Fantasy Football Draft Packet
A great way to start building early excitement for your draft is by providing your league with an official “League Draft Packet”.
It gives owners a little reading material while setting up, and also starts getting them enthused for the mayhem that awaits. You can either print them out for all of the teams, send them along to the owners prior to the draft to build anticipation, or do both.
Below is a sample of what a “Draft Packet” can look like:
To get you started, here is a useful framework for building a quality draft packet. We even provided a template (built on Google Docs) that you can use to help expedite the process.
Cover Page
This is pretty self explanatory. Populate this with your league name, date / location of the draft, and put in your league logo or some other group photo.
Table of Contents
In the Google Doc, if you click on this area you’ll see a small refresh arrow to the left. This allows you to automatically update/refresh the contents, in case you added any sections or changed the section titles.
Draft Order
Use this area to enter your league’s official draft order. If you have any traded picks in the draft, you should also note them here. This section allows owners the chance to bring attention to any mistakes before the draft begins.
Keeper Roster (Optional)
If you are running a keeper or dynasty league, it’s a great idea to include this. The easiest way to build this is by going to your league management host (eg ESPN, Yahoo!, MyFantasyLeague) and copy and paste from there.
List of Super Bowl Champions
It’s always good to celebrate the past champs. This provides a little honorary “Hall of Fame” recognition, by being displayed in your annual draft packet.
Overall Records
Historical “Overall Records” of all of your teams are a great bragging point, and is sure to get some immediate trash talk going.
Rule Book
This is essential. It’s always good that everybody is provided the rules of your league. This way if anybody ever makes the complaint “That’s bullshit! I didn’t know X was a rule!”, you’ll always have this to point back to.
Draft Day Worksheet
We provided a basic starting point for this, but will likely require some reformatting. This section accomplishes a few things: First, it allows owners to keep track of the players they drafted, and helps make sure they fill out a legal roster. Next, it’s a great insurance plan. For example, if you are holding an in-person draft and there’s a computer outage. Or maybe you have a paper draft board, and suddenly an angry owner sets fire to it. For whatever rare or unfortunate circumstance that arises , having owners physically write down their picks can be a useful backup.
Copy of Draft Day Worksheet
Have your owners filled out a copy for the commissioner, which they can provide at the end of the draft. If for some reason the commissioner’s computer crashes before inputting the teams into the league management platform, this will provide a paper backup.
Optional additional pages
Every league is different, as are every commissioners ambitions, so these recommendations are completely optional. It’s sometimes fun to add a little editorial content to get the ball rolling on some early trash talk.
Editorial: Mock Draft
Editorial: Grading Last Year’s Draft
League schedule
Cheatsheet
Create the Draft Packet
We’ve created a Google Docs template that you can duplicate for your own use. Of course, you can/should add you own sections, change what we have, and spruce it up even more with some league photos and team logos.
Simply click the button below, and it will create a copy in your own Google Docs account, which you can then edit and use to create your very own Draft Packet.
