Fantasy Football Slow Draft Board v2
Updated for the 2017–2018 season
Last year I released a Google Sheets based tool to facilitate offline fantasy football drafting across time zones. It worked surprisingly well and I’ve had quite a few folks ask that I update it for this season. Well, here it is!
Why you might want to use this tool
- You find it impossible to get your league managers together at one time — either in person or line — to have a live draft.
- You’re already doing slow, offline drafting but struggle with email threads, wikis, or chat rooms for picks.
- You have a live, in-person draft and need a better way to track picks as they’re coming in.
Setup
Required
- Make a copy of this sheet to your own Google drive by going to File → Make a Copy.
- There are tabs in this sheet for five league sizes: 14, 12, 10, 8, and 6. Each size has a Draft Board tab and a Rosters tab.
- Delete the sizes you don’t want to use by right clicking on those tabs and selecting Delete.
- On your Draft Board, list your top to bottom draft order by filling manager names in the first column, starting with cell A3. The draft order will fill up automatically in a snake format in the center.
Optional but Recommended
- Select and protect columns, A, E, and G through N on the draft board. Also protect the entire Rosters tab. This will prevent folks from accidentally overwriting formulas in those cells.
- Delete the INSTRUCTIONS tab or modify it to give your managers instructions and you see fit.
If you’ve done the above correctly, you’re ready to draft! Share the sheet with your league’s managers by clicking the Share button on the top right and start drafting.
How to draft
It’s easy:
- In order, managers copy players from column K of the PLAYER LIST area to the appropriate cell in column F to make their picks.
- Managers let the next in line know it’s their turn via their communication channel of choice — sms, email, DM, smoke signal, whatever.
The Rosters tab will automatically fill out a pivot table of your league’s rosters as the draft goes. This might be useful to your commissioner to import rosters in your fantasy football provider of choice.
Keepers and Trades
I may introduce some features specific to keepers and trades in the future, but this oftentimes depends on your particular league rules.
In our league, where keepers fill the round in the current year based on where they were selected last year, we preset keepers in the round as appropriate. For example, if Sean is keeping Joe Goalpoast from round 7 of last year, Sean will select Joe from the player list and copy it to his selection in round 7 prior to the draft beginning.
Trades are a bit trickier. Here’s how we worked with them:
- Create a new tab and track of trades there (managers involved, conditions, etc).
- Manually overwrite a manager’s name in the traded slot, overwriting the auto-filled name.
Wrap up and future updates
I might make some tweaks to the tool before the start of the season, including updating player lists as they become available.
Add your address to this form if you’re interested in receiving email updates on those changes. You could also follow me here on Medium.
Is this useful? Any features you’d like to see in future versions? Find a bug? Comment here or reach out to me on Twitter @44.
Enjoy and happy drafting!
Changes and improvements in v2
- Added 2 new league sizes: 14 and 6
- Added autofilling Rosters tabs
- Cleaned up conditional formatting formulas
- Fixed a conditional formatting bug
- Fixed a VLOOKUP bug
- Improved instructions tab for clarity
