Both formats hand you a roster and a season, and that is where the similarity ends. Fantasy football turns real players' weekly stat lines into points and asks you to manage a lineup through it. All 22 Football turns 1,025 Pokémon into applicants for 22 starting jobs, grades how well each one fits, and simulates a 17-game season from the finished board. One game is a weekly information diet. The other is a single hard decision repeated 22 times.
The core difference in one sentence each
Fantasy football
You own the outcomes of real players and decide each week who is worth starting, then live through sixty minutes of football hoping the touches land where you put them.
All 22 Football
You own twenty-two starting jobs rather than twenty-two players, so every pick is judged against the job it fills — and the season is settled in one click once all 22 slots are full.
That difference explains almost everything else. Fantasy managers are rewarded for processing news quickly: a practice report, a snap count, a depth chart change. All 22 Football rewards a structural decision made once, and it penalises the instinct that wins fantasy leagues — chasing the best available name — because name value is invisible to the grader.
Rules, side by side
| Rule | Fantasy football | All 22 Football |
|---|---|---|
| Roster size | Usually 15-17 spots for about 9 weekly starters | 22 starters, no bench, no taxi squad |
| Pool | Roughly 300 relevant players, from a 32-team league | 1,025 bodies, generations 1-9, or 151 in the Gen 1 format |
| How points are earned | Real stat lines: yards, touchdowns, receptions, kicking | Slot grades: six base stats, body-type fit and typing per job |
| Weekly management | Start/sit calls, waivers, streaming defences, trades | None. The board is final when the season starts |
| Season shape | 17-18 weeks of head-to-head matchups and a playoff bracket | 17 games against a schedule that gets harder every week |
| What you compete against | Other managers' lineups and their luck | A strength-of-schedule curve built from your own board grade |
| Sample size | One season, roughly 17 scoring weeks per player | Any number of seasons: rebuild the board and re-simulate |
| Setup | League, draft slot, waiver budget, league mates | One browser tab, no account, board saved locally |
The most underrated line in that table is sample size. A fantasy manager gets one season and one set of results, so a bad week or an injury is indistinguishable from a bad process. An All 22 board can be simulated hundreds of times in a minute, which means the record you see is a distribution rather than a verdict — the maximum-grade Gen 1 board averages 9.8 wins and still produces a losing season in roughly one run out of four.
What a manager actually controls
Fantasy football is a control exercise spread thin. You control which nine-ish bodies start, which ones sit, and how you use waivers and trades; you do not control usage, injuries, weather or the opponent's scoring outburst. Most of the craft is in reading the situation faster than your league mates and resisting the urge to overreact to one Sunday.
- Fantasy decisions: draft (15-17 picks), then weekly start/sit calls, waiver claims and trade offers — dozens of small levers with partial information.
- All 22 decisions: 22 assignments, all made before the first snap, with full information about every applicant. There is no waiver wire and no injury report.
- The catch: in All 22 Football a single mis-spent slot is permanent, while a fantasy mistake is usually recoverable next week.
The full-information part is what makes All 22 Football feel like a puzzle instead of a prediction market. Every body's stats, height, weight and typing are visible; the grader is deterministic; the only unknown is the season itself. You can prove to yourself that Snorlax is worth 67 at defensive tackle and 28 at receiver, which is a very different feeling from arguing about whether a receiver will see nine targets.
Scoring: stat lines versus slot grades
Fantasy scoring is additive and granular: 0.1 points per rushing or receiving yard, six for a touchdown, one for a reception in PPR, three or four for a field goal. Your weekly total is the sum of twenty or so stat lines, and the winner is whoever sums higher. Because scoring is continuous, one huge performance can beat a well-built lineup — the highest-scoring team in a twelve-team league regularly loses a week to a 140-point afternoon.
All 22 scoring is compressed into two numbers and a small game-day roll. Your board produces an offense grade and a defense grade; the simulation converts those into points scored and allowed, then decides each of the seventeen games with a narrow random band. There is no single-player outburst to win you a week, and no way for one slot to carry the board: moving one defensive tackle from a 47 to a 67 raises the overall grade by under a point, which is exactly how real roster building behaves.
Where fantasy football is more fun
- Live stakes: nothing in a simulator matches a fourth-quarter drive where you need eleven yards from one specific player.
- Other people: trash talk, trades, league history and grudges are the real product of fantasy football, not the scoring.
- Weekly rhythm: a reason to care about every game on the slate, every week, all season.
- Constant novelty: news moves, roles change, and the league is different in November than it was in September.
Where All 22 Football is more fun
- Total authorship: the board is entirely yours. No injuries, no committee backfields, no weather — only your 22 decisions.
- Instant iteration: change one slot and re-simulate; learn the grader's logic instead of guessing at it.
- Depth instead of breadth: 1,025 applicants and nine generation pools, including a Gen 1 mode where the heaviest body in the entire pool weighs 460 kg.
- Chasing the perfect season: a maximum-grade board goes 17-0 about once in 500 seasons, and a Gen 1 board about once in 3,000 — a long, honest tail to hunt.
- No commitment: no league, no account and no schedule. A finished board exports as a lineup card you can publish to the community wall.
There is also a lesson in the game that fantasy football tends to hide: scarcity is positional. In Gen 1, seven jobs want a body of 120 kg or more, only one body clears 400 kg, and the offensive line has to be assembled out of 100-120 kg leftovers. That is the same squeeze that makes a real draft difficult, and it is much easier to feel when you can see every applicant's weight in a table.
If you want the purest version of the construction test, play the 17-0 challenge: one board, one shot, no trades. For the coached version, the snake draft adds a region and type restriction so two players cannot both take Snorlax.
Which one should you play?
Play fantasy football if you like following people
You enjoy the news cycle, the weekly start/sit argument and the social side of a league. The craft you are developing is information processing under time pressure.
Play All 22 Football if you like solving systems
You would rather understand why a 460 kg body is a nose tackle and not a receiver, and you want to see the answer immediately instead of waiting for Sunday.
Play both if you want the full picture
Fantasy teaches you what a player does with an opportunity; a 22-slot board teaches you what a roster needs before anyone touches the ball. They use the same vocabulary and reward opposite instincts.
Try the format that has no waivers, no injuries and no excuses
Fill 22 slots from 1,025 bodies, simulate a 17-game season, and find out what your board is really worth.