You still pick names out of a hat? Child's play.
There are times when I thoroughly enjoy being the commissioner of my family's fantasy football league. It is a highly-competitive, long-running enterprise whose history is littered with collusion, betrayal, attempted coups d'état, and, uh, "spirited" debates during Thanksgiving and Christmas. A lot of these things take years off my life, I'm sure of it. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," as Shakespeare said.
But there really are those moments when I love being commish. One of them is choosing the draft order, which we do a little differently than most.
You should do it this way too, because it's awesome.
Obscure sporting event
Picking names out of a hat is boring. Letting the computer randomize the draft order an hour before it starts? Get out of here, dude. In this fantasy football league, we place our picks in the hands of the obscure sporting community.
I start doing research a few months after the season ends. You never really comprehend how many sports there are out there until you do a little digging; I have never struggled to find a good event for us to latch onto. The only two prerequisites are that it finishes before our draft and that their are ten or more competitors (ten-team league).
Once I have decided on the obscure sporting event that will decide our draft order, I randomly choose which of us will be represented by each of the top ten competitors. One year it was the Dodgeball World Cup, another year it was the women's shot-put final in the Olympics. Have you ever tuned in to see if Egypt could take down Canada in a classic game of 6-on-6 dodgeball? 'Cause I have.
COVID-19 wasn't going to stop me from continuing this tradition. There were far less choices this year, for obvious reasons, but marble racing was a surefire winner. You better believe I will be rooting for the Tag Heuer Porsche marble when Marbula E heads to Germany for the Berlin M-Prix on August 4th.
Make it fun, while you can
Fantasy football is all business in my family after the draft order is determined. These events are one of the few instances of lightheartedness in what always tends to be a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners, absolute grind of a season. There are no smiles after the last dodgeball has been dodged, at least not sincere ones. It's now decision-making time.
The results of the sporting event do not necessarily correlate with our draft order first-hand.
Instead, the order you finish corresponds to the order you get to choose your pick. So, if your women's shot-putter finished first, you have all the positions to choose from, 1-10. If you finish second, you can pick any position but the one taken by the winner, and so on and so forth until all the draft slots have been filled.
The first three or four usually go with the top four slots, but there are times when someone chooses to pick last, looking to secure two excellent players in lieu of one star earlier in the draft. Plus, people like stacking their picks; it makes it easier to plan a draft strategy and decreases the likelihood of someone stealing a player you're targeting. There are several different ways to play it.
Don't be boring, fellow commissioners. It is our job, nay, our duty, to preserve the undying flame that is fantasy football. Making the draft position process fun is one of the many ways you can do that.