I enjoy fantasy football. I also hate it (sometimes) – but mostly I enjoy it. When the season comes to an end, it’s always a little bit sad. We used to have a former team member at my work who would do a “post-season fantasy” competition every year on paper. He left for a new opportunity this year, so I had resigned myself to the fact that this year’s fantasy season would be over after week 17. Then, my Instagram algorithm happened, and I discovered Fantasy Afterlife. Focusing solely on post-season football, the platform provides that opportunity for us true fantasy football sickos to have one more shot at a championship (just in case four in a single season wasn’t enough).
Based on their Instagram presence, I believe this was their first year of operation. Afterlife uses a traditional PPR scoring system in a best-ball, king-of-the-hill format where the winner is crowned by the most fantasy points scored during the course of the playoffs. You draft, and that’s your roster. No trades. No waiver wire. Who you draft is who you get. This makes your prognostication skills on who is going to go the farthest critical as you put together a team that can get you as many points as possible.
League creation was super simple. You tell the platform how many players are in your league and it “optimizes” the positions on the roster based on the size. Our league only had two (I guess all of my usual suspects were a bit burnt out from the standard fantasy season). This created a much larger roster (2 QBs, 4 RBs, 7 WRs, 2 TEs, 2 Ks, & 2 DEFs) than I was accustomed to and required a little digging deep, even in a 2-team league. Then, you draft. After you draft, you’re set and you watch the season play out.
Pros: 1) Simplicity of league set up; 2) Set it and forget it lineups; 3) Basic, easy to navigate interface.
Cons: 1) The draft was glitchy and I kept having to leave the draft room and come back in; 2) The first couple of weeks, the platform wasn’t monitoring scoring correctly – a quick bug report seemed to fix that; 3) I would have liked more control over the roster size.
Feature suggestion One thing I’d like to see (that would more closely mimic the “on paper” version my former coworker used to run for us) is a point multiplier. If you select a player who plays in the wild card round and they advance to divisionals, they get 2x on their points. Then 3x for the conference championship, and 4x if they make it to the Super Bowl.
All in all, it was a great experience and I would definitely do again!
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