If you have been a redraft or dynasty fantasy football player for a number of years and are interested in trying a new challenge in 2025, let me introduce you to the latest craze among fantasy managers: Guillotine Leagues. In Guillotine Leagues, the stakes week to week are much greater. A week where your team severely underperforms isn’t just a loss in your record, but potential banishment from the league.
After huge gains in redraft, dynasty, daily fantasy, and best ball, Guillotine formats might just be the next wave coming to the fantasy football industry, and it is one of the most innovative, creative, and fun new formats around.
- Fantasy Football Rankings
- Fantasy Football ADP
- 2025 Best Ball Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Free Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator
Fantasy Football Guillotine League Strategy Guide
What Is a Guillotine League?
Guillotine Leagues, as you might deduce from the name, are leagues where teams are chopped every single week of the season. In these leagues, you don’t have to worry about playing against an opponent, but rather you are competing against every other team in the league to stay out of the basement. The lowest score in the league means elimination. At the end of each NFL week, the team with the lowest cumulative score is chopped out of the league, never to be heard from again.
When a team is chopped on any given week in the fantasy football season, their entire roster enters the waiver wire. Over the course of 18 weeks of the NFL season, one team per week will go under the guillotine until there is just one team left standing, which would then be declared the champion of that specific Guillotine League (and take home any prizes that go along with it).
The Guillotine League’s official website offers free, public leagues as well as the opportunity to create custom, private leagues. With fast and slow-draft options going on now in Guillotine Leagues, there is about to be more guillotines chopping that late 17th-century France.
At the end of the day, the ultimate strategy is to stay alive, but several more advanced strategies can make that plan work. There is much to be done in the draft, but that’s just the beginning.
The Explosion of Guillotine League Popularity
There are general reports surfacing online that about 1% of fantasy football players have played or are playing some form of Guillotine League format. That’s quite a lot of saturation for a league that was founded in 2020 by Paul Charchian.
Other fantasy football platforms such as Sleeper, MFL, ESPN, and Yahoo! offer settings that can be modified to accommodate some sort of Guillotine league format. With fantasy managers looking to find newer formats and creative ways of approaching the NFL season, the popularity of Guillotine Leagues is only expected to rise.
Guillotine League Strategy
Below are some of the general and advanced strategies for competing in and succeeding in a Guillotine League. Fantasy managers can sign up for a league to see the full rules of official Guillotine Leagues.
Play For Next Week, Not the Playoffs
A simple search will yield almost infinite information about NFL players who have elite seasonal strength of schedules or favorable playoff matchups. You can now forget about needing all of that information. You don’t care about that. What you do care about is having the highest possible score for the current week, and only the current week. Assuming your team meets that goal, you will have the opportunity to completely overturn your roster on the waiver wire if that is what you desire to do.
There are also other things that don’t matter nearly as much as the season gets started. Some of the most important things to redraft or dynasty managers but that are much less important to Guillotine League managers are bye weeks and strength of schedule for your rosters. No team is on bye until at least Week 5 in 2025, so that is something that can be addressed when the time comes. Getting to Week 5 is the most important goal. Loading up all your players on one bye week is certainly not advisable in Guillotine Leagues, but it’s also not the end of the world. If you have eight of your players on a bye week in Week 9, you will have eight teams chopped before then to poach players before that week comes knocking for your roster.
Speaking of adding players, get ready for absolute chaos when it comes to waiver wire bidding in Guillotine Leagues. You’ve never seen anything like it.
FAAB is More Important Than Ever
Whether you are familiar with leagues that use Free Agent Acquisition Budget (FAAB) or ranked waiver priority or just a general free-for-all, be ready to practice a new way of acquiring players. Each team in a public Guillotine League begins with $1,000 FAAB money to start the year. Many leagues on traditional, public sites begin the year with $100, so everything is scaled up by a factor of 10 when you start the season with $1,000.
However, the amount of money is not the central issue to consider, but rather the overall strength of your roster compared to your opponents’ rosters and what they plan to do with their FAAB. Theoretically, Christian McCaffrey and Patrick Mahomes could end up on the waiver wire after Week 1. What do you do in that scenario?
There are bound to be large overbids on those players, but you will have to decide for your specific roster if you need that kind of upgrade at their positions, or would your $1,000 better serve you down the road when other teams’ rosters have improved because of waiver wire wins.
Players not drafted become free agents and are also available to acquire with FAAB funds.
The Draft is Bigger Than You’re Used To – 18 Rounds
Most traditional home leagues on public sites are now catered to 10 or 12-team leagues, with a few playing with as many as 14 teams. NFBC Formats for more high-stakes players are sometimes 15 teams for Best Ball formats. All public Guillotine Leagues start with 18 teams so that there can be one standing after the 18-week season. This simple symmetry allows for one team to be removed each week of the season, with one left standing.
With 18 rounds in a Guillotine draft, that means rosters are going to be thinner than in most home leagues. There are a total of 252 players taken in a standard Guillotine League, and that is with zero kickers, DST, or individual defensive players taken. In one of my 2024 Guillotine drafts, players like Deuce Vaughn and Devontez Walker were drafted in the last round, This is the type of player you will need to be familiar with by that time.
However, don’t worry; it’s VERY unlikely that those players will remain on your roster for more than a couple of weeks if you’re smart in the FAAB game after teams are eliminated.
Have a Floor of Consistent Points
What is the best strategy for drafting a solid team before others start getting eliminated from the league? When the waiver wire is relatively thin, you want as many players who can put up consistent points as possible. Consider two running backs taken after pick 75 by FantasyPros ADP in most fantasy football drafts (as of June 14th). Both Kaleb Johnson (75 ADP, RB25) and Tony Pollard (80 ADP, ADP 26) go around the same time, but which is better for Guillotine Leagues, at least as we think about the first few weeks of the season?
The lack of knowledge about Kaleb Johnson’s specific role for the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Aaron Rodgers offense puts him at a distinct disadvantage here. Kaleb Johnson could explode and take over the RB1 job in Pittsburgh right away. Or he could be the next Kimani Vidal, who many thought would be a stud coming out of college. Tony Pollard, however, is a known quantity. He plays on every first and second-down play, and also had 57 targets last season (Guillotine Leagues are PPR scoring, by the way). In addition, he had 36 red zone touches in 2024.
Tony Pollard is much more likely to offer consistent points on your roster in the first few weeks of the season until we see what Kaleb Johnson can do in Pittsburgh. If he turns out to be a no-doubt-about-it every-week starter, that will hurt, but it’s not the most likely outcome. You want players early that will keep you out of the basement. Is that a guarantee with Kaleb Johnson? Play the percentages that will earn you the highest floor of possible points on a weekly basis early instead of worrying about the ceiling. That type of strategy can come later when you make it to Weeks 17 and 18.
Don’t Get Attached to Late-Round Picks (Unless They Break Out)
With more than 250 players taken (again, running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, and quarterbacks only), most of the players from the last few rounds of your draft won’t be on your roster at the end unless you hit on a 2023 Puka Nacua or another similar breakout story. With players from all the early rounds entering free agency every single week, the last few players on your roster are easy candidates to drop and replace. There are 14 players on your roster, but players 11-14 will likely be the first to go when you have a shot at a first- or second-round talent.
In the first couple of weeks of the season, before bye weeks, injuries, and before rosters really get churning with waiver picks, these late-round players are also much less likely to crack the starting lineup unless you were able to draft smart enough (or lucky enough) to find yourself with a hidden treasure or injury replacement. Perhaps the best way to think about it would be that your roster is drafting placeholder players until better players join the waiver wire and can be acquired and inserted into the weakest spots in your lineup.
Do Whatever It Takes To Stay Alive
Whether you like the band or not, make the Imagine Dragons’ anthem “Whatever It Takes” your theme song for a season of Guillotine Leagues.
The goal of Guillotine Leagues is to stay alive at all costs. If, after Week 4, your roster has been decimated by injuries and roster turnover, it might be time to empty the FAAB wallet so you can survive another week. If you consistently find yourself near the chopping block, some adjustments to the lineup or roster might be in order. You also never know what will happen with other teams. Some of the strongest Guillotine League teams early in the season might not make it past midseason because of injuries and roster churn.
Football is an extremely chaotic and volatile game, but Guillotine Leagues offer multiple ways to mitigate some of that risk. A bad draft doesn’t necessarily ruin your chances of competing, as long as make it past Week 1. Fourteen players (including players guaranteed to have been drafted early) will hit free agency each week and give renewed hope to those teams that are underperforming.
Maybe the most important piece of advice is to open your mind from this point forward. Forget a lot of the redraft fantasy football rules you have learned. Don’t set up your team to get eight wins and sneak into the playoffs, hoping for the best in Weeks 14-17. Your team needs to compete today. Next week might as well be next season, because there is no guarantee you’ll even make it that far.
Subscribe: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | iHeart | Castbox | Amazon Music | Podcast Addict | TuneIn
