When is the Best Time to Draft?
When is the best time to hold your fantasy football draft?
There are generally two camps that have decidedly different opinions on the answer to this question:
As close to the kickoff of NFL season as possible
Any time after the NFL Draft (June through early-August)
The sides in this debate both hold valid arguments, and neither camp is right or wrong.
As Close to the Kickoff of the NFL Season as Possible
(Late-August through early-September)
Reason: This gives owners the most information possible before the season begins.
The preseason games will give a glimpse into which rookies may pan out, and likely decide winners of players in position battles. Also, every year during July and August, some players are going to get injured. Players that would likely get selected relatively early in a fantasy draft. If you’ve ever held an early draft and had a player you selected early get injured for the season, then you know it’s a heartbreaking experience.
Leagues that do this will usually choose to hold their draft following the final preseason game. Since this year there are only 3 preseason games, there is a wider window to choose that date. Preseason in 2021 concludes August 29th, with the regular season kicking off on September 9th.
Any time After the NFL Draft
(June through early-August)
Reason: This allows the opportunity for owners to be rewarded for their preparation work.
Owners who put in a lot of research can feel that they can better predict potential standouts before their ADP is reflected in the rankings. Early ADP and Expert Rankings are always significantly different from June/July to late August. There are always going to be a couple of guys in your league who are ill-prepared and simply draft based on these things (ADP / Rankings), and it’s a real bummer watching your personal sleeper climb these ADP ranks through the summer, knowing all too well that some lazy owner will steal them from you simply by default.
What’s the Best Time for YOUR League
Commissioners usually have influential control over deciding a league’s draft date, so it’s important to do what’s best for the league.
If you have a casual league, the case is usually made for a late-August / early-September draft. The wider majority of owners prefer this time period, and it will cause the least amount of friction in your league.
If you run a more competitive league, where owners put a lot of time into researching players, holding an earlier draft should really be considered.
But really, the best time to draft is…
When the majority of owners can attend.
The best drafts are when you don’t have half the league auto-drafting. Participating in a draft gets owners invested in the league early. If you’ve ever had owners check-out midseason, the majority of the time you will recognize that they were also auto-drafters. Holding a draft when nearly everybody can attend is the key recipe for a successful league.
Scheduling Your Fantasy Draft
We often recommend using the Doodle Online Scheduler to help commissioners pick a draft date that works for everyone in their league. It’s a free online tool, where you can set up a list of potential dates, and owners can then directly access the page and mark their availability.
The image above is a true draft schedule we set up for a league. Our league owners all have jobs, so the only time they can get together (in-person) and really party it up is during the weekends — thus the commissioner only set those dates as possible options.
You’ll see this tool visually makes it very easy to find which dates are going to work best for the vast majority of the league.
No matter what date you select for a draft, there will be owners who think it’s too early or too late. However, selecting a date when the most people can attend gives an easy explanation to these fickle owners as to why a specific date was chosen.
