn't bother me at all that the 5th best team might complain about getting left out the playoffs while the 9th best team got in.

Head To Head Play is the elephant in the room. It's hiding just under the surface of the myriad "issues" with "fairness" that always seem to crop up this time of year. If you accept the premise that making the game "fairer" should be the guiding principle underlying future rule changes for your league, you should realize that the end result is just total points. You may not get there. You may not want to get there. But it's the road you're on. I run a team league with 4 divisions of 4 teams each.

We don't change divisions so as an early poster said, we have some pretty good rivalries going on. Makes it fairly exciting. To play it out, we have division opponents play each other twice, and we play everyone else once. Makes it rivalry weeks for the most part. We mixed up our seeding though, where division winners each get a seed. Each wildcard is decided by best record. Third wildcard is either most points scored in the league if not already seeded or reverts to another wildcard determined by record.

The 4th wildcard we call the Cinderella seed. That seed goes to the team with the Most Points Scored Against them. If they're seeded it reverts to a 4th wildcard. This year we only had 1 team eliminated from a shot at the playoffs going into week Crazy and the league smack talk was great. What if you could play head to head AND total points? Because something exists that just about accomplishes that. Very good friends. Highly competitive. We all hate total points because we love to go up against each other and talk as much smack as possible.

We all hate standard head-to-head because if one of us scores the 2nd most points that week but just happens to play the team that scores the most points, we still get the loss.

I literally have 11 head-to-head opponents every week. The same 11 turds, every week. Every year. Most leagues like head-to-head because they like to root against the players they are playing that week. Our league is so strong, we almost all know every teams roster and root against every player in the league that is started that isn't ours. I don't own a Packer. I love it when Rodgers hands off to Kuhn for a short TD because that pisses off so many of my buddies.

And, this solves the problem of having the 2nd highest points a certain week and taking the loss. Also with ALL PLAY, even if you don't have players going on Sunday or Monday night, you're still watching the game with a ton of interest because there are a bunch of teams looking to pass you. Much more exciting than standard head to heads when you or your opponent might have a guy or two playing Monday night.

And for the total points people, it's almost always the top total points teams at the top of the standings every year. Our regular season just ended. Roll off a 3-week span of and you're back in it. Try that with head to head, one win at a time. My division had all the strong teams. I ended up , but in 4th place in my division, missing the playoffs, while also scoring more points than anyone in the other division.

The winner of the other division went I've already suggested we do away with divsions or move some teams around. I kinda like the idea of doing division winners, then its most points scored for playoff berths.

I am having this "issue" in a couple of leagues. IMO, the logic around using divisions is not at the top of the league but lower. As I remember, when I started playing FF there were more leagues with either no or larger divisions and more total points leagues.

Simply, there were more issues with no setting the roster at all, pure tanking, and questionable trades. One thing in the leagues, that I have seen the complaining is that really division normally take no more than one team out of picture at worst. I mean the top teams would make the playoffs no matter the system. When it does not happen for a team in year it is not good, but do you want to in sure the best or keep others active? My thought is that if you trust your league mates, fewer if not no divisions is fine to determine the best player.

If you know that 4 or 5 dudes will be usueless if they get off to a bad start or if a couple of teams start off hot then, division are helpful in retaining interest throughut the league.

My team is the Colts. Top PF , Better record than the other wild card team. I dont care if some of you think that this is not a relevent topic or post, but this is the perfect example.

I'm still not sure if I'll actually start this league or not, but I was looking into setting up a dynasty league and wanted to reward the best teams while keeping enough of the H2H to make it interesting for the guys who aren't into total points.

What I came up with is a mix of a lot of what's above, with a twist or two:. However, victory points determine the standings. That's enough to make the H2H results matter and keep everyone's weekly interest, but small enough that it's unlikely poor teams are rewarded especially when you consider half the money has already been awarded based on total points. I am a big fan of divisions and head to head games. It gives you opportunity to trash talk a specific person. It gives rivalries and it gives teams something to shoot for because in divisions they usually at least have a chance to catch the teams ahead of them because they play the teams more than once.

I think this would be very boring to do in a league especially a league with friends where part of the joy is talking trash because you just had lagerret blount go off while he had forte lay an egg. Should fantasy leagues do away with divisions? The first thing I want to touch on is the fantasy football schedule implications. With the additional games added to the regular season, the fantasy football regular season will have an extra game too.

Regardless if you play in a team or team league or send four or six teams to the playoffs, the NFL changes will impact your fantasy schedule. I started a new league this year and I switched to divisions. Since I am not a fan of divisions, why did I do a new startup with them? The fantasy schedule, in my opinion, is often problematic from year to year. For example, in a typical twelve-team league with six playoff spots, the regular season currently runs through week 13 for fantasy.

That means every team plays two teams twice and everyone else once. The last example is where the top half of the league gets a win for the week, and the bottom half gets losses. I play in a league where I play the same two teams twice every year.

Which is fine, but frankly, the two teams I play twice-yearly typically are some of the better teams in the league. Annually I usually have one of the most challenging schedules in the league. In contrast, a couple of other teams always seem to play teams at the bottom of the standings.

I think we all experience this at some point. The whole goal is to try to remove the random luck of the scheduling and put all the teams on a level playing field. I wish they did, especially for the fantasy football season. I did find a program I liked for a team league. I went with three divisions with four teams each. You play everyone in your division twice and every other team in the league once. All the same division teams have the same schedule difficulty or close to it, which was the goal.

I also added a form of victory points. Regardless of what you want to do, keep in mind that the regular season for fantasy will run through weeks 14 or 15 in most cases.

The next item that is a big deal is injuries. The more wear and tear the players take, the more we will see injuries. The more plays you play, the more likely you could get hurt. This year was noticeably different, for example, even without the extra games.

There was little to no off-season, and with covid, we had a lot of players sitting one to three games. We had players going on short-term IR last minute. Injuries were probably the most significant thing to navigate for the fantasy season. Divisional winner and two wild cards make the playoffs.

Playoffs for us run week 15 and 16 with the title game week We also reshuffle the divisions every 3 years to try to maintain competitive balance and to try to create new rivalries. It's a local league mostly with the exception of the few of us that have moved over the years so the rivalries are huge for us. It feels like this system keeps more teams in contention for the last couple weeks of the regular season. A couple seasons ago, there were still 8 of 12 teams vying for the 4 playoff spots in the last week of the regular season, instead of teams fighting for that 4th spot.

Though I don't in general want to promote mediocrity, it keeps almost all owners active a whole lot longer. The two best records getting first round byes is a further reward for regular season performance. Divisions are fun. Maybe not fair but fun. My old league used to hold a draft for divisional opponents. Fun way to kick the season off. Top team in each division is in playoffs and best team record left in each conference is in as wildcard. Realignment will be determined based upon a weighted formula calculated from total points scored during the ZFL regular season weeks over the most recent three year period.

Teams will be seeded based on the realignment formula and then placed in the following conference and division alignments. When we had a redraft league at work, we only had two divisions, but we'd re-seed them with SB teams in each div, then all of the other teams alternated based on points. It was totally meaningless since it was a redraft, but there was never a question as to how the divisions were done each year.

Each team plays 9 games within the division and 8 games out of the division. Our divisions are merely symbolic and to make a schedule easier. Has no bearing on playoffs since record still determines who gets in and seeding. More just for trash talk and rivalry. My oldest league is a local dynasty -- I've been in since , and the league existed for years before that. Four division winners make the playoffs, no wildcards.

This setup is definitely a mixed bag. My division has been super competitive for the entire time I've been in the league. In fact, for the last five years running, whoever has come in second in our division has had the 4 record, but misses the playoffs anyway.