Fantasy Football 2025

Today is the first Sunday of the 2025 NFL season which means every Sunday from now until February my mood will be determined by two things.

1. My fantasy football teams
2. The Cleveland Browns

I’m going to try to keep this one short since the Browns play in about 30 minutes, but I wanted to talk about how my fantasy football drafts went before I start overreacting to week 1 performances. So every year I draft in 2-3 leagues depending on my work situation.

The Big League

The first is affectionately known as “The Big League” where my dad and I drive an hour and a half to pay an unholy amount of money to participate in a league that is older than me. To show the age of this league, we still draft on pencil and paper (which I think is so much cooler!). This is the most competitive of the 3 leagues I’m in this year and the one I take the most seriously. This will be my 3rd year in the league; year 1 I got my butt kicked, year 2 I got 2nd place and made ~$700 and this year I’m cautiously optimistic about my team.

It being Sunday, I’ve already seen the woeful disappointment that was A.J. Brown week 1. Still though, I think it’ll be fine through the season Dallas just hasn’t figured out what a Qb Spy is quite yet. One thing I forgot to mention is that this is a dynasty league, where I get to keep one player from the year prior. Every year so far I’ve kept Bijan Robinson, he’s one of my favorite players in the NFL and hope he goes off this season. I was also drafting from the 10 spot in a ten person league which was unfortunate because I felt that it was a lot nicer doing mock drafts from the top of the order this year. I also usually go with the top of the order in dynasty leagues anyways because you essentially get two first-round talents, which I think more than makes up for waiting for the turnaround.

For example if you get 1st pick in a dynasty league, you get your best player (probably a first rounder) from last year, plus what would be the 11th best player in a 10 person league.

Again, for this league I feel cautiously optimistic, my WRs and TE are the nursing home all-stars but they should be able to give me at least a good floor to work with.

The Family League

The next draft I did was in my family’s fantasy football league. I started this league up last year to get my uncles and some younger cousins into fantasy football. My family had a league when I was little but it ended up dying out for one reason or another (So I guess this is more of a revival?). Anyways, this is the first year since I started the league back up that we decided to have a cash prize. Funnily enough, this wasn’t even my idea, two of my cousins (13 and 11 years old) came up to me and asked if we could buy in. I checked with everyone else and they were all okay with it, so I implemented a $20 buy-in. This is a 12-person league so players were stretched a bit more thin than the Big League, but this is who I came out with:

I picked from the 8th spot out of 12 (which again, is not ideal this year) but you can kind of see the trend where I punt on either QB or TE when I’m taking the draft seriously.

Now, it might seem insane how I was able to get this WR room. A lot of people in this league have only been playing since last year and some are in middle school.

Ceedee Lamb dropping some of those passes Thursday made me a little nervous, but I think this is absolutely the best of the three teams I drafted. I’m just going to chalk up the drops to them playing in São Paulo.

The Work League

This one is kind of a circus. Last year I think we had 14 people in the league but its been thinned down to 12 this year thankfully. Still though, they use Standard scoring which I’m not a huge fan of. The two leagues I’m a part of use PPR, so obviously I’m much more used to that and how they pump up WRs a bit. Last year was my first time doing this league and I didn’t realize before drafing that it was standard, so I got a bunch of good WRs and got demolished every week. So this year, I took the exact opposite approach and pretty much only stacked RBs and TE.

This team sucks in my opinion. Everyone else knows how OP RBs are in Standard so almost the entire 1st round was a run on Rbs. I was picking from the 2 spot so I was able to get my pookie Bijan, but past that its a circus. I don’t really trust De’von Achane and the Dolphins and my WRs are horrific. This one was only a $10 buy-in, so I take it the least seriously.

Let’s Go Brownies!

It’s 1 o’clock so I’m going to unceremoniously cut this post short. Go Browns! God bless elite Joe Flacco!!!! I haven’t proofread this in interest of Browns football, so sorry for any awful writing.