Now that you’ve brought back your fantasy football league and have decided how to make your draft the best ever, let’s move on to selecting the draft order. Sure, you could let your draft system randomly pick and assign a draft order, but where is the fun in that? There are plenty of fun ways to choose your fantasy football draft order.
Two quick notes before getting to the suggestions. First, I am a big proponent of letting fantasy managers choose their draft slots. Maybe someone would prefer to pick last in the round and get two picks back-to-back in a snake draft, instead of the third overall pick. Flexibility is the key. So below when I say someone gets the “top pick” or “first choice” it means they get to choose their draft slot first. More often than not, that still ends up being the first pick in the round.
Second, in a previous article about the job of a fantasy commissioner, I talked about how fostering competition is a key responsibility. One great way we can ensure competition throughout the entirety of the fantasy season is to use the previous season’s results in helping to determine your fantasy draft order. I’ll go over some examples of how you can do this.
Fun Ways To Choose Your Fantasy Football Draft Order
Lawn Game Tournament
We’re all competitive, that’s one of the reasons we play fantasy sports. Let’s start the fantasy preseason with a tournament! Pong, Cornhole, Lawn Darts, and Kanjam are all great games to play with the league, and can easily be coordinated into a tournament.
Don’t have the time for a 10 or 12 (or more) person tournament? Have an individual pong speed test. See who can make six cups the fastest or in the fewest shots. And remember what I said about using last season’s results? Give time bonuses in the speed test, or bye matchups in the tournament to reward teams for finishing higher in the previous season.
Another option is to go big or go huge and combine multiple games into one big Olympic Tournament.
Video Game Tournament
Sticking with the tournament theme, who doesn’t like video games? Set up a Mario Kart Grand Prix mode, and award bonus points based on the previous season’s finish. Or, more appropriately, NFL Blitz is the ideal video game for a pre-fantasy football draft tournament. Games take less than 10 minutes to complete, it’s a football video game and is the perfect mix of outrageousness, chaos, and trash-talking.
Crocodile Dentist
How about some Russian Roulette to kick off the fantasy football season? Truly random, this game is an underrated fun way to decide your fantasy draft order. If you have not partaken before, each player presses down on a crocodile tooth, with one tooth causing the crocodile to chomp down on the hand of the player.
For our purposes, if you select the wrong tooth, you’re out and whoever stays in the game the longest gets their first choice of draft slot. A simple game and concept, I have personally used this in a league and it was way more intense and amusing than expected.
To incorporate the finish from the prior year, we had the worst teams go first in each round of the game. Once a team was eliminated and a new round started, those same teams that finished at the bottom of the standings picked first again. This essentially “protected” the higher finishing teams as they did not have to play until later on, giving them a much better chance at winning the game overall.
Let Fate (Alcohol) Decide
Another random and fun way to decide your fantasy football draft order is through shots. Pour a shot of water for each member of the league, with one shot containing a clear liquor like vodka or tequila. This method can be taken two ways, whoever gets the mystery shot of alcohol can either “win” and get to select their draft slot first, or can “lose” and get the last available draft slot. Whichever route you go, continue along through however many rounds of shots are necessary to complete your fantasy football draft order.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a suggestion on how to use the previous season’s results with this method so you’ll need to get creative if you so choose. Nonetheless, random shots of alcohol is another fun way to decide the order of your fantasy draft.
For more great rankings and analysis, make sure to check out our 2023 Fantasy Football Draft Kit!
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