Divisions are meant to create rivalries, but in fantasy football they often create more luck than competition. Here’s why divisions fall short and what commissioners should do instead.
Since its humble beginning in Oakland, CA in 1962, divisions were always part of the Fantasy Football experience.
As a team owner, this may be of no concern. That is, until your league proposes rule changes year after year in a hotly contested debate closer akin to passing an act of congress. However, as a league Commissioner, thoughtful consideration of how best to manage divisions are likely. Should you have divisions in the first place? If so, how many divisions should you have? How are you breaking up the divisions? By location? By familiarity of other managers making for a more competitive league?
These questions are worthy of a Commissioner; however, please consider the following. In redraft Fantasy Football Contract Leagues, divisions are an unnecessary complication.
One of the blessings, and curses, of fantasy football is wins and losses determining who makes the playoffs. The blessing of this is it creates a simulation type of experience modeling the NFL. The curse is despite your team consistently scoring in the upper echelons, an unfavorable schedule can result in missing the playoffs.
Divisions do not mitigate this issue. Let’s say you are a commissioner of a standard 12 team league. In an 18-week regular season, the schedule has 14 regular season weeks, 3 playoff matchups, and then most leagues try to avoid the final week of the regular season due to NFL teams resting their players.
Initially, this appears favorable, each team plays all league opponents once, and the teams in their division twice like in the NFL. Where that sounds great (and I’ll talk more about this later), in a redraft format, I would strongly advise against this, especially if the teams in your division change every year.
It poses a fundamental question, “What is the purpose of having divisions, what do they accomplish?” The NFL has divisions to facilitate better rivalries. Most NFL teams were in the same division for decades. Fans circle these division rivalry matchups on the calendar in anticipation of the next showdown. Inter-divisional matchups are a key consideration in prime-time programming calculus. The rationale is straightforward → the NFL is the best reality show on television.
Are divisional rivalries feasible in Fantasy Football? With wholesale roster changes annually, there is no roster continuity year after year. Perhaps your league has Keepers with one or two players from last season. However, it is primarily a ‘new’ team. What continuity exists to justify a division? There’s no long-term roster construction, no carry-over decisions, and no real competitive history tied to your team.
Conversely, I argue it makes your league less competitive. Ideally, the teams with the highest points punch their ticket to the playoffs. However, with divisions, you can randomly end up playing stronger teams twice, while a direct playoff competitor gets a softer schedule against teams who have already checked out. I’ve been there, and if you are like me, it is extremely frustrating and may ultimately result in missing the playoffs. There has to be a better way!
This idea was introduced to me years ago. It’s been so long that I can’t recall who it was so that I can attribute credit for the idea. But I implemented this rule as a commissioner in one of my leagues and I will never go back to divisions.
The true alternative to divisions is adopting position weeks. Based on your league size, position weeks are the remaining weeks in the regular season after you have played every team in your league once. How it works is there are no divisions and instead, during one of the ‘position’ weeks, you play the next closest team to you in the league standings. So the #1 seed would play the #2 seed, the #3 seed would play the #4 seed, etc.
What this accomplishes is not only do you have a balanced schedule, those remaining regular season weeks that used to be randomly assigned to whomever your division is are now replaced by competing with the next closest team to you on the competitive ladder.
Now these position weeks are the weeks circled on the calendar, feeling ‘must wins’ to move up the standings. In particular, the last week in the regular season has extra drama because it feels like a play-in game for the team that is the last seed in the playoffs and the team that is the first team out.
Maybe you are still nostalgic about divisions and can’t bear to see them go. Or perhaps divisions are considered a core part of the league, and changes would be problematic. In this instance, I recommend you consider implementing median scoring.
Depending on what platform you play on, this feature may not be possible but if you can incorporate median scoring, it will help reduce the luck of the draw in your league.
Median scoring is an additional matchup during the weeks besides your direct opponent. If your team scores higher than the median scoring that week you get a win. If your team scores lower, you get a loss. What is the benefit of that?
If you’re the second-highest scoring team the week you face the highest scorer, instead of being 0-1, your record is 1-1. By implementing median scoring, you reduce schedule luck and your team is recognized for scoring prowess as it results in a bump in the win-loss record.
However, I appreciate fantasy football provides an opportunity to mimic the General Manager decision-making process. So, although it is an alternative, I am not a fan.
It’s a necessary tradeoff to create a fairer system, even if I’d prefer to keep divisions. So when do divisions actually make sense? Is the NFL right that they make the game more fun by creating rivalries?
How can we recreate the same level of rivalry and competitiveness in fantasy football existing in the NFL?
Dynasty Fantasy Football Leagues are an evolution which more closely approaches the benefits of the NFL’s Division rivalries. The roster stays essentially intact year over year. This provides continuity, facilitates wiser long-term decision making and contributes to team identity.
Although Dynasty league format more closely approaches the intended benefits of rivalries, it falls short.
The problem is league parity can quickly erode. If teams bottom out, there are limited mechanisms to help them climb back out. Outside of rookie drafts and trades, there isn’t much flexibility, and elite teams have little incentive to move impact players. That allows the top teams to continue to separate while rebuilding teams struggle to catch up. Without tools to rebuild, those teams stay stuck, and competitive balance suffers. This dynamic leads to orphan teams, where managers abandon their rosters and commissioners are forced to find replacements. Those replacements inherit struggling teams with little connection to the league or their division, which erodes familiarity and engagement. Over time, this becomes a core weakness of dynasty leagues, often resulting in leagues dissolving as managers opt to restart with a new dynasty startup league rather than rebuild an orphan team.
However, Dynasty Contract Leagues, or Contract Leagues, provide multiple paths to reassert their glory days. Managers can make trades, sign players in free agency, leverage cap space, and draft rookies. Roster construction becomes more dynamic, more frequent, allowing teams to work their way back. You can see the worst team in a division one year turn into the top team the next, just like we often see in the NFL.
At their core, divisions in the NFL exist to foster community, increase engagement, and create a more competitive league environment.
So when I say divisions are broken, what I really mean is they are broken when applied to the wrong league format.
In redraft leagues, where rosters reset every year, divisions add randomness without adding meaning. There is no continuity, no real team identity, and no reason for rivalries to exist. If your goal is to build the fairest and most competitive league possible, you are better off removing divisions entirely and focusing on a league structure that rewards performance and reduces schedule luck.
But in the right environment, divisions can elevate your league.
When rosters carry over, teams can rebuild, and league dynamics create real competitive cycles, divisions begin to serve a purpose. Matchups gain context. Familiarity builds over time. Rivalries start to feel earned rather than forced.
That is how Dynasty Contract Leagues come closest to capturing what makes divisions work in the NFL. Teams are not stuck. They can reshape their roster, manage the cap, and work their way back into contention. That creates the kind of turnover, tension, and familiarity that divisions are meant to support.
To build a league which creates real team identity and long-term competition, it’s time to explore Dynasty Contract Leagues. That’s the exact experience we’re building at Front Office Pros.
Our upcoming fantasy football platform is designed to recreate that experience, giving commissioners the ability to run leagues where elements like divisions function as they do in the NFL. But that is just one layer.
At Front Office Pros, our mission is to create an authentic GM experience by bringing the mechanics and structure of contract management into fantasy football, where contracts are based on fantasy performance, not real-world salaries.
Visit our About page to learn more about the upcoming beta and check out our other Commissioner Guide articles for more ways to improve your fantasy football league.
If you are interested in commissioning or joining a Front Office Pros league, reach out to us on X to get involved in the beta as we build this new experience.
