The Hybrid League: The perfect blend between dynasty and keeper leagues
We’ve had a handful of people reach out with additional interest about this article since it was originally published, so we’ve since updated it for a 3rd time with more information and edits. Hope you enjoy…
I had a stable re-draft league many years ago, and we reached a point where 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.
Our First Failure: Using Contracts
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 wanted. 20+ years later, we have developed a perfect balance of team identity, off-season engagement, ability to develop multi-year champions, and 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 gameplay 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 is 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 number 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
Note: These keeper quantities should be perceived as "up to that number" and not mandatory for owners to keep. If an owner doesn't want to keep a kicker, they don't have to. If an owner didn't draft any rookies or doesn't have any eligible DR keepers, that's their problem due to poor planning.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
Rookies picked up off of Free Agency are NOT eligible for DR keeper status.
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 can 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 a 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 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. I made a sizable trade some years back 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”(DR) 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 the “DR” 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 placed 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 number of players that 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 one of the 3 skill position slots, which is usually done to make room for grooming recently drafted rookies. It’s essential to track this because once they are moved out of the DR slot then that player loses his eligibility in the future.
Hybrid League Example of Keeper Roster and Draft Pool 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 that 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 was my roster going into the 2021 season:
SKILL 1: Patrick Mahomes (QB) KC
SKILL 2: Josh Jacobs (RB) LVR
SKILL 3: James Cook (RB) BUF
DR 1: JK Dobbins (RB) BAL
DR 2: Kenneth Walker (RB) SEA
TE: George Kittle (TE) SF
K: Justin Tucker (BAL) PK
DST: Seattle Seahawks (SEA) DST
I drafted both Kenneth Walker and Dobbins as rookies the prior year, and decided to put them into my DR spots. Although I also drafted James Cook as a rookie, I put him into my Skill position.
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 2023 (there are many more, but here are the top 5-10 players from each position)
Quarterbacks
Tua Tagovailoa QB/MIA
Kenny Pickett QB/PIT
Jordan Love QB/GB
Jared Goff QB/DET
Kirk Cousins QB/MIN
Russell Wilson QB/DEN
Derek Carr QB/NO
Matt Stafford QB/LAR
Running backs
Miles Sanders RB/CAR
Alexander Mattison RB/MIN
Rachaad White RB/TB
Khalil Herbert RB/CHI
James Conner RB/ARI
Zeke Elliot RB/DAL
Raheem Mostert RB/MIA
Jamaal Williams RB/NO
Antonio Gibson RB/WAS
Tyler Allgeier RB/ATL
Wide Receivers
Jaylen Waddle WR/MIA
Brandon Aiyuk WR/SF
Calvin Ridley WR/JAC
DJ Moore WR/CHI
Jerry Jeudy WR/DEN
Christian Watson WR/GB
Keenan Allen WR/LAC
Tyler Lockett WR/SEA
Christian Kirk WR/JAC
Trey Burks WR/TEN
Important Additional Rules
TRADE DEADLINES AND KEEPER DESIGNATION DATES (IMPORTANT!)
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 at 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.
Example:
My league’s trade deadline is week 12 of the regular season. Owners can then not trade any players until our keepers have been designated for the next season, which for us is one week following the NFL draft.
We do allow for trading draft picks immediately following the conclusion of the fantasy season though.
The earlier you set your date for keeper designation, the sooner it opens up trades and starts getting people excited for the draft. We set our keeper designation date for one week following the NFL draft.
Once the keepers are designated, then all of the non-kept players will be the veterans available for the draft. It’s a very good idea to set your keeper designation date early, so that way owners can know who will be available in the draft pool, and begin preparing for their draft.
Prepare for some owner pushback regarding “keeper designation dates”. I highly recommend an early date (one very shortly after the NFL draft). Some owners will have the all too common response: “But what if my keeper gets hurt during training camp!”
It’s important to understand the value of an earlier date for keeper designation though:
The earlier the keeper designation date, then the earlier teams will know the draft pool and be able to prepare for their draft, and the earlier they can start making trades.
CAP HOW FAR IN THE FUTURE A TEAM CAN TRADE DRAFT PICKS
Our league owners frequently include future picks in many of their trades. For instance, an owner may offer their first-round pick for the next two seasons for a player. However, we do cap how far into the future you can trade. It would be a real bummer to have some owner trade their 1st round pick for the next 10 years, and then have something bad happen to that owner. We use 2 future seasons for our cutoff. So in the 2021 season, the farthest forward they could trade picks is 2022 and 2023.
CONSIDER FUTURE DRAFT PICK TRADES AND DRAFT ORDER
Our league does an inverse-standings (loser bracket for top pick) to determine our draft order. We also hold a snake-style draft.
We ran into one strange scenario that can happen with this method. Let’s say I traded my 1st round pick to a team, and then at the end of the season, I land in the loser bracket. It would actually benefit me to do poorly in the loser bracket, because I don’t have my 1st round pick, and getting knocked out early would thus improve my 2nd round pick position. This inadvertently screws the guy that I traded my 1st round pick.
PREPARING YOUR OWNERS FOR A HYBRID LEAGUE
Starting a Hybrid Keeper league means owners should be preparing for the long haul. Educating them on a little long-term strategy and what to be aware of will get them both excited and well-informed. Here are a few tips:
The first draft you hold will essentially be like any other re-draft, because all of the players will be available. However, going forward the future drafts will very much evolve into a different thing where rookies will take on significantly greater value (as those will be the players with the most upside in your draft.)
A decent strategy in your first draft is to get a tight end, kicker, and defense that you like, because you’ll likely be keeping them for a very long time with their individually designated spots.
Keep constant consideration of drafted rookies, because you’ll want two of them to fill those DR keeper spots when the time comes to designate keepers. If you didn’t draft any rookies or dropped them all during the season, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage when that time comes, because you’ll be keeping fewer keepers that other teams.
Bringing additional attention to rule 3: Always pay attention to how many eligible DR keepers you have prior to a draft. If you enter a draft with two DR keeper players, but don’t draft any rookies that draft, if something bad happens to one of those DR keepers of yours (eg they retired or have a career ending injury) you’re gonna be hurting at that next year’s keeper designation period.
A Rules Template for Your First “Hybrid League”
We’ve had several people reach out requesting a starting point and rules template for their start-up Hybrid League. Below is a list of rules, which you can paste into your League Constitution/Rulebook. While a lot of these areas are flexible, we highly recommend not fussing with the established amount of keepers, as they have huge implications on the end goals of this format. For instance, increasing the number of keepers by even one will greatly reduce the quality of the following year’s draft pool
Rosters consist of a 19-player roster.
(This rule is flexible, however, it’s what works best with our league)One week following the conclusion of the NFL draft, each owner will submit their keepers, which include:
- 3 Total Skill Players (QB, RB, WR, TE) of any mix
- 2 DR (Drafted Rookies)
- 1 Kicker
- 1 Tight End
- 1 Defense/Special TeamsA player can only be placed in the Drafted Rookies (DR) at this keeper designation time if they were an NFL rookie when drafted by the designating fantasy owner.
Rookies picked up off of Free Agency are NOT eligible for DR keeper status.
Players permanently lose eligibility for the DR keeper slot if traded, dropped, or ever assigned to a different keeper slot (eg one of the 3 Skill Player keeper slots).
The trade deadline is Wednesday, December 1, at 12 PM ET
Trades involving players cannot take place until keepers after keepers have been designated.
A team may trade future draft picks, but any such picks may not be more than 2 drafts into the future.
