Can you play fantasy football with an odd number of teams? Format variations from traditional leagues

The most common types of fantasy football leagues are played in a head-to-head scoring format. Each manager faces off against another during each week of the NFL season and whoever scores more fantasy points gets a victory in their league. For this to work most smoothly, the league must have an even number of teams so that all of them have a matchup each week.

This creates a potential dilemma for leagues that have an odd number of teams. It often leaves the commissioner in a situation where they either need to recruit an additional team or bid adieu to a current team to get to an even number. Though they are relatively uncommon, alternatives exist for running a league with an odd number of teams, including the following.

Fantasy Football league formats with an odd number of teams

FF leagues with an odd number of teams

#1 - Rotisserie Scoring

While Rotisserie scoring is most common in fantasy baseball and fantasy basketball, it can be used in fantasy football as well. In these types of leagues, managers don't match up head-to-head with another team each week but instead look to accumulate season-long points as compared to the rest of the league.

This can be done in one of two ways, including either specific categories or overall scoring totals. Category scoring awards points to each manager depending upon where they rank for each statistic compared to the rest of the league.

Season-long scoring totals allow fantasy teams to accumulate points in the same way as head-to-head leagues. Rather than having a weekly opponent, the highest-scoring team at the end of the season wins the league championship.

#2 - Weekly Byes

Another way to handle a fantasy football league with an odd number of teams is by having one of them be on a bye each week. While this is not necessarily ideal, it operates as an alternative for managers who want to keep the traditional head-to-head format.

Commissioners must make sure that each team receives the same number of byes. This can be accomplished in several ways, with the most common being that each team receives one bye week. In this scenario, the commissioner generally has two options. They can either eliminate the lowest-scoring team to trim the league to an even number going forward, or they can simply begin their league playoffs.

#3 - Matching up against the weekly average

A unique way to handle a fantasy football league with an odd number of teams is to avoid the head-to-head format and instead score each week against the league average. This can be accomplished by taking the average of the total fantasy points scored by all of the teams in a given week and awarding a win to each manager that scores higher than the mean.

For managers who score less than the league average in a particular week, a loss will be recorded. Using this format also allows for a lopsided number of wins and losses each week, as the total teams that beat the average will not necessarily be half of the teams in that particular fantasy football league.