This is going to sound super cliché, but hear me out. Fantasy football is about more than just winning and losing your matchups. It's easy to be reductive and turn fantasy football into straight competition, but at their core, fantasy sports are about community, relationships, shared interest and love of sports.
Ideally, your fantasy league looks at the game this way, but if you don't have many yearly traditions in your league, fear not -- for I am here to help. Here are four ways to spice up your league's yearly investment and maybe build some traditions along the way.
Draft-order Olympics
You could just randomize your draft order an hour before the draft ... but some of us want to put in the sweat equity to potentially earn a higher pick! Being able to do an event or Olympic-style games to determine your yearly draft order is one of the most fun things a league can do together.
There are so many easy games you could put together to create a draft-order gauntlet. For example (and please tag me online if your league does this for your draft order): complete one flip cup, make one ping-pong ball in a cup (include a beverage, if you like), make one free throw, get three bags on the board in cornhole and knock over five bowling pins. Whoever can do all of that in the shortest time gets to determine which draft pick they want. The second-fastest time gets the next pick, and so on.
It doesn't have to be only physical events. You could have a trivia section or a stats portion, if you're not as interested in all of the other moving pieces. There are plenty of ways to do this, but it really makes setting your draft order a lot more fun.
In-person draft
Another great way to maximize the fun is to draft in person. That doesn't mean you can't still draft on ESPN (almost every live draft I've gone to in recent memory is still done with ESPN's fantasy game), but being in the same room as everyone else takes the day to another level. Food, drinks, jokes and fantasy football. How could an afternoon get any better?
Hosting a live draft is sort of like throwing a party for the entire league, and it's an especially nice way to introduce newcomers to the rest of the managers. At the end of the season, only one of you gets to feel like a winner, but at the beginning, everyone gets to feel like they have a shot. You can feel that energy in the room when you're doing a live draft. There's not another day like it on the fantasy football calendar.
Weekly write-up or podcast
I realize not everyone has the free time to do a weekly recap for your fantasy football league, but if you do have a person like that in your league, there are few things that are as fun and entertaining as a witty reaction to last week's games.
It's an opportunity to bust the chops of managers for poor roster decisions, benching the wrong guy, or to highlight how an underdog team trounced the defending champion and create inside jokes that will live on for seasons to come. These recaps, in whatever form, are another great way to build camaraderie and keep a league invested throughout the season.
League punishment
You're reading a column by a former fantasy punishment victim. You don't have to go as hard as I did when I got an eight-hour tattoo on my side of three puppets from "The Fantasy Show with Matthew Berry."
However, league punishments for the last-place team have become a bit of a rite of passage for some fantasy managers. Whether it's the Waffle House challenge, running a marathon in a costume, recreating viral TikTok dances or maybe something that is not punishment (but more potentially rewarding) like volunteering, there are a ton of great ways to keep everyone engaged all the way to the very end.