Best Scheduling Tools For Your Fantasy Football Draft
As a fantasy football commissioner, your first duty is to successfully bring the league together for a draft. This all starts with a well-organized process of deciding on a day to hold your draft.
The earlier you start this process, the better, as people's calendars will start filling up early without a "Save the Date." Finding a tool to help with this process will save you (the Commish) a lot of time and headaches.
While there are tons of calendar scheduling services out there, finding one that caters to the needs of scheduling a draft day is more difficult to discover. Below are summaries of a few of our favorite free scheduling tools that we've used to get you kicked off and running with the "Draft Day Scheduling Process."
This one is for the power user, who wants maximum flexibility.
Simply add a question for “owner name”, and then add a “matrix box” with rows of dates and columns of “Available”, “Not Available”, and “Not Ideal”. As the submissions come in you’ll be able to quickly scan a graphic “summary” to find your best draft date.
Pros: Powerful, flexible, and visually superior. Create a form, and then easily send out a single URL via email to all of your owners.
Cons: If you’ve never used Google Forms before, there is a slight learning curb. It may take you a few tries before you get the form properly created, because “Matrix Box” creation can be a bit confusing at first.
FantasyNerds: Draft Date Picker
This is a recently discovered gem that we wish we’d known about sooner.
Pros: Very easy to create, and the product was developed with fantasy football in mind.
Cons: Requires account registration for the Form Maker (not the owners who will respond — only the creator). Very binary responses, being limited to checking a box for being available or not. Having a 3rd option is sometimes nice.
The biggest downfall is that there is no “single URL” that you can send to people, so you will either have to enter all of your owner's email addresses, or else send out the unique URLs to every owner individually.
This is a fairly new service that just started up in the Summer of 2022, and while we don’t have any live experience with it, we set up a couple of fake polls to try it out and it was quite slick.
Pros: A very modern interface. Doesn’t require user registration, and is free of cost. Has the ability to create a link to send to owners. Options for “Yes, No, If Need Be”. Easy to follow results summary to find an ideal date.
Cons: None as of now. The service is great. Being new on the scene, eventually, services like this will have to find ways to monetize, so it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves. But for now, Tallycal is a great way to schedule a draft.
Doodle
This used to be our no-fail recommendation for scheduling a draft, but wow has this sucker devolved. It now feels like a prehistoric website that hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s. Add on top of this a bombardment of banner ads, a lack of tools for the organizer of the poll, and a missing ability for the organizer to modify their responses. This now falls to the bottom of our recommendation list.
Pros: It’s free and fast, and doesn’t require any registration from the form maker or responders. Create a form and send out the link to the owners via email.
Cons: Visually confusing with all of the banner ads. Lacks tools, customization, and ability to edit the poll maker’s response.
