Now that the calendar has turned to July, fantasy football season is right around the corner. That means the best day of the fantasy season is coming soon, Draft Day. If your fantasy football draft isn’t your favorite part of the season, you might be doing it wrong. Here are some ways to improve your fantasy draft.
How Make Your Fantasy Football Draft the Best Ever
Live Draft
The best way to improve your fantasy draft is by getting the group together in person. Live drafts are drastically more fun than online drafts, mainly for the one reason you’d expect. Banter and snarky comments don’t hit as well over chat or text, but face-to-face they sure do. Plus, just seeing all the draft picks up on a draft board amplifies the excitement (and feedback) of each selection. Add in food and drinks, and you have a great fantasy football draft party and an awesome start to your fantasy season.
I understand not all fantasy leagues are made up of people in the same local or geographical area. If a majority of the league is able to meet up for an in-person draft, and maybe only one or two league mates are not, luckily there are technological solutions to help. Whether it’s a streaming website or using an online meeting platform like Zoom or Google Meets, non-local league members can still be included in the fun, just to a lesser extent. Use these in conjunction with the Fantrax site and you can get the best of both worlds.
Destination Draft
Piggybacking off the live draft, let’s take it one step further with a destination draft. Nothing builds league camaraderie better than everyone meeting up somewhere (non-local) to draft our fantasy teams. Treat it as a vacation and spend a few days with the league.
While the draft is the highlight of the getaway, this is also a chance to have a league dinner, pool day, or see a show/game, if possible. Imagine the draft day party I described before but in Las Vegas (or some other fun location). I can’t think of a better way for the league to “Go Ham” while bonding over our fantasy teams (Just don’t go to the Twilight Zone).
Make Your Fantasy Football Draft an Auction
The first two suggestions were logistical ways you could improve your fantasy draft. The next three are process related. The most common and standard fantasy football draft is a snake draft. While it is a perfectly good way to pick your team, we’re looking for ways to do things differently. Enter, a fantasy football auction draft.
When you are in a snake draft, you can only draft players that are available when it is your slot in the draft order. What if you had the opportunity to draft every player? With an auction, you can do just that. Every team is allotted the same auction budget to work with, how you choose to disperse those fake dollars, are up to you.
If you want to go heavy Stars and Scrubs and draft a handful of the best players in the pool, you can do that. Or, you can go Steady Eddie and employ a Money-Ball strategy looking for values and spreading out your funds. Regardless of your plan of attack, an auction is a nice change of pace to the standard fantasy draft.
Allow Trades During Your Draft
I admit, this improvement to your fantasy draft takes more work on the part of the Commissioner. Most draft software does not have the ability to process trades as the draft is taking place, so in order to allow this, there will be some offline tracking necessary. If you can figure out the tracking requirements to stay organized, allowing trades during the draft is a great way to introduce some chaos.
There are a lot of directions this can go. Feel like you rushed and aren’t in love with your last pick? See if you can trade that player to another team for their next selection. Can’t decide between two players? Perhaps you can pick both by working out a trade with the team drafting after you, by sending them your next two rounds. Trading during the draft is one of the more interesting ways you can improve your fantasy draft.
Draft More Players
How about a two-for-one to round things out? One way you can improve your fantasy football draft while also increasing competition is to increase your rosters and draft more players.
With more shallow leagues or smaller rosters, less preparation is necessary as there are more “good” players available later in the draft. The same can be said for the players that do not get drafted and are left on the waiver wire.
If you want to reward the savvy fantasy player, and reduce the likelihood of “luck” in weekly matchups, insert an extra Flex/Utility spot to your starting lineup. Adding a couple of extra bench slots can also go a long way.
No matter what you do, the biggest day of the fantasy football season is draft day. It’s our job as Commissioners to make sure everything goes smoothly, but we also need to do what we can to increase enjoyment and engagement. Hopefully, you can implement one or more of these suggestions to improve your fantasy draft.
For more great rankings and analysis, make sure to check out our 2023 Fantasy Football Draft Kit!