This was my first year playing in Guillotine Leagues™ and I'm hooked forever after winning our inaugural Fantasy Life content creator league. Based on what I learned on this championship run, I will outline three simple rules you can use to improve your guillotine skills.

In many ways, guillotine fantasy football leagues are the same as traditional leagues. You draft a team, select your weekly lineup, and work the waiver wire to try and hoist a championship trophy.

However, there are a few significant twists.

  • Each week, the lowest-scoring team gets chopped from the league.
     
  • You start the season with 18 teams and there are no head-to-head matchups until Week 17, when only two teams remain. You must survive the chopping block 17 times to win!
     
  • The players from chopped teams are placed on the waiver wire for all remaining managers to bid on with their free agent acquisition budget ($1,000), also known as FAAB.

To get ready for the season, I soaked up everything I could get my hands on from our local guillotine expert, Paul Charchian. He does a fantastic job breaking down the basics of Guillotine Leagues as well as considerations for drafting and strategies for managing your FAAB. 

In order to hang my Fantasy Life championship banner from the rafters, I had to outlast some of the sharpest minds in the fantasy space. Below are the final six chops of the season.

  • Week 12: Peter Overzet
  • Week 13: Matthew Berry
  • Week 14: Cooterdoodle
  • Week 15: Rob Waziak
  • Week 16: Thor Nystrom
  • Week 17: Matthew Freedman

Defeating this group was no easy task—they all built formidable teams. In fact, I thought I would lose to Waz in Week 15, but I barely avoided the chopping block. Ultimately, it came down to Freedman and me battling for the championship in Week 17.

Interestingly, Freedman and I took entirely different approaches, and based on our teams, each strategy was viable. (Read on for more on that and a response to Freedman's half-hearted congratulations and whining.)

So, what did I learn about guillotine leagues after surviving these shark-infested waters?

Let's dive into my top takeaways.

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1. Self-scouting is critical to winning a Guillotine League

Self-examination is important in every fantasy football league with waiver wires, but it's amplified by the chopping block in Guillotine Leagues.

The first rule about Guillotine Leagues is DON'T GET CHOPPED.

The second rule about Guillotine Leagues is DON'T GET CHOPPED.

The third rule about Guillotine Leagues is that every week, someone MUST GET CHOPPED.

You are fighting for your survival, which means you must be sober-minded about the quality of your team. If your team is weak, you must find a way to survive.

However, we can't be too all-in early. Almost every week, there are superstars cut in guillotine leagues. You can't just blow your whole FAAB stack on two names early in the season and expect to have a team strong enough to win in the end.

To illustrate this, let's compare the team I drafted with my team at the end of the season.

Drafted Team (starters in bold):

Final Team:

Only six of 14 draft selections were on my roster by the championship game. Of course, you can also see how strong these teams must be to win it all. Based on points per game, I had the QB2, RB1, RB9, RB14, RB16, WR3, WR5, WR7, WR12, WR14, WR19, WR20, TE1, and TE4 on the roster.

Guillotine Leagues are a delicate balance between finding a way to survive and laying the foundation to thrive. To navigate these choppy waters (see what I did there?), you must have a process for accurately evaluating the strength of your team.

Strength and weakness is a moving target

Before diving into self-scouting, it is essential to consider how guillotine leagues differ from traditional ones. How you perceive your team changes throughout the season! The typical factors—hot streaks, slumps, the strength of schedule, bye weeks, and injuries—are at play. However, the difference in guillotine leagues is that your league mates can drastically improve their roster every week thanks to the quality of waiver wire options.

For example, early in the season, most chops came from a 50-70 point performance, but as the season progressed, the bar moved higher. The teams became more stacked, and only the strong ones remained. Below, you can see how chop week points steadily escalated over the season and exploded over the final weeks.

 

Six teams (35%) were cut with point totals around their season average, but nine chops (53%) resulted from scoring 15 to 30 points below their season average, while two cuts (12%) came from teams scoring well above their season average.

I analyzed my team's performance relative to the field and the chop line each week. Based on that, I developed some basic guidelines for further examining my team's strengths. I paired these guidelines with Charch's waiver wire budget plan to customize my strategy.

Signs of a strong team

  • Averaging 20 to 30 points above the chop line.
  • Have a replacement RB and WR option to keep you 10 to 20 above the cut line with a starter injury.
  • Early in the season, when there are 14-plus teams, rostering a backup QB is also worth considering. I rostered a QB2 until the waiver wire accumulated depth at the position.
  • Have bye-week replacement options for a starting lineup looking two weeks ahead.

Signs of a weak team

  • Average points are within 10 of the chop line.
  • One injury away from falling close to the chop line average.
  • Facing multiple bye-week holes within the next two games.
  • Multiple key players are facing outlier hard matchups over the next two games. Note: the words multiple and outlier are key! Most matchup talk is noise in fantasy football, but there are a handful of teams we want to avoid.

2. How to play it if you have a strong team

Fortunately, I drafted a quality team that allowed me to play from ahead in 2024. Below is a snapshot of how my team compared to the chop line over four periods.

  • Weeks 1 to 4: 121 vs. 64 (cleared chop line by 40 points 100% of games)
  • Weeks 5 to 8: 115 vs. 70 (cleared chop line by 30 points 100% of games)
  • Weeks 9 to 12: 137 vs. 84 (cleared chop line by 25 points in 100% of games)
  • Weeks 13 to 14: 157 vs. 102 (cleared chop line by 15 points in 100% of games)

Note: Chopped players no longer return to the waiver wire pool after Week 14. You can still pick up players chopped ahead of Week 14 that are available.

Focus on conserving FAAB early and ramping up late

Given my team's low probability of getting cut over the first eight weeks, I aimed to conserve FAAB and build a second-half monster as the field thinned. Spending escalated as my team cleared the chop line by closer margins.

I monitored how often my teams cleared the line by a certain number of points, not just the average. For example, my advantage over the average improved from Weeks 9 to 12, but I cleared the chop line in 100% of games by a lower margin (25 versus 40 and 30 over the first two snapshots).

We started the season with $1,000 in FAAB, and below is a snapshot of how much I had left based on the same periods outlined above.

  • Weeks 1 to 4: $969
  • Weeks 5 to 8: $904
  • Weeks 9 to 12: $240
  • Weeks 13 to 14: $11

My most aggressive FAAB period was from weeks 9 to 12. 

Then, the finishing touches occurred over the final two weeks of chop action.

Ultimately, Barkley was the only massive bid. Everyone else was secured for 16% of starting FAAB or less, including bargains on Chase Brown (11%), Williams (7%), and Kittle (2%) in Weeks 13 and 14.

Bonus: My bids never end with a zero or five. I can't tell you how many critical bids this little nuance has won by $2 to $3 of FAAB over the years.

Attack roster weaknesses with precision early

Coming out of the draft, I identified running back and tight end as my primary weaknesses. Because of that, I consistently tried to attack those positions on waivers early. However, because of my team strength, I never bid over 18% of my FAAB.

Ultimately, that wasn't enough to secure Derrick Henry, Jonathan Taylor, De'Von Achane, James Cook, or Sam LaPorta over the first eight games. I would have adjusted if my team had been closer to the chop line—especially at running back.

Be opportunistic

While I couldn't land any big names with my medium-sized bids, I still focused on being opportunistic. Thanks to my team's strength, I had room to add an injured player who was a massive part of my final championship roster: Puka Nacua.

Injured players aren't prioritized in guillotine leagues for teams hovering around the chop line. With demand drastically impacted, Nacua was a basement bargain ($3) in Week 3.

Even though he was a luxury at the time, guillotine formats require monster squads in the final weeks to win, and Nacua offered the talent profile to find his way into the lineup. After returning to action in Week 8, he averaged 19.8 points per game as the WR4.

That made him a staple in my lineup on a team that coincidentally lost Rashee Rice the week after I picked up Nacua. Depth is HUGE in this format.

Become an enforcer

You should become an enforcer when playing from a position of FAAB strength late in the season. Many of your league mates will be broke from just trying to survive. So, each week, you should study your relative opponent's strength as well as their remaining FAAB, and when it makes sense, cut them off at the knees.

The "when it makes sense" part of the statement above is essential. Your moves must still be a net positive for your team and fit within your budget plan. Additionally, you don't want to do this too often early in the season because 5 to 7% bids can add up quickly.

In the final week of chops, Thor Nystrom put on a master class in this department. Knowing that none of the remaining teams had over $50 in FAAB, he bid $51 on all the best remaining players, improving his team while blocking everyone else. That move netted him:

Waz's team was loaded, and Thor dropped the hammer like a real-life God of Thunder to usurp all of his power. Well played, Thor!

3. How to play it if you have a weak team

As much as we all want to dominate our draft and start the season strong, that doesn't always happen, even for the best of us, like Freedman. His draft was hit hard with injuries and underperformers.

Freedman should consider an ayahuasca retreat in a dark room to reflect on his overexposure to aging and injured players. Still, he deserves massive kudos for quickly assessing the quality of his team and taking aggressive action. His FAAB spending was far more front-loaded than mine.

  • Weeks 1 to 4: $364 remaining
  • Weeks 5 to 8: $63
  • Weeks 9 to 12: $0
  • Weeks 13 to 14: $0

Over the first four weeks, Freedman made the following additions:

Olave was another injury casualty, but Henry and Jacobs finished as the RB3 and RB7, infusing Freedman's lineup with 19.3 and 18.0 points per game, respectively. But he didn't stop there, spending the majority of the remaining budget over the next four games.

By mid-October, Freedman had massively improved his starting lineup, allowing him to sail past teams that drafted stronger squads.

  • McCaffrey → Henry
  • Harris → Jacobs
  • Lockett → Achane

Make strong, medium-sized bids

I thought Freedman's early-season bid sizing was excellent. His big acquisitions were all in the 20% to 30% range, which gave him several advantages.

  1. His bids were in the range that would beat high-performing teams that wanted to conserve FAAB.
  2. His bids would likely not beat a team in full-on panic mode, but they would be competitive against middling squads.
  3. His bids were sized so that he could fire multiple rounds over the coming weeks, leaving room for continued improvement, which he knew would be required to win it all.

It is also important to note that Freedman targeted the right types of players. Olave and Jacobs both had Utilization Scores that suggested positive regression. Derek Henry resided in a great offense and offered a strong pedigree. However, he hadn't had his blowup game yet (RB28 and RB11 finishes). In the following two games, Henry erupted for RB2 (30.4) and RB1 (35.9) finishes.

Remain active on waivers even when your FAAB is low or gone.

As the competition thinned, Freedman was able to maximize his remaining FAAB.

After all the FAAB had dried up, he remained diligent, successfully placing $0 claims on Zay Flowers, Brian Robinson, and Chuba Hubbard ($0).

Ultimately, his low funds did catch up with him, as Thor and I mostly had our pick of the best free agents over the final chop weeks. While Freedman deserves major props for turning this team into a contender, I can't let his claim that I won the championship by default due to injuries stand.

It's time to break out the ayahuasca and reflect on that draft, Freedman! Hey, I hear it is a life-changing event with teammates, so I may join you.