I’ve written recently about the end of the 2022 Omnifantasy season, and with that we turn our focus to the 2023 Omnifantasy Cup. The format will be a little different this year, but if you’re still interested in playing, you need to sign up at this link whether you played last year or not. Here’s what you need to know.
What is the Omnifantasy Cup?
If you didn’t play last year, the Omnifantasy Cup was a contest of 12 different 12-team leagues, meaning we had 144 participants. The groups were more or less randomized, although in cases where two friends joined because they wanted to play together but couldn’t get a whole league together, I put them in the same draft (so if this is you, feel free to ask). It’s actually better on everyone if a few people know each other in the group, to be able to easily ping when they are on the clock and those types of things.
But the 144-person contest featured a leaderboard that was on the front page of omnifantasy.com all year, and the overall standings can be viewed here. From that standings page, anyone can click on any user and be taken into that league, where they could analyze that person’s draft, which is to say everyone had access to all 12 leagues if they really want it.
Broadly, the idea was every league had the same settings, and thus all 144 people were on reasonably level footing as they tried to build the best team. You could also win your individual 12-person league, as another goal. Mostly, it was a fun way to get everyone who wanted to try Omnifantasy into leagues, if they couldn’t get enough participants to create their own league.
And in 2023, we’ll be running it back, with some slight changes.
What draft structures are new in 2023
The first key I want to break down is we’ve created a draft timer and autopick system because as you might recall last year, we didn’t have that feature and drafts could stall for several hours with no cutoff (unless I manually autopicked, which I only wound up doing a couple times overall). That’s simply because this is not the most technologically advanced website, though it does work!
Ultimately, I want to improve the user experience this year while also limiting the amount of overall commishing/managing of the leagues that’s required on our end. One move we’re making is to reduce the number of people in each league to eight, which should allow for quicker turns between each individual’s picks, and more of a flow to drafts.
As for the autopick system, we have added a timer on the site that will indicate how long someone’s been on the clock, and that timer will not count from midnight to 8 AM ET, but that’s all the features we have there. There are no notifications when you’re on the clock or your time is running down, I’m afraid. If an autopick is made, there will be no undoing of the pick. Because the timer for Omnifantasy Cup 2023 will be eight hours, my hope is drafters will be engaged enough to proactively check in with drafts at least enough to know when their window might be starting, and then obviously before that window closes in order to make their pick manually. My preference is this system doesn’t have to autopick for anyone across the whole tournament, but the reality is we needed something automated as a backstop so drafts didn’t need to be manually monitored — if someone doesn’t pick, eventually the timer will expire and a pick will be made for them, same as any fantasy draft.
Lastly, for those of you in Omni Cup 2022, you’ll remember I created Twitter DM channels for each league. Unfortunately, I won’t be creating those on your behalf this year, because that was another time-consuming element, as a lot of individuals had certain Twitter settings turned on that made it difficult to get those set up. I’m happy to help in any way I can if you want to take the initiative to try to create a DM thread for your own league. (One recommendation would be to use the comment section on this post at omnifantasy.substack.com to reach out to other league members who want to be reached out to, once the drafts have been created.)
What leagues and draft rules are new in 2023
Alright, onto the fun stuff. The other advantage to eight-team leagues is the ability to include the spring football leagues, XFL and USFL, which only have eight teams and thus can’t be included in Omnifantasy leagues that include more than eight participants as each participant wouldn’t be able to draft one. (Note that for these leagues, all eight teams will earn at least 20 Omnifantasy points, so you could wait until the final round to take the last remaining XFL or USFL team and still record points, because every sport uses that same scoring system of the top eight finishers earning points. That also means the 80-point champion will effectively only earn you 60 points over the worst of the other XFL/USFL picks, and thus I want to offer a small strategy note that in my opinion these picks shouldn’t go super high even with high expected points totals. I still like including them to have a team to root for.)
Upon shrinking the leagues, I was also going to keep F1 in the contest, despite my disdain for it as an Omnifantasy event (as anyone who read my recaps knows), but was talked out of that, and I do personally think that’s the right call. Max Verstappen is -140 to win that title, which is way too strong of a favorite that would make him the optimal 1.01 in every draft and give too big of an advantage to whoever drew that slot, especially considering we don’t have third-round reversal as a site feature yet.
So, we’re removing F1, adding the spring football leagues, and also adding three other new events. The women’s World Cup is an easy swap for last year’s men’s version. We’ve added women’s tennis (WTA) by popular demand. And the World Baseball Classic is the final new event, a two-week international baseball tournament starting March 8, which will be our first finalized event on March 21 (and is thus our biggest time constraint this year, with drafts needing to get completed by 3/8).
That will bring us to 17 total events, requiring a longer draft. The reason for this gets back to the nature of the larger contest at the heart of the Omnifantasy Cup — having more events means more available points and more potential for people to distance themselves and the scoreboard to be less bunched up. Last year’s winner totaled 570 points, with only two drafters across the 144 participants hitting the 500 mark; this year, I expect the winner to easily surpass 600 and perhaps approach 700, because we have three additional events adding more earnable points to the field.
The 17 events plus the 5 flex picks you get will create a 22-round draft. That might seem long, but recall that with eight-team leagues, things should hopefully move quickly. Last year’s Omnifantasy Cup had 19 rounds, anyway. (This year’s version will have 52 fewer picks in each draft, and only be 77% as long as last year’s drafts.)
What that adds up to is a draft with these settings, if you’re looking to get some advance research in (the one thing not listed is the Members of the draft, but recall there will be eight in each):
When does this start?
I will create all the leagues tomorrow morning, Monday 2/20, some time between 10 am and Noon ET. Once I create the leagues, the drafts will automatically start, so if you’ve signed up, it’s as simple as being on the lookout for those leagues to pop up in your profile on the front page at omnifantasy.com.
I’m sure there will be plenty of legitimate reasons to reach out to me tomorrow, so please don’t hesitate to if something goes wrong. I’ve cleared some time to manage these and get them underway. Much like Scott Fish always says for SFB — for any of you who have played — my big hope is just that everyone gets logged in and makes their first-round pick. If you see someone in your league who hasn’t made their first-round pick, and you can’t figure out how to reach them or especially if they get autodrafted, please don’t hesitate to DM me the league number and league URL on Twitter and let me know that’s going on. I’ll have a couple replacements on standby and anyone who is unable or unwilling to make their first pick tomorrow will be replaced so we can get the drafts going.
Once the drafts have all been created, I’ll shoot an email out just to the participants in this year’s Omnifantasy Cup (bcc’ing everyone, as I’ve done in the past, so as to protect privacy). But other than that, you’ll be off and running!
One thing I can do somewhat early on is make all the URLs public, and maybe one of the sharp minds that I know enjoy this event can pull together some kind of ADP or something. I’ll circle back on that as well.
I’m excited for this! Let’s have some fun with it, and good luck!