If you’ve been wishing you could still play fantasy football now that the regular season is over and still have an itch to draft, you’ve landed at the right place. The NFL Playoffs open up a whole new world of fantasy football contests and leagues you can enter, and we’ll touch on a few places where you can get into the action. Sure it’s not the same as drafting in your buddy’s backyard in 80-degree weather with an adult beverage in hand, but we’ll take what we can get this time of year.
Underdog Best Ball Contests
The Underdog fantasy app has numerous fantasy football best ball contests that can be entered before the first Wild Card game on Saturday afternoon. To be clear this is different than the fantasy pick ‘em part of their app, which is more on the side of gambling. Underdog best ball contests are available in 40 states, so most people reading this should be able to enter these best ball contests/leagues. For those unfamiliar with Best Ball, it’s essentially a draft-and-forget format. There’s no roster management or lineups, so you still get the fun of drafting without the stress of setting a lineup. As of this writing on Wednesday, Underdog currently has six best ball contests that will span the duration of the playoffs, meaning you’ll draft your team before the start of the first game on Saturday and that’s your team for the playoffs. Entry fees range from $3 to $500 (I’ll be looking at the $3 or $5 options). Ryan Heath of fantasypoints.com put out a great video/podcast diving into the strategy behind these types of Best Ball contests for the playoffs. The link is below.
RTSports Playoff Challenge
RTSports has several different options to get involved in playoff fantasy football. Their playoff challenge resembles more of a season-long fantasy football environment, where you have eight starters, six bench spots, and set a lineup each week. For those who miss the grind of setting a lineup and want something closer to your home league, this could be for you. They also offer the Fantasy Life post-season shootout that hands out a $100,000 grand prize. This is on the pricier end, with one entry fee costing $125 or three for $350. This goes back to the best ball style, where each team has 10 players, and the team that accumulates the most points during the playoffs with those 10 players wins. Of course, the challenge here is losing out on points from players on your team as their teams get eliminated from the playoffs.
FFPC (Fantasy Football Players Championship)
The FFPC always has a wide range of options to play season-long fantasy football at the beginning of the year, so I figured they’d be a good place to check out what they have going on during the playoffs. Their $200 playoff challenge is unique in that there’s no draft. You choose any 12 players you want, but can’t pick two players from the same team. They have the same contest for a $35 entry fee as well. It’s a different style of fantasy football that most of us are used to playing in that we have all the control of who’s on our team without having to go through a draft, but requires some strategy in picking players you think are on teams that will make a playoff run.
The main objective here is to inform you of ways to play fantasy football during the playoffs, but it would seem silly not to at least address briefly how to approach the teams on bye this week, the Chiefs and Lions. In a tournament-style format where you have to advance round-by-round, loading your team up with both Chiefs and Lions players is risky. In that type of format, which is common among the larger contests on Underdog, you obviously need players on your team playing this week to accumulate points. At the same time, the Chiefs and Lions of course have several players that are attractive from a fantasy standpoint. Building your team with Lions players, for example, along with multiple players from a team playing this week that you believe has a good chance of going far (Bills?) could be a good alternative to drafting both Lions and Chiefs players. Good luck, and happy drafting!
Photos courtesy of Icon Sportswire
Adapted by Kurt Wasemiller (@kurt_player02 on IG & Threads, @kuwasemiller on Bluesky)