Getting paid in fantasy football is a great feeling, so why not extend that feeling to every week of the season instead of just once at the very end?
Creating a weekly payout structure for your fantasy football league is a good way to spread around the prize money and keep the league interesting for teams even when they’re long out of the playoff race. More winners means a happier league, and a happier league means you won’t have to scramble every year to replace players who lose interest and drop out.
Weekly payouts can also be a good way to ensure that every team plays through to the end of the season, even if they’ve been eliminated from playoff contention. Set a requirement that in order to be eligible for a weekly prize, the team must have submitted a full and legal lineup for that week (every position filled, and no injured players in starting positions).
You don’t need to devote a lot of cash to create an interesting weekly prize structure — many commissioners set aside an amount equivalent to the third-place prize, which split up over a standard 14-week season could mean anywhere from $10 to $50 for the winner of that week’s prize.
If you have a low-stakes league without enough of a prize pool to fund a weekly payout, you could institute some kind of weekly non-cash prize (many leagues let the highest-scoring team rename the lowest-scoring team for the next week). Or you can create a separate prize pool, like one commissioner suggested on Reddit’s Fantasy Football subreddit.
“Every week we throw $10 into a pot and team with the highest points wins it. 12 team league so the payout is pretty nice!” the commissioner wrote.
Creating a weekly prize can also be a fun activity that you can add to your fantasy football draft. As each player makes their first-round pick, they also get to choose one of the weekly award categories.
If you need some help setting the weekly payout structure, check out the ideas below that were shared by veteran fantasy football commissioners.
Highest-scoring team of the week
This is one of the most popular ideas and rewards the team that scored the highest. This is a fairly standard addition, though not particularly creative and can run into some problems if you have one powerhouse team that ends up winning nearly all of the prize money set aside.
While this can be a good start, it’s not always a hit with players. As one fantasy player shared on the Fantasy Football subreddit, simply rewarding the highest score every week was “super lame.”
“This year, we switched to specific challenges each week. (some of them skill based, some completely luck). And it’s been a HUGE hit. I swear the league cares more about the $20 weekly challenge some times more than of they win or lose their matchup.”
Highest-scoring loser of the week
Turning in a high-scoring week in fantasy football is an incredible feeling. You did all the right research, made the right starts and sits and watched your players perform to the top of their abilities.
But doing all that just to lose to a team that had an unreal week (or lucked their way into a few ridiculous performances) is something far from incredible. One solution could be a weekly prize to the losing team with the highest score. This is a fun variation that keeps their great performance from going to total waste, and can keep the griping between players to a minimum.
Fantasy Football survivor pool
This is not technically a weekly payout idea, but a separate weekly contest that ends with one big payout. It works similar to a survivor pool, with the lowest-scoring team being eliminated every week. Once you’re left with one team standing, whether it’s after Week 9 for a 10-player league or Week 11 for a 12-player league, they win the entire prize pool.
Since this is a longer-term contest, it’s good to set a bigger prize, maybe one-third or one-quarter of the prize pool money.
Weekly challenges
One of the coolest twists you can institute in your league are weekly challenges that reward specific positions, big performances or even interesting ways to lose.
If you want to add something standard and easy to understand, you can pick a different position every week and reward the player who scores the most points. Week 1 can be the highest-scoring kicker, then quarterback, running back and on through the entire roster. If there are still weeks left over once you’ve covered every position, you can reward the team with the highest-scoring bench or backup quarterback with the most points.
This is where many fantasy football commissioners get creative. Start with a big pool of suggestions and let your players pick which ones to implement.
Below are other fun ideas for weekly payouts that have been a success in real fantasy football leagues.
