2015 Rookie Draft - ESPN.com

[jakrabt]

so there's not really a good way to hold a rookie/free agent draft using ESPN, and the members of the league live all over the US. Is there a good website or way of conducting a rookie/FA draft? I've heard people use a forum or chat room but wanted to see if anyone had any better ideas.

[Telperion]

Email, 24 hours per pick.

[nabright]

All my leagues run them through message boards with 24hrs per pick. When one pick is done, its whoever picked responsibility to email the next owner OTB.

[slaughterrt]

We hold it on the message boards. 24 hours or 12 hours per pick. Usually start off at 12 hours and move it to more if needed. Of course owners email the next guy up. Usually everyone makes their picks in a reasonable amount of time (2 or less hours) unless it's overnight. It's the easiest way on my opinion. It gives everyone time to make their pick, or field trade offers, and gives guys to adjust their draft boards. This is the least complicated way. This is the most exciting part of the offseason, so no need to over think it.

[Cult of Dionysus]

You can also use MFL to hold the email draft for free, or there's a draft service through http://fantasyfootballcalculator.com/.

However, the message board is the easiest option. I even carried out a 27 round, 16 team start-up using the ESPN message board. Sure, it took three weeks and we had to replace about 5 managers, but we got there eventually.

To make things easier, you can embed a chatango chat app into the league homepage. That way people can chat in real-time.

[bruiser]

To make things easier, you can embed a chatango chat app into the league homepage. That way people can chat in real-time.

Wow! I'm listening. For years I've hated that there is no chat box on ESPN. I'm fairly savvy, but no programming expert. How do I embed the app into my homepage?

[Phaded]

To make things easier, you can embed a chatango chat app into the league homepage. That way people can chat in real-time.

Wow! I'm listening. For years I've hated that there is no chat box on ESPN. I'm fairly savvy, but no programming expert. How do I embed the app into my homepage?

You have to go to chatango.com and sign up. Once you've signed up they will give you embedding codes. Use the HTML embedded code. Go to "Edit LM Note" and copy+paste the HTML code. Voila.

[bruiser]

You have to go to chatango.com and sign up. Once you've signed up they will give you embedding codes. Use the HTML embedded code. Go to "Edit LM Note" and copy+paste the HTML code. Voila.

Dude, you're awesome. Thank you

[Tsunami]

Myfantasyleague.com allows you to do free drafts, which is useful if you need to be able to pre-rank your players and avoid people picking someone who is already taken. But you would have to take the time to set it up in advance, which means entering all your keepers, which could be time-consuming. For a rookie draft of only a few rounds it's probably easier just to do it on the message board or through email. Or set up a Facebook/Twitter for your league if people are wanting to do the draft on their phones. Of course, this will make it hard to see who is available, so if your league is full of noobs you should probably go to MFL.

[HawkeyeState]

MFL allows you set up a trial league for free and "try it" for a while. You can hold it there and then just add the players to your ESPN rosters after the fact. Otherwise if you don't want to do message board, you can do the really cheap way and just do a Google Doc.

[iCantStop]

We use Google Drive to track all of our rosters / rules / transactions, and I really like it. Of course, we all live in the Midwest, so we can have, at minimum, groups of people get together at various spots for the draft & use Google Hangouts (Skype, for more people at a time) to text-chat & video chat...

We also have a text-message conversation on Google hangouts that everyone is in and it is pretty fun. Lots of trolling back and forth between guys and everyone gets some good laughs...