Best Ways to Determine Your Fantasy Football Draft Order

There are a lot of online fantasy football communities discussing "the best ways a league can determine their fantasy draft order".  We decided to compile and share some of the best "draft order lottery" ideas. What we found during our research is that the draft order lottery ideas/methods all fall into one of 5 broad categories. Each category contains ideas with specifics that can be easily modified to the unique interests of your league. For example, some leagues play a video game to determine the outcome. Every group of friends has a different favorite video game, which can be easily exchanged. In fact, the "video game" aspect of the idea isn't even important, as that could eveen be exchanged for any competitive challenge.

The most important thing to consider is the "Category" that works best for your league's goals. Choosing a "competitive" method (such as playing a game of skill to select your draft order outcome) may not be the fairest method, because people’s abilities will always vary in all games of skill.

The goal should be to maximize fun, while also keeping fairness in mind. Find a category that will work best with your league, and then let yourself be inspired.

• RAFFLE: This category contains the general concept of total randomness. Put these ideas in the same ilk as “Pulling names out of a hat”. The randomness can be mitigated by controlling the number entries each team gets (i.e. giving bad teams more chances for the better pick).

  • Put Names in a Hat/Bingo Cage: The luck aspect can be managed by giving some of the poorer teams more "entries", and thus improving their odds.

  • Software that replaces name in hat: There are online applications out there such as FFNerd, and Draft Order Generator, which computerize the method of randomness.

  • Leaf Blower Powered Lottery Machine to pick the order

• COMPETITIVE: This category contains games of skill to determine the draft order. Most of these ideas are unrelated to fantasy sports, so it's good to decide the skill level of owners, and whether it's a good fit for your league.

  • Drinking Games: Flip Cup, Beeriocart, Beer Pong.

  • Video Games: Hold a video game tournament, where order of winners determines draft order. Some of the top games tend to include Mario Kart, Madden Football, and Call of Duty.

  • Punt, Pass, and Kick contest: Rules can be found here.

  • Have every manager take the wonderlic test and whomever got the highest mark gets first pick and then work your way down

  • Everyone gets 100 tokens and goes to Chuck E Cheese, whoever gets the most tickets gets first pick.

  • Poker Tournament: Get a couple of tables of Texas Hold’em going. Elimination order determines where a team picks.

• SEMI-RANDOM This category contains ideas that determine a draft order based on outcomes of unrelated events. The randomness is managed by the fact that the outcomes have better or worse odds for each option. For instance, some horses in a race are bigger favors to win than others.

  • Outcome of NCAA Tournament: Each owner gets a select number of teams participating in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Best finish wins 1st pick, second best 2nd pick, etc.

  • Outcome of the Kentucky Derby: Each owner is given one horse, and the outcome of race determines draft order. Horses could be distributed by "vegas odds of winning", giving worse teams better horse, or just selected randomly out of a hat.

  • Results of National Spelling Bee: We heard a great anecdote about this mentioning "There's nothing like streaming the spelling bee live at work, yelling at a fifth-grader for fucking up a word you've never even heard of before."

  • Reality TV: Choose a contestant on a competitive reality TV program (ie The Bachelor), and the order they are ejected decides your draft order placement.

  • Outcome of NFL draft: Randomly assign each person one of the top 12 projected players to be picked in the NFL draft. The order that they get picked will decide an owners draft position.

  • Draw from top golfers and draft order is then determined by how they finish in the PGA Championship.

  • Home Run Derby: Each team gets a player randomly assigned to them.

• TOTALLY RANDOM BASED ON OUTSIDE OUTCOME This category is very similar to the one before it, however, the outcomes all have equal odds and thus are totally random.

  • Rubber Duck Race: Each owner gets a rubber duck, place them in a river, and the order they cross the finish line determines draft order. If desired, the randomness can be controlled by giving some owners more than one duck.

  • Snail Race: Each person gets a snail and then paints a dot of different colors on its shell. Put all the snails in the middle of an outlined circle. First snail outside the predetermined circle gets 1st pick and so on.