Keep the board beside your draft.

How to use it at the table

Keep this open beside your real draft, on whatever platform it runs on. Tap players as they come off the board and what is left re-ranks for your scoring, your league size and your QB rules. Nothing to sign up for, and it remembers where you were if your phone locks.

Open this page a minute before your draft starts and set the three things that change what a player is worth: how many teams are in the league, how receptions score, and whether you can start a second quarterback. Those settings are saved in this browser, so next year the page opens where you left it. Then put the phone down beside your laptop, or hold it if you are drafting from the phone itself, and work the two buttons on each row.

Taken is for everyone else's picks. Mine is for yours. Both take the player off the board, because a drafted player is a drafted player no matter who got him, but they go to different places: yours fill your roster below, everyone else's go to the taken list so you can check whether you actually marked a name or only meant to. If you fat-finger a row, Undo takes back the last mark and puts him back exactly where he was.

The draft board

Above the list is the board itself: every pick of the draft laid out the way the room is, teams across and rounds down, running left to right in odd rounds and back the other way in even ones because that is how a snake draft actually goes. Each player you mark fills the next cell, so the board reads back as the order players came off. If you set your seat, your column is headed "You" and tinted, your own picks are outlined, and the line above the grid counts the picks between now and your next turn.

The ring marks the pick on the clock. Press a cell nobody has filled and the search opens asking who went there. Press a filled one and you can take that pick back, not only the most recent one, and every pick behind it shuffles up to close the gap. The chip beside the heading counts how many of the draft's picks are in.

On a phone the board sits above the list and the list scrolls beneath it, so the player you tap off the list fills a cell you can watch fill. The cells there are small tinted tiles rather than rows, each one a surname, a position and club, and the ADP figure, which is what lets a twelve-team round fit in one short sideways swipe of the board's own box. The round numbers and your own column stay put while it moves, and the page itself never scrolls sideways. A run on running backs looks like a run on running backs, because every tile at that position is the same colour.

The phone also puts the controls where your thumb already is. Once a draft is under way, the search box, Undo and a settings gear sit in one bar across the foot of the screen, and the list scrolls behind it, so the part of the screen you are reading is players and almost nothing else. What you just did appears for a couple of seconds above the bar and then gets out of the way.

The board opens on the rounds that have actually happened plus the one on the clock, most recent at the bottom, because a fifteen-round grid of empty squares is not a board yet. Show all rounds opens the rest of it whenever you want to look ahead, and closes it again.

Open the draft console puts this same page in its own window, laid out for a second screen: the board along the top, the list underneath it with its search and its position chips, and the picks made from either one. Put the console on the laptop beside your draft and keep the phone in your hand, or drag it onto a second monitor. Both windows are the same board and stay in step within a frame of each other, so a pick marked in one appears in the other and an undo in either takes it back in both. Nothing leaves the browser to make that work.

The two strips

Above the board, pinned so it stays put while you scroll, is the best player left at every position. It is not a separate ranking. It is the top row of the same board, read one position at a time, so it can never disagree with what is underneath it. Kickers and defenses only get a row when the pool has them, because a permanently empty row is worse than no row. When a position runs dry the row stays and says so, which is the thing you want to know at that moment. On a phone that strip is left out: it is the top of the list read one position at a time, and on a screen that narrow it was costing a row of the list to repeat what the next few rows already said.

Below the board is your roster, laid out as the actual starting lineup your league uses rather than a list of names in the order you took them. Every seat is drawn whether it is filled or not, so the holes are the point: an empty flex and an empty tight end in the ninth round is a sentence you can read in half a second. Players past your starters fall to the bench underneath. The slotting is done by the same code that runs the mock draft room and grades a finished draft, so the lineup you see here is the lineup those tools would score, and a third receiver who is really your flex is shown in the flex.

The order is the same one the printable cheat sheet and the rankings board use: projected value for your scoring, best first. A player our projections cannot price, which in practice means kickers, defenses and deep bench names, sits behind everyone who can be priced, in the order real drafters are taking him. That is deliberate. A number we do not have is not the same as a number of zero, and pretending otherwise would push a kicker up your board in the eleventh round for no reason.

Why the tier lines matter more than the ranks

Tap a position chip and horizontal tier lines appear. A tier is a group of players our projections cannot separate by more than the forecasters themselves disagree, so inside a tier the ranking is noise and the choice is yours: take the bye week that fits, the offense you like, the handcuff to the back you already own. The line between tiers is the part that is real. When a tier is down to its last player and it is your pick, that is the moment worth spending on, because the next name is a genuine step down and it will still be a step down when the pick comes back to you. The band on each tier says how many are left in it, which is the number you are actually deciding against.

The most common way to lose value in a draft is to reach across a tier line for a name you like when three players from the same tier would have come back to you a round later. The second most common is the reverse: sitting on the last player of a tier because the rank next to him looks ordinary, and watching the position fall off a cliff. Both are easier to see on a board that removes players as they go than on a printed sheet you are crossing off by hand, which is the whole reason this page exists.

What it does not know

It does not know your league mates. It has never seen your keeper list, your trade with the manager in seat four, or the fact that the guy on the end always drafts three quarterbacks. Market ADP is the average of a lot of other people's drafts, and your draft is not the average one. Use the board for what it is good at, which is remembering the whole pool and pricing it consistently while you are trying to think, and use your own read for everything it cannot see.

It also does not connect to Sleeper, ESPN, Yahoo or anywhere else. There is no sync and no login, which means there is nothing to break at the worst possible moment and nothing of yours stored on our side. The cost of that choice is that you have to tap the picks in yourself. In a slow draft that is easy. In a fast one, mark your own picks first and catch the others up between turns, because the only marks that change your decision are the ones for players you were considering.

After the draft

When it is over, take the league to Grade My Draft and every team in it, yours included, gets a report card on market value, starting lineup, depth and balance. If you want reps before the real thing, the Mock Draft Trainer runs a full draft against a seeded CPU in a couple of minutes, and the draft kit shows the projections underneath all of this, including how much the forecasters disagree about any given player. Everything is free and none of it needs an account.