The Hybrid League: The perfect blend between dynasty and keeper leagues.
I started a re-draft league several years ago, and we reached a point that we collectively decided to step into the realm of keeper leagues. The idea of maintaining a carry-over roster each year was appealing for many reasons:
It would create a sense of team identity, thus adding to the reality of being a fantasy team owner.
The idea of building a dominant fantasy dynasty was an added challenge to improve the game.
It would expand fantasy football into the off-season, where owners could remain engaged with offseason keeper declarations, and trades of players and draft picks.
The biggest downfall of a keeper league is how it can impact the draft day experience. We live for draft day, and so degrading the draft pool to only rookies and veteran scraps was worrisome. We decided to start off small, allowing teams to only keep 4 players with time-limited contracts. Two years of this first experiment we scrapped it. It all felt like a very half-assed and unrewarding experience, and didn’t accomplish any of our goals.
Despite the failure of our first attempt at a keeper league, it was a valuable experience. We learned what we liked and disliked, and what changes would get us to where we want. 20+ years later (granted we made several tweaks over the years), we have developed a perfect balance of team identity, off-season engagement, ability to develop multi-year champions, as most importantly… maintained a quality draft experience.
All of these glorious things wrapped together, in a league format we have deemed…”The Hybrid League!”
Keeper Leagues vs Dynasty Leagues
Keeper League formats involve fantasy teams getting to keep a handful of players from year-to-year. This maintains a fair amount of quality in the draft pool from year-to-year, however, from a game play perspective it’s very unsatisfying. It ultimately just feels like skipping the first round or two of the best players, and equally distributing the biggest names to all the teams. There’s no sense of team identity and trades remain as infrequent as in re-draft leagues. It just doesn’t really improve the overall fantasy league experience.
Dynasty League formats involve fantasy teams keeping their entire roster from year-to-year. It’s a great format for serious leagues, but it has some major downfalls. The biggest one being that the draft becomes less exciting. You are essentially just drafting rookies, and the draft will only last about three rounds. The first round is interesting, and then it’s just a bunch of unknown rookies that got selected in the 5th round of that year’s NFL draft. On top of this, if your team is bad it can several years to rebuild and get out of a hole.
The Hybrid League
The Hybrid is a perfect combination of Keeper and Dynasty Format, where a large amount of players are kept, but the draft still maintains a lot of value.
Here’s how the keeper rules of a Hybrid works
3 Total Skill Players (QB, RB, WR, TE) of any mix
2 DR (Drafted Rookies)
1 Kicker
1 Tight End
1 Defense/Special Teams
Additional Rules
Keepers are designated one week following the NFL Draft
Drafted Rookies (DR) lose eligibility for that keeper slot if traded, dropped, or assigned to a different keeper slot (eg one of the 3 Skill Player keeper slots)
Following the end of the season, trades involving players cannot take place until keepers are designated
Most of these keeper slots are self explanatory.
You keep any mix of 3 total players from any of the skill positions: Quarterback, Running back, Wide Receiver, and Tight End. For example, you could keep 2 QBs and 1 RB or 3 RBs, or 1 RB and 2 WRs.
You then keep one kicker, one tight end, and one Defense/Special Team. Things like kickers and defense may seem trivial, but there is purpose for this. For one, it helps establish team identity. We have owners who have had the same Defense/S.T. for 20 some years. It’s odd, but also kind of awesome. Kickers can be fun too, as it creates an NFL like atmosphere of owners struggling from year-to-year to find a dependable kicker that they can have for many years to come. Last year I made a sizable trade to get Justin Tucker, just out of the belief that I won’t have to deal with that position again in the draft for the foreseeable future. That’s something you’ll rarely see in other league formats (trading for a kicker).
Explaining the Two “Drafted Rookies” Keeper Slots
The slot that requires some additional explanation is the two “Drafted Rookies (DR)”.
The “DR” keeper slots are for any player that you drafted as a rookie. You can keep players in this slot for as long as they are on your roster and assigned with that DR designation. For instance, we had an owner draft Peyton Manning as a rookie, and he got to remain in that slot until he retired. The one important note is that “once a player is dropped, traded, or moved out of the DR slot in any given season, then they are never again eligible to be place back in that slot”.
What the DR keeper slots accomplish is adding value to rookies. There is a strategy to acquiring a player for those slots (rookies), and it forces owners to give constant thought to their rosters (both offseason and during the draft). For instance, if in a given season you only have two players eligible for that slot for the next year, you may be hesitant to trade either of them during the season as it would limit the amount of players you get to keep.
The one small downside is that this must be tracked manually. This means that the commissioner must keep a spreadsheet of keepers and their designations from year-to-year. Players will oftentimes be shifted from the DR keeper slot to a one of the 3 skill position slots, which is often done to make room from grooming recently drafted rookies. It’s essential to track this so, because once they are moved out of the DR slot that player loses his eligibility in the future.
Hybrid League Examples of Keeper Roster and Draft Quality
As mentioned earlier, the Hybrid keeps a beautiful balance between keeper roster and draft player pool quality. While you aren’t going to have the type of draft pool you get in a re-draft, it’s still going to be dramatically better than a dynasty league. The first round is usually dominated by big-named rookies and a handful of veterans, and the quality remains fairly solid through about the 5th or 6th round.
For example, below is my roster going into the 2019 season:
SKILL 1: Mahomes, Patrick KCC QB
SKILL 2: Conner, James PIT RB
SKILL 3: Ingram, Mark BAL RB
DR 1: Fournette, Leonard JAC RB
DR 2: Davis, Corey TEN WR
TE: Ebron, Eric IND TE
K: Tucker, Justin BAL PK
DST: Seahawks, Seattle SEA Def
I drafted both Fournette and Davis as rookies a couple of years ago, and slotted them into those DR keeper slots. I have a pretty young team right now, and with my DR slots in tact, my strategy this year will be to focus on getting some veteran depth for my roster.
Going into the draft, here is the quality of players that will be available:
ALL of the NFL rookies. These will dominate the majority of the first round of our draft.
The veteran talent in 2019 (there are many more, but here are the top 5-10 players from each position)
Quarterbacks
Roethlisberger, Ben PIT QB
Ryan, Matt ATL QB
Rivers, Philip LAC QB
Prescott, Dak DAL QB
Darnold, Sam NYJ QB
Running backs
White, James NEP RB
Drake, Kenyan MIA RB
Peterson, Adrian WAS RB
Cohen, Tarik CHI RB
Howard, Jordan CHI RB
Murray, Latavius NO RB
Ekeler, Austin LAC RB
Wide Receivers
Hill, Tyreek KCC WR
Diggs, Stefon MIN WR
Samuel, Curtis CAR WR
Godwin, Chris TBB WR
Anderson, Robby NYJ WR
Boyd, Tyler CIN WR
Fitzgerald, Larry ARI WR
Hilton, T.Y. IND WR
Ross, John CIN WR
Woods, Robert LAR WR
Following the end of the season, Trades involving players cannot take place until keepers are designated
It’s important to note our rule that during the off-season “Trades involving players cannot take place until keepers are designated”. You don’t want owners trading away all of their excess talent, following the conclusion of the season. All that will do is lessen the draft quality. Instead, lock the rosters following your fantasy season until the keeper designation date.
The earlier you set your date for keeper designation, the sooner it opens up trades and starts getting people excited for the draft.
If you have any questions about any other specifics or nuances of the Hybrid League format, drop a note in the comments and we’ll be happy to answer them!