I’ve been dropping the link for the 2024 Omni Cup signups a few different places, and we’re already over 100 registered participants. But I realized I haven’t done a good job of thoroughly detailing what it actually is this year, so I wanted to walk through plans for the 2024 Omni Cup, which will start this Wednesday, the 21st.
If you’re here, I assume you know the basics of what Omnifantasy is (if not, this post from a few years ago aims to give a high level breakdown). The Omnifantasy Cup has one main aim: To make Omnifantasy leagues easier to join.
Over the first couple years after introducing this concept, a common refrain I heard was interest in trying to concept but difficulty pulling enough people together for a home league. The Omni Cup aims to work around that by allowing anyone to join a large contest that features many smaller, randomized leagues, with one central leaderboard and eventual winner. There’s no entry fee, you won’t look dumb if you don’t know what you’re doing — there are far too many entrants for that to matter — and there’s a small prize for the overall winner if you do take down the whole thing (tickets to a sporting event).
So the short version is if you’re interested in trying out Omnifantasy, or have played before but no longer have a league, this is the easiest way to get in the game.
2024 settings
Draft guidelines
The site still isn’t perfect, and it wasn’t until last year that we had a timer and autopick system. This year, we’ll move that timer to four-hour picks (important note for those of you that are on top of things: How this functions is the system checks every hour if there are any expired timers, and then autopicks for them, so the autopicks don’t occur right as the timer expires, and you’ll sometimes see negative time on the clock; ultimately, everyone will get somewhere between four and five hours, but should never go further than an hour into the negative).
We’ll still turn the clock off between Midnight and 8 a.m. ET every day, so if your four-hour window overlaps with that, it really becomes a 12-hour window before you autopick. This is the main reason for adjusting the timer down, because with the overnight shutoff last year, there were sometimes 16-hour autopicks. The flip side is that during the day, you’ll only have a four-hour max, which hopefully will keep things moving better.
We also have email notifications set up for this year, so those will be the most important indication to keep up with if you’re worried about autopicking.
League and competition parameters
I haven’t decided on a final number of drafters per league, and that will be influenced a bit by the total number of participants, but will likely be in the 8-10 range. My aim is smaller leagues to allow for deeper drafts without the drafts taking forever (so the target will be 8 per league, like 2023).
I talked a little last year about why F1 didn’t ultimately fit the contest well, but we’re throwing in every other sport Omnifantasy has to offer, a full 17 leagues this year. With five Flex picks, that will make for 22-round drafts. Here are the leagues we’ll include, with women’s college basketball and cricket being among the big, new offerings for 2024:
If we need to go to leagues of 9 or even 10 people, we won’t be able to use UFL due to the rule requiring every league member to draft at least one legal pick from each league (there are only eight UFL teams, so leagues of more than eight people don’t allow for each member to have a UFL team).
When does this start and end?
As I mentioned, the goal is to get these drafts fired up on Wednesday, after I get back from a quick trip out of town. In the past, I’ve accommodated requests for people to be in leagues with friends, but I’ll try to avoid more than two or three people stacked into the same league. (In some respects, it’s helpful to have people you know in your league, so people can ping each other when they are on the clock, and to me that offsets any concerns about gaming the system and loading up one roster considering this is mostly all for fun.)
Our goal will be to get all of these drafts done in under two weeks, as there are final legs of Champions Leagues matchups starting on Tuesday, March 5, which is just to say that we’ll start to get some results in that we’ll want to be done drafting before. That will mean some prodding and hopefully everyone is OK with a few pings here and there if they are taking a little while on the clock. These drafts tend to linger, and they take a lot of my time to manage, but I’m hopeful they’ll move well on their own now that we’re in Year 3, many have had a couple years to get familiar with the site, and we’ve also added some of the upgrades with autopicks and email notifications.
I’ll have more information on Wednesday, including how I’ll maintain some resources like ADP, but wanted to get this out today as a last reminder to get signed up if you want to participate. Looking for to this and it’ll be a great time as always!
Can you add Syracuse Women's basketball team to NCAAW please? Thanks.