Everything You Need to Know About Best Ball, Auction and Salary Cap Fantasy Football Leagues

Looking for a new challenge this season? Here are some alternatives to traditional fantasy leagues.

There are a million and one types of fantasy football league formats and scoring systems. Assuming you already know the three most common league types—redraft, keeper and dynasty—let’s talk about different wrinkles that can add a new twist to the conventional leagues.

Best ball leagues
Rather than managing a team throughout a season and prepping a weekly lineup, the best ball format allows managers to draft a team and be done with it. Every week, lineups are automatically optimized so a team’s best-scoring players are the starters. For example, if a team has two quarterbacks and needs one to start every week, the highest-scoring QB is made the starter for that week.

There are some downsides. With no in-season management, injuries can prove to be even more difficult to overcome. Part of the strategy is to selectively draft more depth at key positions like running back and wide receiver.

Auction drafts
Rather than mirroring the process of the NFL draft where each team gets one pick in every round, auction drafts give each team a set budget, typically $200. Players are nominated and bid on using a short 15- or 30-second timer. Each bid resets the timer to 10 seconds and once the timer ends, that player is awarded to that team at the price of the final bid.

One benefit of auctions is that it’s more or less impossible to end up with two top-10 players in redraft. The auction format allows you to be more targeted with player selections. Drafts often boil down to value as players rise and fall based on their ADP, while auctions give managers more freedom.

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Salary cap leagues
As a variation to auctions and before DFS came along, there was a time when you could play in a salary cap league. You’d be given an updated pricing list for each player and it was up to you to construct a new lineup for every weekly matchup. What makes these leagues intriguing is if you can keep a player from week to week if you like their salary. So if, for example, you picked Patrick Mahomes ahead of Week 1 in the 2018 season, you would’ve selected him at a steep discount compared to how rapidly his salary would’ve increased that year (he finished with 5,097 passing yards and 50 TD passes).

Another wrinkle is using a salary cap within an auction dynasty league. For example, let’s say each fantasy manager has an annual budget of $100 million. In the first year, Mahomes could be auctioned off on a three-year contract, priced at $90M. Salaries are backloaded, as they are in the NFL, so from Years 1 to 3, his contract would escalate from $27 to $30 to $33 million. Like the NFL, managers can trade players as long as salaries fit within both teams’ caps. There are minimum salaries. Players on one-year deals below a certain salary threshold can be cut with no cap hit. Cutting players on multi-year deals would also incur a cap hit.