The Fantasy Draft Email ESPN Should Send

Improving the Fantasy Draft Experience

In preparation for the upcoming fantasy football season, I’ve been participating in countless mock drafts, and because all of my real leagues are run through ESPN.com, that’s where I’ve been doing them.

Initially I simply enjoyed the drafting process, but as I did more I found that the feedback that I received from these mock drafts was severely lacking. The only thing that ESPN provides is an email with each of the picks in order. Because of this, it’s hard to see whole teams at glance, how good a pick may have been at a specific spot, or really anything else that might be useful. With that in mind I threw together a simple script on Google App Engine that I simply forward the Draft Results email to, and get a reply back with the email broken out as in the picture above.

Each team is broken down by pick, displaying the overall rank of the player as well as the players current ADP (Average Draft Position). Based upon these numbers I calculate whether or not the pick was a clear value (9 picks later than ADP) or a reach (9 picks earlier than ADP).

This is just a simple improvement on what ESPN sends me, but already I’ve found this useful.

If you’ve got any ideas for additions I could make to this, or are interested in testing it out yourself (it’s on Google App Engine’s free settings so it can only send out so many emails), feel free to comment or hit me up on twitter @bbqhacker.