Dynasty Team Manager

About

Dynasty Team Manager is a unique NFL dynasty contract league format. It is invite only and deliberately kept to a very small number of leagues, as a certain amount of the work in running the league is quite manual.

Aim

My ultimate goal with Dynasty Team Manager is to create a unique, and fully self contained dynasty contract fantast NFL format, which mirrors the NFL rules as closely as possible. There is a way to go with that though, and it is entirely possible that it never happens, but read on to understand the history and where the format is now.

History

The beginnings of the league started in 2014. I had been playing a redraft league for a number of years and liked the idea of trying dynasty. The problem was that I new I wanted the whole salary cap and contract aspect of the NFL to be involved. I wanted a contract league. More than that thought I wanted a contract league that mirrored the NFL rules as closely as possible. So I set about reading a vast number of webpages about the intricacies of NFL contracts and began compiling a set of rules. The existing fantasy leagues that I had played were all using NFL Fantasy (and at the time that felt like the dominant format), so the rules were tailored to work with that format, and the format was essentially 'NFL Fantasy with a substantial amount of custom rules' A league, consisting primarily of other owners that I had already been involved in one or more leagues with, was setup. Spreadsheets to record the contracts and various other 'manual files' were added, rules were tweaked, changed, added removed. The league evolved.

Website

From relatively early on (probably season 2) I began to automate some aspects of the league. Being a software developer by profession I already had much of the knowledge and tools to do this. For several years this was largely focussed on behind the scene processes, aspects that would simply be too laborious for me to do otherwise. The idea of a website was floated (I think jokingly!) but it was something I had interest in and so I started work on this. It took a while before anything that was worth actually releasing to the players of the (then) sole league. That happened in 2018. The first iteration of the website did not offer much more than the manual rules but like those manual rules it has grown and changed over the years since. The manual rules themselves have now largely stabilised (in the first few years they changed quite substantially as we either discovered a better way to do things, or I realised I had misunderstood some aspect of the NFL contract intricacies). It continues to constantly change, averaging several new updates a month, all with a view to achieving that ultimate aim.
League II
In 2021 a second league was added. Part of the goal of this league was to show the website would work with multiple leagues but more than that two distinctly different leagues. It introduced the following concepts:

Platforms

As it stands the format makes use of the following platforms:

Features

There are several platforms that cover some of the same features, but none that I am aware of which cover all of them. Some of the additions added, above and beyond that possible on NFL Fantasy are: