We are just over a week away from seeing the first ever draft for the Detroit Lions Podcast fantasy football leagues. There is one spot left!

Before the draft can happen players need to go to detroitlionspodcast.com/fantasy by Monday, August 22nd and pay their team dues. If we don’t have everyone paid on Monday, we may have to drop a league or two. We are hoping it doesn’t come to that, we’ve had about 50% so far pay their dues.

We’ve had a lot of really great interest in our fantasy football leagues, when we launched initially we were only doing a two league “mega-league” and a beginner’s league. After filling the 24 team league in a record-breaking week, we opened up a second 24 team league which has just one space left at time of publication. Contact me on twitter at @natecheat or via email at [email protected] to let me know you want that spot, first come first served.

Time to Pay Your Dues Folks…

Dues for the leagues are $15 for the beginner league, and $30 for the intermediate leagues. The Detroit Lions Podcast is conducting these leagues as a fundraiser to bring better quality content to our listeners, but that doesn’t mean these leagues don’t have prizes. The beginner league has a $50 prize for the champion. The intermediate leagues, each a combination of two 12-team leagues, both have a grand prize of $150 for the “Super Bowl” winners.

The “Super Bowl” winners are decided during the championship week of playoffs, league 1 & 2 and 3 & 4 combine during the individual league championship game. The player who scores the most points in each combination becomes the inter-league winner, with the second place prize of $100 going to the winner of the other league. Finally the third place prize of $50 goes to the second place winner of either league based on the most points scored.

The leagues will be drafting on Saturday, August 27th and were all originally set for the same time – that has been changed. If you’re in the league and haven’t had a chance to read my emails, make sure to go into your league and check the time. The purpose for the change was finding out the players who are managing the commissioner teams are unable to draft for themselves. When I set up the leagues I wasn’t aware of the issue – five years playing fantasy football as commissioner and I’m still learning!

Commissioner Teams in the DLP Fantasy Football Leagues

For those couple that are playing the commissioner teams, drafting will be a little more interesting. I’m going to lay out the process in this article for the sake of transparency. Had I deleted the leagues and coordinated with the players who would be managing those teams to re-setup the league, we wouldn’t have to deal with this issue. That option would have involved deleting everyones’ teams and re-inviting everyone.

So for draft day, commissioner team co-managers will need to log into the draft application. You will be able to see the player list and the chat screen. I’ll be logged in all day, and during your draft instead of registering your pick like normal, you send me your pick through the chat and I will click the button to put that player on your team. It is important for the integrity of the league that this process is done in the open, so there is no thought of tampering by me.

Next year I’ll change the setup for the leagues so this won’t be an issue.

Though there are monetary prizes for the winners, everyone is getting more than just a chance to play and beat fellow Lions fans. Make sure you are subscribing to the podcast, and listening each week for the DLP Fantasy Football Leagues update where I will be talking about who won and lost each week as well as highlighting the best team names. Each league has a member of the Detroit Lions Podcast playing along side listeners, and Chris and Case are even participating.

I’ll be providing a written update as well each week, with some fantasy advice, so keep a look out!