For years, I resisted the siren call of fantasy football. My friends would try to sell me on the game, usually when they were short on players to launch their league—“It gives you a reason to care about games you’d otherwise have no interest in!”—but their pleas left me unmoved. I have a supernatural ability to get deeply invested in the outcome of literally any sporting event after watching it for 45 seconds, and fantasy football never made sense to me. It’s a version of football in which quarterbacks are disposable commodities, a good kicker is more valuable than most tight ends, and running backs who are routinely disrespected in the NFL are the most important players. Whose fantasy is that—Tony Pollard’s?

About ten years ago, though, a friend of mine whose league was a player short pitched me on one that, he promised me, would address all of my issues with fantasy football. The league was the brainchild of his wife’s uncle, a football-obsessed Texas Longhorns memorabilia dealer named Archie Windham. Archie was a presence in Longhorns fandom, familiar to many who collected autographs or game balls, and the league, which he branded “Ultimate Fantasy Football,” was structured in a madcap way that, sure enough, flipped the usual fantasy dynamics on its head.

Here’s how the product of Archie’s mad genius deviates from traditional fantasy football: In a normal league, each of the ten teams starts a quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, a tight end, a kicker, a defensive player, and a “flex” player who can be either a running back, a wide receiver, or a tight end. Quarterbacks score the most fantasy points, but since each team can only start one, they’re not particularly valuable—there will always be a bunch of starting QBs on the bench. Running backs, meanwhile, tend to score the second-most points, and the fact that each team can start as many as three of them means that they’re the most valuable players in the game. Accordingly, 24 of the top 50 players on the Ringer’s fantasy ranking are running backs, with wide receivers not far behind. (The first quarterback doesn’t show up until number eighteen.)

In Archie’s league, though, the number of starting players goes way, way up, and the positions are much more flexible: each team starts two quarterbacks, two running backs, three wide receivers, and a tight end. Additionally, there’s a position spot held for either a running back or a wide receiver, one for either a wide receiver or a tight end, and one for any offensive player at any position. (Like in traditional fantasy, there’s also a spot for defense and one for a kicker.)

Expanding the number of offensive starters from seven to eleven—and the number of quarterbacks a team can start from one to as many as three—completely changes the way players are perceived. A star running back is still a hot commodity, but, just like in the actual NFL, quarterback play is key. On the Ringer’s chart, former Texas Tech quarterback Patrick Mahomes, the consensus best player in the NFL, is the twenty-fourth-most valuable commodity, behind both Tony Pollard and CeeDee Lamb (raise your hand, Cowboys fans, if you’d trade either of those guys for Mahomes); in Archie’s league, Mahomes has a good chance of being the top overall player, just as he is in the real world—and Jalen Hurts and Josh Allen will probably be numbers two and three.

Because the roster requirements are so demanding, certain things that would be absurd in a standard fantasy league are ordinary occurrences in Archie’s. We use an auction draft format, and there will be a bidding war for Sam Howell and Baker Mayfield, perhaps the two worst starting quarterbacks in the NFL. Does the player who bids on Baker Mayfield wish that he were playing in a league where, say, Geno Smith would be a waiver-wire pickup instead? Sure, but so do the Tampa Bay Bucs.

The same holds true for virtually every position (kickers are still mostly fungible, but that’s life in the NFL too). All three of the miserable starters in the Houston Texans’ receiving corps will be on rosters. The gap between the haves, who are starting a tight end who catches touchdowns the way a wide receiver does, and the have-nots, whose tight ends are glorified blockers, will be pronounced. A third-string running back will make the difference between a win and a loss for someone pretty much every week. It flies in the face of most of what we understand as the principles of fantasy football, but the dynamics of the league—with quarterback as the critical position, every roster spot at a premium, and hard decisions to make about who to start—mirror the NFL in a way that makes for a richer fantasy experience than most.

I never got to know Archie that well. He was my friend’s relative, a name my Longhorns-obsessed friends knew from his memorabilia business, and, for a few years, my fantasy football league manager. Most of my interactions with him involved countering a trade proposal or raising the high bid at the draft. And in the fall of 2016, he died. The following year, I took over stewardship of Archie’s league—if I didn’t, I knew I was unlikely to ever find another one quite like it. I’ve played in a fantasy league created by a literal statistics professor, and even that failed to match what Archie cooked up as a way to make fantasy football feel more like real football. His way of playing isn’t for everyone, but once you get used to it, no other way of playing comes close. I may not have known him well, but I think he’d be happy to learn that the fantasy league he envisioned lives on.

If you’d like to start your own Archie-style league, here are the position rules:

1 QB
1 QB
1 RB
1 RB
1 RB/WR
1 WR
1 WR
1 WR
1 WR/TE
1 TE
1 OP (offensive player)
1 K
1 D/ST
1 bench
1 bench
1 bench
1 bench
1 bench
1 bench

Scoring is standard. Drafts are auction-style, with each player receiving a pool of $200 “cash” to bid. Once you’ve played Archie Windham’s version of fantasy football, you’ll never go back.