Has anyone found any cool NFL playoff fantasy formats

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A proper? fantasy? playoff? league can? be? one of? the most challenging and all-consuming? experiences you? can? have? in fake football.?? The best format, one I helped create nearly 20 years ago, combines the key elements of DFS and survivor. It requires no draft or league management, as the player pool is universal. And it can be run for as many people as you want to invite.

The problem with a conventional drafted playoff league is that — in an era where Super Bowl teams have generally not had to win a game on the road— the draft really becomes a race to acquire the best players on top-seeded teams. Everyone basically has the same cheat sheet. The dispersal of these players is largely evenly spread out. And you also can’t have large rosters, so the opportunities to post huge weeks and really flip the standings is severely compromised. Once the draft is over, lineups are set it and forget it — boring.

A combination of a DFS and survivor element enables teams to roster, in our league, 16 players the first three playoff rounds: two quarterbacks, three RBs, four WRs, two TEs, two kickers, two defenses and one team coach (more on this later). For the Super Bowl, roster size drops in half from 16 to just eight.

The key is every owner can pick any player — but just one time. But as teams are eliminated from the playoffs, those players also go with them. So you have to constantly weigh whether to pick players from teams you think are going to lose (and which therefore on average get far less points), saving the players from the winning teams, or whether you are going to play pot odds and pick players on teams expected to win hoping for huge weeks that they will not come close to replicating even if they do survive. Then, of course, you hope that the favorites with thee stars lose shootouts so you get the best of both worlds.

The survivor/DFS format is like three-dimensional chess. You have to map out a theory for the playoffs — who are your Super Bowl teams? And then work back from there (though you only really need to be right on one of the Super Bowl teams to have enough players to work with). And when do you mix in a sprinkling of players in ideal weather/indoors and versus weaker defenses? Then you can still trounce the owners who went with lesser players in the meantime and held available stars for future matchups more likely to be lower scoring.

For each round, you have to consider maximizing weekly points and maximizing the opportunity to field a full roster for subsequent rounds. The wild-card and divisional rounds are never really a problem. The key turning point is usually the conference championship round — can you field a full roster and still have enough players left over for the Super Bowl?

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