Guillotine League but with traditional standings and playoffs
We all know the usual guillotine format: lowest score gets eliminated, full roster goes to waivers with FAAB in play, last team standing wins. I kinda hate how cutthroat it is (even though I know that’s the point) but I like the elimination format. So my thought is to tweak it a little so that the full season standings matter more than just trying to avoid one bad week.
My idea is an 18 team league, no head to head matchups but wins and losses for top half and bottom half each week. Every 2 weeks 2 teams are eliminated and the waiver bidding happens. So after 2 weeks you’ll have a few teams likely be 0-2, total points would be the tiebreak. Everyone keeps their win/loss record and we play weeks 3 and 4 with 16 teams, so those surviving 0-2 or 1-1 teams aren’t fully safe they still need to fight their way off the bottom. Same thing happens, top half get wins and bottom half get losses. Bottom 2 in the overall standings after week 4 are eliminated, we proceed to 5 and 6 with 14 teams and so on.
This continues with everyone keeping their wins, losses, and total points all the way until after week 14 where it’s down to 4 teams. At this point the final rosters are set (you can still add drop but there will be no more full teams being dropped to waivers) and we go to the playoffs. So this would be the only time all year that the full season standings don’t matter anymore just like any other league that features playoffs. The final 4 play weeks 15 and 16 with the top 2 scores going to the week 17 championship game and bottom 2 going to the week 17 3rd place game. Payouts are champion 10x, runner up 4x, 3rd place 2x, regular season points leader 2x.
I love it but I feel like it’s going to be too confusing for the average Joe fantasy guy to figure out. I can already imagine the dozens of similar questions and complaints that will come from it. I think most will probably say to just go back to the standard cutthroat guillotine that people are used to.