Dynasty 101: Rules and Formats Plus Salary Cap Leagues (Fantasy Football)

Dynasty leagues are the next level of fantasy football beyond your regular old redraft leagues. For those of us who don’t get enough fantasy football from September to December, dynasty allows us to stay locked in all year as we follow the news surrounding our favorite players and teams. It allows us as fantasy players the opportunity to live out our dreams as an NFL GM, with the ultimate goal of building our roster into a perennial powerhouse, also known as…you guessed it…a dynasty. Six years ago, I convinced my main league to convert to a modified dynasty format, and it was the best decision we ever made. In this article, I’ll cover some of the most common dynasty rules and formats, as well as take a little deep dive into the format we use in my main league, which I have some personal bias towards.

Dynasty Basics

The key difference between a dynasty league and a standard redraft league is that when the season ends, all the players don’t go back into the draft pool for next year. Instead, managers get to keep some or all of their players on their roster when the season ends. In a typical dynasty league, players are able to be kept indefinitely, which means once a player is on your roster, you can keep them until they retire (or longer, Tom Brady comeback hopefuls). Leagues such as this will begin with what is called a “Dynasty Startup Draft” which follows a similar format to a standard fantasy draft, except it will typically be many rounds longer – maybe 15-25 rounds depending on the size of your league. The major distinction here is that when you draft a player, they are on your roster for good, or until you decide to drop them or trade them to someone else. 

Annual Draft

Of course, with the majority of players being kept on rosters from year to year, the pool of players to be drafted from each season is much smaller. In most cases, dynasty leagues will have a rookie draft, where managers can select rookies from the incoming class to add to their roster. Rookie drafts can be held at any time during the offseason, but are usually best kept until after the NFL draft so that managers can make better-informed decisions when drafting. Just like the NFL, the rookie draft order is typically set in reverse-standings order, which means the team that finished in last place the previous season gets the first pick in the rookie draft. This helps teams with worse records, and therefore likely less-competitive rosters, rebuild their teams and get back in the hunt for a championship. In addition to rookie drafts, some dynasty leagues will have a free agent draft where non-rookies can be selected. Alternatively, the more common format is to have an offseason waiver system that allows players to be picked up at any time.

Trading 

Trading is a very fun aspect of dynasty leagues, and it works about how you’d expect. You can swap players and/or draft picks with another team, and when you do so, you swap the rights to those assets forever. Where the fun comes in is when competitive teams start selling their future assets (draft picks and young players) to rebuilding teams, who in turn send veteran or established players who can help the competitive teams win in the short term. This incentive to trade away expiring assets before they go to waste is one of the things that separates dynasty leagues from redraft leagues. 

Note that most dynasty leagues implement a trade deadline somewhere around the midpoint of the season. The purpose of this deadline is to force teams to commit to a playoff run or a rebuild before they know exactly how the standings will shake out, and also to prevent any “funny business” that could happen as a result of trading during or just before the playoffs.

An Alternative Dynasty Format

Now comes the part where I get on my soapbox and tell you about my personal favorite format for a league, and why I think it is the best. My main league is what some call a “salary cap” league, which is the most immersive dynasty format I’ve found so far. If your goal in playing dynasty is to feel as close as possible to running your own NFL franchise, this is the format for you. Here is how it works.

Startup

The league kicks off with a startup draft like any dynasty league, but rather than drafting in order (regular or snake), the draft is an auction with each team having the same agreed upon budget. In my league, we use a $200 budget to simulate the NFL salary cap. The price that is bid for each player becomes their “salary” or amount at which they can be re-signed the following season.

Contract Extensions

Players’ “contracts” can be extended at the amount for which they were signed, with an additional cost of $5 per year. Each player’s contract can only be extended once before they go back into the free agent pool. For example, let’s say I signed Justin Jefferson in the auction for a price of $50. This is the salary I pay him for his first season on my team. After his first season, I can sign him to an extension, with the following price breakdown:

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After the final season of his extension, he becomes a free agent again. Contract extension rules can be adjusted based on how you want to balance your league, but we’ve found success with this format. We recently agreed on an amendment to reduce the additional cost of QB extensions from $5 to $3, since their contracts tend to be smaller. 

Annual Drafts

There are two drafts to be held every offseason, and they can be held at the same time or separately. The first is the rookie draft, which works very similar to a rookie draft in a standard dynasty league with one exception. Each pick slot is assigned a dollar value (shown in the table below) which will become that player’s starting salary upon being promoted to the active roster. 

We use a seven-man taxi squad in our league, where rookie draft picks can be kept at no cost until they are promoted to the active roster, at which point their contract is activated and begins to count against the salary cap. If a player is activated midseason, their contract will not count against the salary cap, but the first season on their contract will toll, and the manager will be forced to extend them the following season. We also have a waiver claim period where managers have the opportunity to claim players from others’ taxi squads, to prevent players from being stashed for too long. 

The second draft held annually is the free agent auction, where free agents and undrafted rookies can be bid on. This draft works the same way as the startup draft and is the main advantage between this league format and a standard dynasty league in my opinion. Because of the way the contract extensions work, impactful players are added back into the free agent pool every offseason, which makes for a fun draft and an opportunity to reshuffle your team every year. 

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Trading

Trading is fairly straightforward and works similarly to the NFL and most major sports leagues. When a player is traded from one team to another, the team acquiring said player also acquires their contract. In our league, we allow teams to go over the $200 budget via trades, as long as they are back under budget by the beginning of the next season. The only exception to this is that we do not allow teams to owe more than $200 in “guaranteed” contracts at any given time, which is the salary owed to players on non-expiring contracts. Draft picks can (and should) also be traded.

Roster Size and In-Season Pickups

For our league, we play 1QB / 2RB / 2WR / 1TE / 2FLEX, with a standard bench size of six, not including the seven-man taxi squads. We intentionally keep the benches small, similar to redraft leagues, so that the weekly waiver wire stays active. We use FAAB bidding for waivers, but we do not allow these plays to be kept, as the FAAB bids used to acquire them are not representative of true auction values. All players added during the season go back into the free agent pool at the end of the year.

Summary

Leagues like the one I’ve described here are great for fantasy players who want a hybrid feel between redraft and dynasty. It also offers a chance for football nerds like myself to play pretend GM of a franchise. The contract extensions, in-season waiver wire, and annual free agent auctions are fun ways to keep a league fresh compared to a standard dynasty league. I hope this article convinces at least one league to convert to a salary-cap format and try out their own version of the rules that I outlined above.