Dear friends of Civitas Growth Partners,
We spend a good chunk of time thinking about incentive structures, and we have concluded that standard fantasy football has terrible ones. Half the league is mathematically eliminated by Halloween, and yet everyone is still expected to set a lineup through December out of some vague sense of civic duty. It is the Social Security of recreational sports - the people paying in have no realistic hope of a payout.
So we would like to gauge interest in something with sharper edges: a Civitas Snippets Guillotine League.
How a guillotine league works
Everyone drafts a team and sets a lineup each week, same as normal. Scoring is standard - we are not reinventing the point-per-reception here.
Nobody plays anybody. There are no head-to-head matchups and no schedule luck. Every week, all teams are ranked by total points, and the single lowest scorer is eliminated. Gone. Season over.
Here is the part that makes it interesting: the eliminated team’s entire roster is dropped into free agency. The surviving teams then bid on those players using a fixed blind-bidding budget (FAAB) for the season. Spend your budget in Week 2 on the guy who fell to you, and you will be watching Week 9 unfold with nothing left in the coffers. Capital allocation matters.
Eighteen teams is the ideal - it lines up one elimination per week with the fantasy regular season - but the format works with fewer, and we will size the league to whoever shows up. Either way, the guillotine falls every Tuesday morning until one team remains standing. Last team standing wins.
The practical bits
Draft: Tuesday, September 8, 7:00pm ET, online. Details will be sent once we have participation finalized.
Stakes: $1,000 cash prize for first place.
We need a real headcount before we commit to this - a guillotine league with six teams is just a slow-motion regular league. If you are in, or in-adjacent, put your name and email here:
If enough of you raise a hand, we will follow up with a league invite ahead of the 8th. If not, we will quietly pretend this email never happened and return to our regularly scheduled commentary.
Cheers,
The Civitas Team