Shawn Siegele explains why Guillotine leagues will eventually become your new home-league default, details his strategic objectives in these formats, and breaks down a Stealing Bananas draft with Ben Gretch.

A couple of years ago, Colm Kelly, Ben, and I participated in a guillotine league for charity, and it was one of our favorite fantasy experiences. It’s impossible to overstate the excitement of waivers when a full roster goes back into the pool every week.

Here’s how it works:

1. Set up and draft your team just like traditional fantasy football
2. Each week the lowest scoring team gets eliminated
3. All of the players from the eliminated team become free agents
4. A weekly FAAB bidding war starts among the remaining teams
5. Survive the chop and be crowned champion

And here’s the real kicker: Because it’s a survivor-style format, you can start leagues any week of the season for as long as you want. This makes it the perfect option for those rest-of-season leagues to scratch your drafting itch over the course of the NFL campaign.

We’ll probably have multiple RotoViz-oriented leagues over the next month, but if you want in on our debut community league here’s what to do. Head over to guillotineleagues.com and sign up. Then contact Colm (@OvertimeIreland) and ask to be put on the list. We’ll draft tomorrow (Wednesday) at 5:30 eastern as a final draft appetizer before the NFL season commences on Thursday. We’ll add managers in the order they contact Colm, and if you miss the original cut, you’ll still save a spot in our next league.

This is a free opportunity to draft with the RotoViz community. Just keep in mind: Colm lives in Ireland, so don’t panic if he doesn’t get back to you until Wednesday morning.

How to Survive the Chop and Dominate Your Guillotine League

In our 2022 experiment, we made it almost to the end after a well-timed pickup following Week 1. Austin Ekeler scored only 11 points, placing his team on the chopping block. Over the next 16 weeks he averaged 23.8 PPG, almost pushing us to the title.

The Ekeler example helps illustrate the excitement and the tactical tension in a Guillotine format.

Survive, Build, and Bridge

To win a guillotine title, you must navigate a set of objectives that are frequently in conflict. You’re not only in a battle for survival; you’re in a race to build the best team while also maintaining the largest bidding reserve.

My three objectives:

• Survive the early chop
• Build a super team
• Bridge to a late-season bidding advantage

In our previous run, we spent a large chunk of our budget after Week 1 and then pecked away with $1 and $2 bids at the QB and TE positions, trying to create depth and leverage while waiting for our FAAB allotment to regain its edge. By the time the season had reached its crucial weeks, we were back in position to control the bidding on specific key players.

That brings us back to what may be the most important rule of thumb for waivers:

Always bid on the players who will make your roster better. Even substantial underbids will often win a player in cases where everyone is trying to maintain that FAAB advantage.

That’s a key recommendation across platforms: always bid. The only bids I ever make are high bids for must-have options and low bids to pick off values. It’s simply too easy to miss on midrange bids. You can be wrong in two ways: you incorrectly guess the market and waste hundreds in FAAB or you end up missing on your thesis for the addition and cut the player again shortly.

Why Free Agency Is Key

In normal redraft formats, it’s often wise to spend your free agent budget early. Week 1 gives us extremely valuable information on a player like Puka Nacua. Even if you spend 800-900 units, you benefit in two key ways. You’ve blocked the other 11 managers, and you get to put that performance in your lineup for the entire season. A similarly high-quality option may never materialize, and if that player appears in Week 8, you lose out on his scoring for all of the intervening weeks.

It’s intuitive that Guillotine leagues would be different, but the sheer size of the difference may be even larger than that intuition. For example, not only is a team getting chopped every week, but all of their bidding dollars also disappear from the pool. Entering Week 8, for example, you might be covered by two teams, but two weeks later those squads could be gone.

Even more importantly, teams that are chopped early are usually sending the equivalent of a pick from each round back into the pool. Once you reach midseason, chopped teams will be adding their own draft picks plus all of their previous free agent acquisitions. The waiver wire will be flush with stars at exactly the moment that free agent dollars start to get scarce.

That raises another key element. If you are covered by three teams in a week where four elite players get dumped back into the pool, you’re still guaranteed access to a star pickup. And sometimes you can even add multiple players as other managers take the risk to wait one more week and simply add your players once you’ve been chopped.

In such an environment, it’s easy to see how any wasted bids or overpays early will put you in a weaker position down the stretch.

Drafting to Survive the Chop and Build a Guillotine Powerhouse

Ben and I drafted live against the Stealing Bananas listeners in an 18-team league that will leave one team standing.

Guillotine leagues have a 1-QB, 2-RB, 2-WR, 1-TE, 2-Flex starting lineup with PPR scoring.

We began the draft with these objectives:

• Create a strong volume floor across the six starting lineup spots that will likely be filled by RBs and WRs
• Hit the end of the extended elite TE tier
• Wait on QB
• Pivot to building in midseason upside after the starting lineup is set

The Draft

We were fortunate to draw the No. 9 slot, which allowed us to grab one of our favorite priority selections in Garrett Wilson, and generally manage the types of huge runs that drafters on the edges of an 18-team draft will experience.

In the second round, we were able to hit another priority target, the receiver with the greatest WR fantasy season ever (Weeks 1-17).

Cooper Kupp wasn’t healthy in 2023 but has reportedly dominated training camp. The injury to Nacua, while not a big issue for his future outlook, has opened the door to Kupp leading this team as the 1a in 2024. He doesn’t need to be nearly that good to help us accomplish our objectives here.

Tee Higgins is poised for a secondary breakout in Cincinnati. If we can fill our first Flex slot with a top-15 WR, the team’s overall floor continues to get higher.

The Pivot to Running Back

We had interest in players like Jayden Reed, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and Rome Odunze in Round 4, but none of them made it back. Although the risk in the first two is probably overstated, pivoting to RB was the better move in this format in any case.

James Cook is a controversial selection in more WR-heavy formats, but his early-season workload should be perfect for the Guillotine. Ray Davis was not a camp standout, and while Cook won’t suddenly jump to the top of the EP leaderboard, he only needs to consolidate the touch share slightly to combine safety and upside here.

We missed on David Njoku by one pick in Round 5, forcing a tactical shift. Instead, we took value in Aaron Jones, a more talented version of Cook, and a player heavily discounted due to injuries in 2023. Finally we’re able to come back with Tyjae Spears, the top RB breakout candidate for 2024.

2 Ways to Play the Bridge Rounds

Once we had our non-QB/TE starting lineup set we had the choice of filling out the rest of the starting lineup, trying to create some additional depth, or stashing some upside beyond Week 1.

We opted for Hollywood Brown, who could be a clear starting WR as early as Week 3, and Jonathon Brooks, who might qualify as a borderline RB1 by midseason.

Because we waited on QB and TE, we didn’t have pressure to continue filling out the starting lineup. By stashing a couple of higher upside plays, we help shift the psychology of the bidding over the first month. Having a healthy Brown or Brooks dropped onto the roster is like landing a quality option in free agency, but without the serious outlay of cash.

Other Strong Options

I really like the selections of Jerome Ford and Chuba Hubbard. These backs are a little pricey in regular leagues where you wouldn’t expect them to get much work over the second half of the season. That’s more or less irrelevant here, as a flood of high-value players will hit the waiver wire between now and then. Selecting Ford or Hubbard provides an additional quality starter over the first month. It helps you avoid the chop while being able to roster elite TEs like Kyle Pitts and Trey McBride.

We may regret passing on Caleb Williams. The rookie offers a perfect fantasy profile for this contest, and if he hits from Week 1, he’ll provide the scoring punch necessary to consistently advance while doing so after the valuable RBs and WRs were gone. On the other hand, given some of Chicago’s struggles in camp and the preseason, it’s possible he’s the culprit in a Week 1 chop.

Banking the Right Scenarios Late

Tight end was our most obvious problem position, and we’d been discussing how to attack it since Round 5.

This is one of my key pieces of advice for Guillotine leagues. Think in one-week increments when it comes to gathering information and deploying a lineup that survives the chop.

If you land an elite TE, you don’t need to select a second unless you have a very high grade on the backup. Five of the 18 teams selected a top TE and stayed at only one. By contrast, if you’re one of the last teams to select a TE, it makes sense to get a look at multiple options.

I’m still cautiously optimistic on Cole Kmet, although his potential volatility could be a negative in this format. In this range, we were looking for some floor in a targets/routes combination that might become clearer after Week 1. To accomplish that, we wanted to target weak WR depth charts where the TEs had established a combination of routes and target-earning ability over the second half of last season.

TE TPRR Leaderboard – Weeks 10-18 (Sports Info Solutions)

I selected Week 10 as a starting point, because Michael Thomas played only a few snaps before departing. His absence opened things up for Juwan Johnson to play a larger role the rest of the way. Johnson’s ADP has been suppressed by the injury forced him to miss training camp. He’s a better fit late in best ball formats, but we get to take a look at a good price here. If he’s healthy and the Saints WR corps continues as a bottom-five group after Chris Olave, then he’s playable until we land a top TE in FA. Johnson has nine TE1 weekly finishes over the last two years.

By contrast, Tyler Conklin posted a strong routes and targets profile in 2023, but generated -13.4 fantasy points over expectation (FPOE) across the final nine weeks. Conklin is not an elite talent and the QB play was abysmal, so that was not a shock. But unless we get a surprise from Mike Williams (a 30-year-old non-target-earner coming off of injury) or Malachi Corley (a draft reach who generated mixed camp reviews), then Conklin will have a good target floor behind Wilson. His efficiency should rebound with Aaron Rodgers.

In both of these situations, we know the play requires more information, so we’re comfortable burning three consecutive picks to gain that info over the first couple of weeks.

Filling the QB Position Late

We timed out in Round 12 while discussing the merits of taking Kirk Cousins first and hoping Geno Smith (with a better Week 1 matchup) comes back to us. Those are the pitfalls of live streaming a co-managed draft. For the purposes of looking at the build, we’ll pretend we got the Cousins selection in.

The new Atlanta QB was on fire last year before the unfortunate injury that ended his season.

The peripherals were also excellent. Cousins ranked No. 6 in adjusted net yards per attempt, and No. 4 in boom percentage, IQR, and points-above-average per play.

Cousins moves over to Atlanta, a less proven squad, but one that includes two elite passing weapons, an intriguing vertical threat, an up-and-coming coordinator prospect, and a dome. In formats where he lasts far beyond the Tua Tagovailoa/Jared Goff/Brock Purdy tier, he’s a screaming buy.

Having filibustered our way out of this pick, Ben and I made an emergency grab for the QB who pairs with our first-round pick. It’s definitely not ideal. A poor week from Wiliams, and suddenly we lose scoring from two important categories (first-round pick, QB). We could easily head into Monday night football in the chopping position, a development that would add immediate intrigue in Week 1.

For our final pick, we pivoted back to stocking the Week 2 pool. If Russell Wilson is benched in-game during Week 1, we’ll have the 2022 QB5 positioned as our Week 2 starter. If Wilson flourishes, we’ve got an easy cut for free agent pickups.

What to Do Now

If you have any qualms about your home or work league — too many leaguemates autodrafted; a third of your league forgets to set their starting lineup in Week 1 — I’d head over to guillotineleagues.com, familiarize yourself with the format, and be ready to swoop in next Tuesday with a solution: a brand new 2024 league with one manager chopped every week.

We’ll have more guillotine content on RV, SB, and OT as the season progresses. Good luck in Week 1, everyone, and survive the chop!