Best Dynasty Fantasy Football Formats: Five Ways To Set Up Your League

John breaks down his five best ways to set up you Dynasty fantasy football leagues in 2025. Which formats are the best for Dynasty fantasy football leagues?

There are plenty of major fantasy football formats to play. You can play Daily Fantasy Sports cash games or season-long money tournaments. You can set up a casual redraft league with your friends. You can also play Dynasty, which is the preferred format of many of fantasy football's biggest fans.

But there are plenty of flavors of Dynasty leagues, too. And depending on how competitive you want them to be or how much you want to just relax and have fun, different scoring rules and roster settings can get you the ideal league for your tastes.

Below we'll break down five formats that can spice up your league and make things more interesting, level the playing field, or just make things more fun. Let's dive in!

For a deeper dive into dynasty strategy, rankings, and trade tactics, be sure to check out our complete Dynasty Fantasy Football Guide.

SuperFlex

One great way to add more challenges to Dynasty fantasy football is by setting up your league to have a SuperFlex spot. While traditional Flex spots only accommodate wide receivers, running backs, or tight ends, a SuperFlex spot can have a quarterback. And since QB is easily the highest-scoring position in fantasy football, obviously, you'll need two of them to succeed.

In traditional 1QB leagues, quarterbacks are much less important. The high-end options, like Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, and Joe Burrow give their teams advantages, but especially in PPR formats, they're much less important than receivers and running backs. There is a large crop of QBs that put up low-end QB1 and high-end QB2 numbers, and as long as you have someone decent, you're probably fine.

Even in a 'down' year for QBs, first-round rookie QBs—especially top-10 picks—are must-targets in superflex drafts. A mid-tier QB2 (QB18) still lands in the **TOP 55 OVERALL** in PPR leagues. Don’t sleep on that value. https://t.co/prb9fY2zxN

— Dynasty Rich (@DynastyRich) February 26, 2025

It adds an extra dimension of challenge in the drafts as well. If you don't invest early in QB, you could end up being completely screwed, because having a weak QB in your SuperFlex spot is terrible news when you go up against someone who has two great options. You can forget about winning in that case.

But if you spend too early on your QBs, and bust on one of the picks, you could end up missing out on a highly skilled receiver or running back. Some of the most competitive leagues in all of fantasy football are Dynasty SuperFlex leagues because those who like challenges tend to seek them out!

Contract/Salary Cap Leagues

If you want to feel more like a general manager of an NFL team (but with your fantasy team), you can also join or set up a contract/salary cap league. These are much more complicated than non-salary cap leagues, so they're more interesting for managers who have played the game for some time.

Auction drafts have many more moving parts and are a lot more difficult to navigate than traditional snake drafts or rookie drafts. Of course, the more work you put into your team, the better it feels when you're rewarded with wins.

Auction / Salary Cap is becoming a more popular way to do a Dynasty Startup Draft. What if I said that instead of relying on random luck for your draft slot, that simply every player was available? More below ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/lLaH2ePHqH

— Kyle Lindemann (@LuckIsMadeFF) July 9, 2024

This is probably not something you should do if you've only been playing for one or two years. But if you're a hardcore fan of fantasy football and find yourself getting bored with every other format you've played, or at least not as interested as you used to be, this can be a format that provides nearly limitless challenges.

The ceiling for how much thought and work you can put into your team is extremely high. And working with limited resources challenges your mind in ways other formats can't. If that sounds like your cup of tea, go for it. It's not mine.

Deep Roster And Deep, Deep Bench Leagues

For those who like an added degree of difficulty, increasing the size of the starting rosters and making the benches very deep is a great option. The waiver wire can be a great way to pick up additional players for your struggling squad in leagues with smaller overall rosters, but it can lead to huge advantages for lucky teams in years when there happen to be stars to pick up.

Sometimes, waiver wire stars are so dominant that they play a part in invalidating draft picks and trades. And it can be advantageous for certain teams to tank at the beginning of the year in the hopes that the next Kyren Williams or Puka Nacua will come available to them. Last season, there weren't any real season-long waiver wire league-winners, but it can always happen.

The startup draft becomes much more important when it's 30 rounds instead of 20 and the roster size is bigger to compensate for that. You have to reach deep into the pool of available players, and depending on how many league members there are, there may hardly be anyone to pick up off waivers throughout the season.

Hitting on underrated rookies and breakout players that come out of nowhere in the later rounds becomes massively important.

TE Premium Leagues

Another format that balances out some issues that standard leagues have are Tight End-Premium leagues, where receptions made by tight ends are given an extra bonus. This helps level the playing field between wide receivers and TEs and helps your big guys be more valuable. In leagues that don't have this premium, TE is often a position that hardly matters.

In TE Premium, only 6 non-QBs scored more fantasy points than Evan Engram in 2023

CeeDee Lamb
Christian McCaffrey
Tyreek Hill
Amon-Ra St. Brown
Puka Nacua
A.J. Brown

— Curtis Patrick (@CPatrickNFL) March 18, 2024

Most seasons, if you don't get one of the elite TEs in the draft, the best move is just to punt the position and hope you hit on a random rookie or a second-year player that breaks out. That's a difficult task to pull off. In TE-Premium leagues, the lower-tier options become feasible, and the best players can be as impactful as some of the top running backs and wide receivers.

20-100 Points Per Tackle By An Offensive Player League

For me personally, it's nice to be in a league that's set up with absolutely ridiculous rules. Joke leagues are fun, and the outcomes of the games are often hilarious. Having a league where you can just screw around as much as you want, not care about the outcomes, and just have fun.

NOOO MY SEASON IS OVER 😭😭😭 https://t.co/UnFFf7E7lj pic.twitter.com/KsWtQgp24U

— Akash (@YZR_Fantasy) December 15, 2024

I stole this idea from the above X post. In the league that person was a part of, quarterbacks were awarded 100 points for logging a tackle. Tackles are one of the most difficult stats to predict for offensive players, as they only happen during turnovers when the offensive players need to become defenders to make sure the ball isn't returned the other way for a touchdown.

Dynasty fantasy managers may be opposed to the idea of a parody league, but as long as money isn't on the line, it's a fun and lighthearted way to bring a little joy to the thing that causes so many people stress every year. And there are plenty of other ways to

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