Frequently asked questions

Squads Fantasy is fantasy football where you draft whole NFL squads instead of individual players. A squad is every player at one position on one NFL team, added up: the Chiefs receivers, the 49ers quarterbacks, the Bills running backs. You also draft whole team defenses and special teams.

In regular fantasy you pick individual players. In Squads Fantasy you pick a team's whole group at a position. You are not betting on one player to stay healthy and productive, you are betting on how a team uses that whole position group. Everything else, from the draft to weekly head-to-head matchups, will feel familiar.

A quarterback, running back, wide receiver or tight end squad is every player at that position on one NFL team, with their stats added together. A defense is the team's whole defense, and special teams is its kicking, punting and return units, scored on what the unit does as a team. Each position has 32 squads, one per NFL team.

Injuries, rest days and committees matter much less. If a starter goes down, the next player at his position is still part of your squad, and a running back committee is simply one squad. The game shifts toward team situation, scheme and matchup, and away from waiting on injury news.

No. Like a player in regular fantasy, a squad belongs to one manager at a time. There is one extra rule to keep teams balanced: you cannot own a team's defense together with that same team's offense squads.

Squads is the main game: quarterback, running back, wide receiver, tight end, defense and special teams squads. Units is the original three-piece game: draft a team's whole offense, whole defense and whole special teams. Read more on the Squads and Units pages.

Every team has a quarterback, running back, wide receiver and tight end squad, which makes squads hard to tell apart. A squad's captain is its number one player on the team's depth chart, for example Brock Purdy for the San Francisco quarterbacks. Turn on Use Captains on your profile or on My Team and the site names those squads by their captain. Defense and special teams keep the team name.

A squad scores the combined stats of its players for the week: yards, touchdowns and receptions for offensive squads, and what the whole unit did for defense and special teams. Points are awarded per stat, like passing yards, sacks, interceptions and field goals. See every rule on the Scoring page.

A defense is scored only on what it does and what it allows: sacks, takeaways, points and yards allowed, and similar stats. It does not get points for its own team's offense, a team win or a margin of victory.

Yes. A commissioner can change the point value of any scoring rule for their league. They can apply a change from the next week that has not started, or to the whole season. Every change is written to the league's change log so nobody is surprised.

Managers take turns drafting squads in a live draft room with a pick clock. A league can run a snake, linear or by-position draft. If your clock runs out, or you turn on autodraft, the site picks for you, using your queue first. You can practice for free in a mock draft, alone or with other people.

Your league sets how many squads you can hold at each position and how many you start each week. In the Squads game you start squads at each position, and the rest sit on your bench.

You set your starting squads on My Team each week, and you can plan any future week ahead. By default a squad locks when its own NFL game kicks off, so you can keep changing the others until theirs start. A squad on a bye scores zero. If you do nothing, last week's lineup carries over and a bye starter is swapped for the best bench squad.

Through waivers. You put in a claim from the Free Agents list, and claims are settled before each week's first kickoff, either by highest FAAB bid or by waiver priority, depending on your league. You can also drop a squad from My Team, the Free Agents list or the squad's own page. There are no instant pickups, so nobody wins a race to the add button.

Yes. You can offer another manager a squad-for-squad swap, any mix of positions, and they accept or decline. A trade counts from the first week that has not kicked off, so a week already under way never changes. A league can set a trade deadline.

The season is head-to-head, one matchup a week. Every league ends on the second-to-last NFL week of the regular season. A league can also start mid-season, and its first week is simply the NFL week it begins on. Weeks on the site use NFL week numbers.

The top teams in the standings make the playoffs, and the bracket is set when the regular season ends. Until then the league page shows how the first round would look if the season ended today.

It is free to play. There is no money, entry fee or prize: it is a game for bragging rights.

Statistics come from the free nflverse project, with projections from Sleeper and news from ESPN and RotoWire. Squads Fantasy is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NFL or its teams. See Credits.

Look at the sample team to see it in action, run a mock draft to practice, or create a league and invite your friends with a link. Questions we have not answered? Contact us.