How to Host a Live Fantasy Football Draft
Live fantasy football drafts are a great time, but take work and can be intimidating for first time hosts. There are several things that required to host a successful draft and a few other nice-to-haves.
There are also quite a few things mentioned that as a new commissioner or host you might think you don’t need to do, because people are responsible adults, right? Maybe your league is one of the golden few where that is true and managers behave accordingly, but it is a dangerous assumption.
Communication
You are coordinating a group of adult individuals during travel season to settle on one time and one place. That takes some doing, and especially early and frequent communication.
You want to start seriously talking about your draft day in the early spring and have one solidified by summer at the very latest. Basically, you’re looking for the sweets spot where people will know about unmissable life events (daughter getting married) but not have firm vacation plans. Even better, is getting your league to agree to a day at the previous year’s draft or settle on the same day for each year. Many redraft leagues use Memorial Day or the Friday before Memorial Day weekend.
From there, you want to be in touch about once a month through whatever medium makes sense. As much as people hate them, group text is probably the safest here, just make sure you don’t over do it and if the whole group doesn’t know each other ask folks to respond to you individually. Email or even your chosen fantasy app might work, but it’s important to catch everyone’s attention. Don’t text just to text either, come up with an excuse each time to check in, but the point is ultimately to ensure people can’t pull the “I forgot excuse.”
As draft day gets closer do final confirmations that everyone still plans to be there and hammer out any details you need people to be aware of. Maybe you’re providing food, maybe it’s BYOB, maybe you don’t have quite enough chairs, maybe the internet is spotty so people need to come with all material prepared, etc. You need to give people enough time to plan accordingly.
Finally, be responsive to questions always. If you have people this engaged, you are doing it right!
Seating and Space
We have drafted everywhere from the luxury suite before a college football game to a camping trip, so the space is flexible. You just need to ensure that everyone is on the same page about what the space entails.
If you are a new host, the easiest answer is probably to draft at your house, so make sure you have the most basic accommodations so that managers will be comfortable and not inadvertently destroy your home. At minimum you need to provide enough seating and table space so that everyone is reasonably comfortable, both so people are willing to do it again next year and because do you really want Sam from accounting four beers deep, balancing his fifth, a slice of pizza and a laptop while sitting cross legged on your white carpet? No one wants that.
Also consider other things about your space. Is it small with poor ventilation? Think through how you keep the funk of 12ish people who are stressed and excited down to a minimum. Maybe you have a significant other and some kids, are they ready for you take over the living room for three hours?
Beyond basic though there are all sorts of fun venues. Sports bars will usually accommodate, drafts are like a whole thing at Buffalo Wild Wings, and then there are even more exotic locations. If you can get everyone to agree, mixing it up year to year is a great option because it adds variety and excitement.
Wi-Fi Access
Wherever you choose to draft you need to be honest about wifi and mobile reception, then plan accordingly.
Especially over pandemic times, fantasy managers became really used to have the internet at their fingertips to do last minute research during drafts, follow for breaking news and even ask friends for advice. There is nothing wrong with any of that, knowledge is power, but if the reception situation can’t support it you can end up with some very grumpy and frazzled managers. While it might be some level of a competitive edge, draft day should be fun and you want everyone to feel setup for a good season so they stay engaged.
If service is spotty at your chosen venue, you need to remind your league members early and often. These things can be planned for with proper preparation and can even be the point so long as you give people the heads up needed. For our camping draft, we specifically did the whole thing by paper because we didn’t want people constantly running off to find pockets of reception. It turned out to be a lot more work, but a fun change of pace.
We find that there are usually 2-3 who despite everyone’s best efforts can’t make it to the draft because of irreconcilable scheduling conflicts, or something truly important coming up last minute. Because of that, we usually draft by app while in person because it allows those that can’t be there still to participate. That also allows for auto draft as a last resort. We never tolerate that without a great excuse, but in one of our favorite leagues we have a pulmonologist who is frequently on call for COVID matters. He understandably gets a pass.
Food and Drinks
You don’t need to provide food and drinks of course but you should have a plan here for people who expect to eat and drink. If people show up expecting you to provide food (or simply not thought about it) you will have folks try to do a “real quick run,” between picks. You really don’t want a revolving door of beer runs and corner store tacos to become a distraction.
When drafting at someone’s house, we typically don’t expect the host to provide anything, because they’re already providing the venue. Rather we’ll do some basic coordination, but generally ask everyone to bring a food to share and roughly the right amount drink for themselves. Somehow, every year we end up with enough beer and liquor to drown a medium sized fraternity and then barely touch it. Our eyes are bigger than our livers these days.
Draft Materials
The only required item is the draft board but there are other materials you might want to include to make the experience better for your league.
A common example is a draft guide so that those who opted not to do their research have something to go from. Again, draft day should be fun, and it doesn’t help your league to have ill prepared managers bomb the draft, ruin their season, and stop setting line ups by week three.
If internet access is spotty, you also want at minimum a list of all players, with their positions and teams. You will also need someone to maintain players still available on that list for the rest of the group. While it’s a fair position that managers should keep their own list, people won’t, and no one can be expected to look at 80 players gone in the seventh round and make a good decision who to draft next without at least a list of who’s left.
Last up you want the draft board to be visible to all and a plan for how it will be filled out. We recommend the commissioner, or a helper handle the whole thing, but you can also have each manager fill it out or place a sticker when it’s their pick. That can be a lot of fun too.
Conclusion
There you have it, everything you need to host a successful live fantasy football draft. As a parting piece of advice, you will have people flake last minute for good and bad reasons, have a plan in place to deal with it as one person’s absence shouldn’t ruin a great time for the rest of your league.