The FFPC Playoff Challenge

Some brief end-ofyear reflections + reviewing the best contest in fantasy football

Hey folks,

I hope you all had a terrific Week 17, or at least better than mine.

It wasn’t all bad, I suppose. I won my home town dynasty league for the first time (season 5 we’ve been doing it), as well as my highest stakes dynasty league, and went 7-7 in my managed finals overall.

The best ball outcome however was almost the worst possible one in terms of mental anguish. I finished 60th out of 441 in the final, just a few points outside the top 50 - a $10,000 difference ($5K vs. $15K). In other words, I finished just about as high as you can finish without getting legitimately life-impacting money out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take $5K over $1K any day of the week, but if you want a result that will cause you to torture yourself over why you didn’t start adding Kyren Williams to the end of your Mathew Stafford teams a few weeks earlier than you did… this was the one.

I also happened to be extraordinarily sick throughout the weekend’s games which prevented me from being able to write my last RB column of the year, go out on New Year’s, or - for the most part - go for a walk. It was a claustrophobic, dizzy, phlegm-filled end to the 2023 fantasy season.

I suspect you’ve seen a lot of talk on twitter about ROIs and results and everything like that. I don’t post mine on twitter for a few reasons: first, to the extent that posting my results is a valid form of “accountability,” I’m ultimately accountable to you: my subscribers, not every random person on twitter who follows me. Second, there is a natural selection bias to results-posting on twitter in which the people who do the best are going to be most inclined to post, and it leaves a lot of young, impressionable analysts or players feeling bad about themselves as they get inundated with tweet-after-tweet of results theirs can’t match up to. Third, while posting results in Best Ball Mania for instance is both verifiable and measurable since you are competing in the same contest with the same rules as anyone else, and it’s fair to compare performance among participants, that’s hardly the case in dynasty. It’s impossible to verify anyone’s actual results, and each individual league is its own makeup of 12-people with extreme variance in the overall “edge” available to a given player within that. I can say for myself that leagues I’ve joined on forums vs. home leagues vs. “analyst” leagues vs. leagues with my own subscribers each have a different degree of difficulty and a very different expected value attached. Lastly, with dynasty in particular there are perverse incentives to ROI-posting, which is that people become more incentivized to play for high yearly ROIs, and often times that means teams selling futures, keeping the teams that stay at the top of their league, and orphaning the ones which draw dead, backfilling those with new startups. You may think this is a tin-foil hat take, but I’ve seen people do it systematically in leagues I’m in.

For what it’s worth I had a profitable dynasty season. I made playoffs in 37/61 leagues (60.7%), made semis in 25/61 (41%), finals in 14/61 (22.9%) and won 7 (11.4%). My wins were tilted toward some of my higher buy-in leagues, which was a mix of luck and disproportionate effort which led to a +52% ROI. I’ve never orphaned a team, and average 1.33 1st-round draft picks per league in 2024, and 1.29 in 2025. Of my 24 non-playoff teams, 14 were intentional tanks either at the outset of the season or within the 1st month, each of which includes the 1.01 or 1.02 in 2024. 10 were “re-loads” or “tear downs” which entered the year with an intent to compete, and I either bailed out in the mid-season and sold off depreciating assets, or failed to make playoffs at the end of the regular season.

For those particularly interested in my portfolio, I’ll make sure to do a breakdown at some point in the off-season.

For those of you with questions about the dynasty rankings: I didn’t update during playoffs since many of you have trade deadlines and those who don’t face short term incentive structures to determine value anyhow. I plan to do an update within the next couple weeks as we get into the off-season.

For those interested in a review of some of my best and worst takes, you can check out this week’s Dynasty Points podcast, and there will be an article on that coming within a few weeks: as soon as the extent of my fantasy work is done for the current season, and that means capping off my year with a look to the FFPC Playoff Challenge.

The FFPC Playoff Challenge

Ok this is my favourite contest in all of fantasy sports, and if you’ve never played it before I hope you consider making this the first year. The beauty is how simple it is, which makes it both very easy to play for anyone new to the contest, but also allows for a legitimate edge in thinking about it at a higher level.

When we actually know the playoff matchups next week I’ll post some thoughts on my favourite plays and my ownership expectations, but this will serve as an introduction to how the tournament works and some general strategy tips.

Here’s how it works:

You get a 12-position lineup in which you need to designate 1QB, 2RBs, 2WRs, 1TE, 4FLEX, 1K, 1DST. To make that lineup you can pick only one player from each team that qualified for the playoffs, and you get their score for the entirety of the playoffs, with the Super Bowl counting for double-points.

If you’re quick with math you probably realized this means there are two teams you wind up bypassing entirely. In total you are picking a position player from 10 teams, a defense or kicker from 2, and nobody from 2. You’d expect that if a team plays multiple games, it’s very unlikely their highest scoring player will be their defense or kicker, which means you are in effecting picking four teams to “fade.” I’m borrowing this terminology from the ship chasing boys, but leaving a team out entirely = a “hard fade” and picking a defense or kicker = a “soft fade.”

This allows you to pick at least two “wild cards” i.e. teams who can get eliminated in their first playoff matchup who you’re still taking a position player from.