10 Weekly Payout Ideas for Your Fantasy Football League

1. Weekly High Lineup Score

Simple but effective. Give a prize to the weekly high lineup score. Even the most busted lineups can come together for a burst week.

This is where Season DFS fits naturally (and no, we will not continue plugging Season DFS in each idea, no matter how much we want to). Since every week is a new playing field, everyone has an equal shot at the prize each week. There's never a reason to not put a lineup together, even if you have drifted back in the season-long standings. Season DFS keeps track of the weekly highs and emphasizes that stat for this reason.

2. Most Weekly Highs Across the Season

This is the same as the item before, but instead of paying each weekly high, you only pay one or two people that have the most high weeks across the season. You could just set a specific amount of your total pot awarded to this team.

The tradeoff here from paying each week is that you can allocate less of the overall pot (or any arbitrary amount) but this also has the potential to have one team run away with it and towards the end of the season. People could still lose their motivation to play if that happens. One way to combat this is to split this into the first and second half of the season, though that may generate more ties.

Make sure to decide the tiebreaker up front. If two teams finish with the same number of high weeks, splitting the pot is the simplest answer, but we usually don't do that in fantasy land. You could tie-break based on total points, best week, head-to-head record (if applicable), as a few options.

3. Closest to the Projection

A little more obscure but each week, the lineup that comes closest to its projected score wins the award, whether it lands over or under. Instead of rewarding raw points, it is more luck/random based. Plus, bad teams are still in the running, maybe even moreso, because they may have less players bursting through their ceiling and living more at their baseline.

4. Skins + Win by a Margin

Two concepts come together for this one. First, skins just means that the prize carries over to the following week if the winning condition isn't met. In this case, the winning condition is the winning margin the highest team has over the next highest team score. Set the margin to whatever you want. A common number might be 10 or 15 fantasy points.

This method rewards those that can put together truly dominant lineups. You are trading payout frequency for the prize size. In a DFS-style league, as the pot potentially builds each week, everyone has an equal shot at it. Again, this article is about payout ideas that keep everyone engaged, so the weekly reset in a DFS league really makes an impact.

5. Milestone Jackpot

Another variation similar to the previous one but this is where a pot rolls over from week to week until someone clears a big scoring milestone. Instead of going with the winning margin, this is targeting a raw number, like 150 pts.

It's hard to know what the right number is for your specific league, but set the threshold high enough that it is rare but reachable under your scoring settings.

6. Highest Single Player Score

Up to now, the ideas have been for team performance, but that's not the only way to approach it. The weekly pot could go to whoever rostered the week's biggest single player performance, the one 40 point game everyone talks about on Monday. It gives managers a second rooting interest beyond their lineup total, since the monster score can come from any team in the league. Even if the rest of your squad lays an egg, you may have that one guy that captures the prize for you.

Again here, you'll want to establish rules for a tie-breaker (especially in DFS leagues where player pool is shared). It could be the next highest player score between those that tied for the highest. In the DFS league case, you could set a rule that this is the highest scoring player that isn't rostered by anyone else.

7. Position Awards

Instead of one weekly payout, you could have several smaller ones. The week's highest scoring quarterback, running back, wide receiver, and tight end each earn something. You can award the best lineup score at each position slot.

Position awards spread the money around but is definitely more work to manage. A team that gets blown out can still cash on a big running back week. For a league that wants to keep everyone in the money conversation, this is the broadest weekly structure on the list.

8. Survivor Elimination: Lowest Score Is Out

Let's try another angle. Fund a side pot for a survivor game running alongside your league. Each week, the lowest lineup score in the league is eliminated. The last team standing wins the pot. This is the guillotine-esque format but as a side quest, not as the league format (and no players are dropped from getting kicked out of the league, like guillotine).

This is another fun idea, though doesn't quite protect the whole league staying interested as well as the others since someone is eliminated each week. Though, the appeal is that the standings do not protect anyone. The first-place team can be eliminated by a bad week just like the last-place team can squeak by all the way to the side pot prize.

Make sure to decide if this elimination path ends mid-season or not. If you want it to last the whole season, you could split the game into two rounds and then adjust how many teams are eliminated for the first few rounds of each, for example.

9. Most Improved From the Previous Week

This method is not impervious to tankers, so beware. But if your league has some amount of integrity, you could take the zero to hero approach. Each week after week 1, the weekly pot goes to the team whose lineup score improved the most from the week before.

Bad scores feel bad. What a novel concept! But this method gives new hope to those suffering from a failed lineup. The next week keeps those teams pushing forward because redemption is right around the corner.

10. Bad Luck Awards

Fantasy football and luck go together like peanut butter and jelly. Give the bad luck its own payout. There's a few ways to play this. In a head-to-head league, you could pay other the LOSER facing the highest opposing score. You could also turn this into a season-long thing either by usuing total points against or a season-long version where it goes to whoever played against the highest lineup the most times.

Another take in head-to-head leagues is to pay the loser that scored the most fantasy points in the week. We have all been there. You score the second most points in the week but play against the person with the highest and get dished an L. In this case, you still get a consolation prize. It is similar value to establishing playing vs the median score, if you are familiar with that.