Guillotine League strategy, reader leagues

Talking through another fun eliminator format

You guys know I love eliminator formats in fantasy football, because we did reader leagues through Fantasy Cares this summer, and then I wrote up several thousands of words on Underdog’s Eliminator formats, as well.

That’s why I’m legit pumped to be partnering with Fantasy Life to get word out about Guillotine Leagues. I had a chance to play a Guillotine League back in 2022 through a separate charity opportunity, and it was honestly one of the most fun leagues I’ve ever played in. I was bummed when I couldn’t make it work for the 2023 season, and I’m stoked to be firing up some leagues for 2024.

I’m going to do up to three reader leagues with you guys, because I’m frankly stoked about playing in them. I’m also starting one with my college buddies. If we have additional interest, I’ll try to help facilitate additional Stealing Signals leagues that I won’t be in (simply because I don’t know how on top of all the drafts I’ll be able to stay with the season a week away). But we’ll get these fired up ASAP, and they’ll be slow drafts but with one-hour clocks, where you can set your queue. If you want to create your own league with people from the Discord, use this link.

I’ll get to more details on how to sign up, but let’s first break down this format.

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So what is a Guillotine League?

The “guillotine” is because it’s an eliminator, where someone gets “chopped” each week. If you score the fewest points in a given week, your season is over, plain and simple. One of the reasons this is so great is not everyone always builds a great fantasy team, but you always feel that obligation to play out the league as a good league member. That doesn’t exist here.

That’s right — literally my first selling point is if your team sucks, your season ends. It literally might be the single best selling point. Those of us who play in multiple fantasy leagues and really enjoy this hobby understand how by about midseason, those ones that aren’t doing as well are the worst, and you’re trying to keep as much of your focus on the ones doing well as you can. With this format, you are naturally into it as your team continues to advance. It’s either fun to keep surviving and advancing, building out additional strategy, or your time isn’t wasted further because you lost three key players to injury in the same week. Solid.

The cool part of Guillotine that doesn’t exist with the other eliminators I’ve written about is the in-season management. This isn’t best ball; there are waivers and starting lineups. And each week, the entire roster of the team that gets chopped enters the waiver player pool.

After Week 1, there will be a first-round pick available to bid on, as well as a second-round pick, etc. There might be an elite QB or an elite TE. If you don’t pick anyone up, but survive through Week 2, you’ll have another full roster hitting waivers. FAAB management becomes a puzzle. I’ll talk a bunch of my own strategy ideas below, but one of the reasons I’m excited to play multiple leagues this year is to try some stuff out.

I think the best format of these are the traditional 18-team leagues, where teams are eliminated each week until two remain in Week 17. When I did it two years ago with my Stealing Bananas cohost Shawn Siegele, and his RotoViz Overtime cohost Colm Kelly, we made it until about Week 13 or so. I’ll talk through how I remember that one going in the strategy section below.

But you can also make smaller leagues, and they can go any length. One of the cool things is you can start this in-season, like a 14-week season for a 14-team league.

It’s fairly simple other than that. It’s a traditional fantasy league, but the survivor element and the waiver battles are very different. I’m pitched on a lot of products, and many require complex rules changes that are substantially different from traditional fantasy football. I don’t think the masses really care to learn super complicated new games, but for stuff like best ball, for example, the slight modification of the existing way of doing things really works.

That’s the same deal with Guillotine Leagues. It’s normal fantasy football, except it’s a bit thin at the beginning because of the 18-team leagues, and then there’s the survivor element and you have the potential to build a superteam as you survive and advance.

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How do you crush a draft?

This is a great question, and it’s going to change a bit based on your draft position, but like my other eliminator content, I’m going to argue once again for imbalance to create floor. Wide receivers remain the safer early-round picks, in that they bottom out at a far lower rate, and are a better value store for our high-end draft capital. When we load up at that position, yes we are weak at RB, but we are unlikely to truly bottom out and finish last in any given week.

But there’s a major difference in Guillotine Leagues, right? The waiver wire. In the other eliminator contests I’ve written about, there are no roster improvements, so a hard Zero RB approach can give you that value store for early-season stability, while also creating late-season upside if the late-round RBs hit. We don’t necessarily need that second part to be a major element of our strategy in Guillotine Leagues, because we’re expecting so much talent to be available on the waiver wire throughout the season.

I mentioned my 2022 league. I can’t remember the exact specifics, but I do know we went fairly Zero RB, and then the first-round pick of the first team to get chopped was Austin Ekeler, who’d started slow, and we were able to grab him with a somewhat aggressive bid before Week 2. Instead of needing a late-round RB to hit at some point, we just acquired the guy who would go on to lead the NFL in touchdowns that year.

It’s not always going to work out that easily, and we did spend a pretty penny in FAAB early (I’ll talk more about FAAB strategies, but to complete this one anecdote, we did make it to the final four or five teams, and still had some FAAB to play with, when we finally hit a down week relative to the other superteams and were eliminated; I don’t believe spending early overly hamstrung us, though as I’ll discuss, it’s not always the smartest path).

At any rate, it’s not just RBs that will hit the waiver wire. An elite TE might. An elite QB. Obviously WRs will. But the anecdote serves to detail a key element to building a superteam in this format — if you draft by ignoring one position, then address that position aggressively on the waiver wire, you can get there quickly.

Of course, if you draft for balance and hit the waiver wire aggressively, you can also have a great team quickly. That’s sort of the thing about the amount of talent that becomes available. But in this format, you can pretty easily see how an imbalanced roster leaves you focused on a specific waiver strategy, and may simplify the path.

The question that arises for me, then, is “What types of teams falter early?” You might think I’ll emphasize early-RB builds, and you won’t be totally wrong, but I do think there’s an argument for projectable RB volume building in some early-season floor. A lot of times, those teams start to collapse around Week 5 or so, weakening right when the byes make things tricky.

The actual answer for me is probably teams who take QBs too early. Guillotine Leagues are a deep format that start 1 QB, 2 RBs, 2 WRs, 1 TE, and 2 Flex spots. There are no K and DST spots, and it’s full PPR. For QBs, it’s 25 yards per point, Pass TDs are 4, and INTs are -2, so the scoring is relatively muted. Here’s a link to the full rules.

To me, this is a late-round QB format where you try to find some good early-season matchups, and recognize that as the season progresses, and more and more teams drop out, the QB options will be plentiful. Consider that at midseason, there will be only nine teams left in a single-QB format; even if you haven’t landed an elite QB by this point, you could basically play QB through weekly streaming of the popular DFS names of that given week, for not much more than $1 bids.

The other thing you need to consider relative to our typical strategy around here is you want to be at least a little more considerate of filling your starting lineup. Typically, I advise drafting enough WRs to fill bench spots so you have firepower in the byes and if injuries occur; in Guillotine Leagues, you can get that firepower off the waiver wire, to some extent. Depth on draft day is less crucial.

So while I talked about WRs as the better value stores than RBs in the early rounds, I do think hitting an Anchor RB early can make plenty of sense, and even if you’ve taken one, you want to be on the lookout for more RB opportunities.

Still, Zero RB is very viable. In an 18-team league where you can start four WRs, you can “win the flex” with four strong options in the first five rounds, with the necessary Elite TE as a detour. And yes, it’s early TE for me. Even as leagues shrink, TE firepower will be a scarce resource. They have high bust rates, and can have low weekly floors. You don’t necessarily want to spend too much on a TE — I think the Round 1/2 turn in an 18-team league would be risky, and then you might not have a shot at the Round 3/4 turn in some rooms — so you can’t always control how things work out. But getting an early difference-maker here could be massive.

The last thing I’ll note is when it comes to weekly consistency, that’s usually pretty tough to predict, but I do like to break ties toward good offenses. I want environments where I know there will be yards and points most weeks, versus, say, Pittsburgh.

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FAAB Strategy

The other huge element is how to handle your budget throughout the year. Over at Fantasy Life, Guillotine Leagues founder Paul Charchian broke down some key considerations, including pulling some data that shows how players get cheaper to buy as the season rolls along.

This is a great data point, and the reason we see this is FAAB depletes two ways: Both as everyone spends it, and also as the league shrinks. Every time a team is chopped, there’s less total FAAB in the environment. By the later stages, not only have people used a lot of their budget, but you’re also looking at few remaining teams to even be competing with for bids, and a smaller total possible dollar value even if everyone had saved.

You’re also talking about a ton of good players available on waivers. The value Travis Kelce might provide over other waiver options in the early part of the season is going to be different than the value in the later part of the season. As leagues shrink, roster limits will naturally mean a lot of good players will be available on waivers. When you get to the final weeks, not everyone can be contained on four or five rosters, and stars will go unrostered. The production level of $1 pickups increases throughout the season.

This changes things for different positions. I touched on it with QBs above, where QB as a position becomes super replaceable later. At RB, we start to get later-round names popping up, and outside true legendary profiles, there will be spot start opportunities that can replicate most RB profiles.

To me, it’s the truly elite WRs that will be hard to replicate, especially as you can start four of them. Even in the late stages, say with just four teams left, it’s hard to imagine 16+ really elite WR profiles at any given time.

That tangent aside — it relates back to draft strategy more — I would probably be so bold as to slightly disagree with Paul on the risk of using some of your FAAB early. Paul has far more experience than me, but I think you can consider a barbell FAAB approach where you’re aggressive with a chunk of it early — say, 30%-50%, but perhaps up to 70% in rare cases — but only if those buys are necessary and really strengthen your roster for a long outlook, like my Ekeler example above.

In those cases, you need to be prepared to sit out several future FAAB cycles, and your roster needs to be good enough to coast a little bit while you let your FAAB comparatively recover. During the stretch run, when everyone has strong teams, there will be a lot of blocking, and a lot of gamesmanship with FAAB. You do want to have powder dry at that point, no question.

And to that point, it’s definitely the case that Paul’s strategy could be the dominant one. Saving your FAAB — if you can still navigate the early weeks well — will allow you to be competitive as the player pool gets stronger and stronger.

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Reader leagues

If this all sounds fun, drop your name on this Google form and I’ll fire up some drafts later today. These drafts will be slow drafts with one-hour pick clocks that will pause overnight, where you can always set a queue. They’re open to everyone, whether you’re a paid subscriber or just on the free plan.

Or just go create your own league here. Excited to draft with you guys!