Love dynasty leagues? Love auction leagues? What about contract leagues? Have you ever wished that a league provider’s salary cap would more closely resemble the actual NFL? What if I told you that there was a company that blended dynasty auction leagues with contract/salary cap leagues?
Perhaps the hidden gem of the fantasy football league provider landscape, Reality Sports Online is an exciting contract league auction platform that brings you closer to a true NFL style management process. Reality Sports Online comes with all the frills, including, but not limited to, franchise tags, rookie drafts, a real-world NFL salary cap, and contract extensions. There is a lot to get excited about with Reality Sports Online. While we’ll dive into strategies in the future, we’ll instead use this opportunity to take a look at the feature-rich offering from our friends at Reality Sports Online.
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What is Reality Sports Online
As alluded to above, Reality Sports Online is a dynasty-contract auction-league platform that’s increasing in popularity by the day. Quite simply, there is no other league provider with as robust of a contract auction league platform. The salary cap is fixed and set to mirror the salary cap in the actual NFL. The cost is $12.99 per league member, but use the promo code “FantasyPros” and you’ll receive 10% off your team or league! Each league member can split this cost through RSO’s interface, or it can be paid in full by the commissioner (if they choose to collect funds in another way, or are only using a portion of buy-in for league fee).
Why Reality Sports Online?
If you are looking to start or join a salary cap, contract auction dynasty league, you owe it to yourself and your league mates (if you’re the commissioner) to at least give Reality Sports Online a test run. While there are a couple of competing options, no other league provider gives you this level of simulated front-office experience. The NFL front office experience of RSO’s brain trust is evident in their detailed and exhaustive offering.
Features
Auctions with contracts of different lengths (1-4 years)
Typical of dynasty contract leagues, there are different contract lengths that you can assign or offer to individual players. The contract lengths on Reality Sports Online range from one to four years.
Limited amount of contract length slots
It’s important to be judicious about the contract lengths you choose to offer. Each team will only have a limited number of two, three, or four-year deals to hand out. Your league’s commissioner will predetermine the maximum number of each contract type. They will be able to set the maximum number of each contract type between zero and nine
Guaranteed vs. overall value
All contracts will have a guaranteed and non-guaranteed portion. This is more important when it comes to multi-year deals, as any players waived in the future could count against the cap due to dead money if they are not claimed.
Franchise tags
The franchise tag feature at Reality Sports Online mimics the way the value of franchise tag contracts gets calculated in the actual NFL. If a player gets tagged, they will receive the average of the top five contracts at the position or 120 percent of their previous year’s salary, whichever is greater.
Extensions
You can also offer contract extensions to your players. The commissioner can choose to set the maximum amount of extensions from zero to nine. Reality Sports Online suggests that this number be set at zero in the startup year, and at one in subsequent years.
Rookie contracts
Prospects selected in the rookie draft are automatically assigned rookie contracts. These drafts use the traditional inverted standings, linear draft order, but there is an option to customize it (and to use the snake method if so desired). They can span from two to five rounds. Rookie contracts can be pre-set to span three to four years. True to life, there is even an option to include an option year for rookies selected in the first round of your rookie draft.
Salary cap
While salary caps are not unique to Reality Sports Online, what differentiates them from other salary cap league providers is that the cap for RSO leagues is directly tied to the salary cap in the actual NFL. This helps to simulate a more true to life NFL front office experience.
Dead cap
When a team waives a player who goes claimed on waivers, the waiving team remains responsible for the remaining guaranteed money. This dead cap feature is critical to keeping Reality Sports Online’s leagues a true front office simulation.
55 man rosters
Reality Sports Online lets you set roster sizes of between four to 53 players (it will be expanded to 55 this offseason). You may also choose to allow owners to make use of a practice squad of up to nine players. Just like in the real NFL, practice squad players can get signed by rival teams.
Multi-day auctions
With some leagues choosing to go with NFL-style 53 man rosters, Reality Sports Online has provided players with the ability to pause drafts and resume them another day. Drafts have been known to be scheduled for two or even three sessions. As any veteran auction player knows, auction drafts often take quite a bit longer than standard live drafts. As such, this multi-session feature is a very welcomed option.
Navigating/Getting started
The first thing one will want to do before getting started is to decide whether you will be looking to join a league, or if creating one as the commissioner is in your best interests. If you decide to start your own league and do not have enough owners to it, you can post your league in the league lobby or on Twitter to try to find interested parties. Speaking of the league lobby, this is the place to go if you are looking to join an existing startup or to take over an orphan.
Once you have either joined or created a league, the next step is to participate in a mock draft. If you are the commissioner, you should invite your league mates to participate in the mock to get themselves familiarized with Reality Sports Online’s draft room and draft rules. Getting your feet wet with a mock draft should be considered a mandatory step, because, at first glance, Reality Sports Online’s draft room could prove to be daunting and more complicated than it actually is.
Once you enter the mock draft, you will notice that the majority of the draft room may resemble what you have seen in previous auction drafts you have participated in. The only real learning curve will be getting a handle on the offer submission process. There are two options, a manual offer or an automatically generated offer. The automatically generated offer gives you the option of contract lengths and sets the offer at a price point that the player being bid on would accept. While the average annual value may decrease on contracts of a longer length, similar to the NFL, this means the overall guarantee will rise. Shorter contracts will have a higher average annual value to make the bid competitive.
The ideal way to make bids is to use the automatically generated contract offer option. As mentioned above, each league will have a limited number of three and four-year deals to hand out, so use them wisely. RSO’s platform will grey out the contract option when you have used up all said slots, and you are no longer able to offer contracts of that duration/type.
The mock draft room helps acquaint players with the nomination and bidding process. It’s important to note that the contract values you may see in the mock draft are not at all reflective of contract values in an actual auction draft. Think of the mock draft room more as an illustrative learning tool than a mock that you can use to gain insight on, and devise a contract value strategy.
Conclusion
Reality Sports Online provides players with an exciting dynasty league experience like no other. Contract leagues call for a unique set of strategies, which helps to increase both the challenge and the immersion. With RSO, the fantasy experience is set to mirror actual NFL front office experience as closely as possible, filling a void many dynasty players did not even know they had. We will touch on Reality Sports Online-specific strategies and tips in the coming weeks. And once again, if you do sign up, use the promo code “FantasyPros” for 10% off your team or league! If you have questions in the interim, feel free to reach out to me @FantasyContext on Twitter.
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Raju Byfield is a featured writer for FantasyPros. For more from Raju, check out his archive and follow him @FantasyContext.
