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.

tab and a tab. Delete the sizes you don’t want to use by right clicking on those tabs and selecting Delete.

The base sheet is set for multiple league sizes.

After deleting the tabs you don’t want, you should end up with INSTRUCTIONS and two tabs for your league size.

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.

POS, TEAM, and BYE will auto fill with each pick. No need to copy those over.

Duplicate picks or players already selected will be highlighted for you.

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.

The new Rosters tabs will fill out players, positions, teams, and bye weeks per manager.

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: