r/FFCommish

For the last several years I've posted my Google Sheet draft board here every year and got great feedback, but I was always fighting Google Sheets itself: manual player list imports, mobile being a PITA, and "Invalid: Input must fall within specified range."

So I built the actual thing: https://smartdraft.app

What it does

• Open the link and you have a draft board. No account, no signup, no six-step league creation wizard.
• Share the room link with your league — everyone sees picks the moment they happen.
• Player list is already loaded, with Standard / PPR / Half-PPR ADP. No more copy-pasting a CSV.
• Keepers, custom team count and rounds, roster settings.
• Personal cheat sheet — your own favorites and notes on players, saved to you, not shared with the league.
• Pick timer countdown.
• Mock draft against bots so you can kick the tires before draft night.
• Full audit log of every action, so the commish can fix a bad pick without blowing up the board.
• Draft recap when it's over.

Things to know

• It's free.
• It's new, so there will be bugs. Tell me in the comments and I'll fix them fast, same as I always did with the sheet.
• The old Google Sheet is still there for this season if you'd rather use what you know.
• Run a mock draft with your league before you use it live. Seriously.

Ask questions in the comments instead of DM/chat so the answers help everybody.

“Hey!

What’s the coolest way for your league to pick draft order? I’ve made this….”

Every. Single. Hobby. Subreddit. has been overrun by these guys using Gemini or Chat GPT to slap the lamest simplest tool together and try to grift money.

It seems that they’ve now hit Fantasy Football now that the season approaches. It would be lovely to see some kind of mod action/statement, because they are almost more common than actual football related posts now.

Does anyone know if leaguesafe allows for a payout for the regular season champion? Currently my league does e transfer where we pay the winner and runner up, but leaguesafe seems more efficient. We implemented a new change where the regular season winner gets their buy in back so idk if leaguesafe has a feature for that.

I have a team in a league thats I run that is just.. truly terrible. Owner thats new to dynasty combined with some of the worst luck I have ever seen. Is there anything I can do to give him a mercy boost? Anyone ever been in this situation? He doesnt even have his first next year. I dont want him to leave the league

So I'm 15 years into running a 12 man redraft league with close mates and have a unprecidented situation.

One of our buddies is totally awol, none of us live close by so it's always been remote contact only and he's just disappeared from all socials and is not answering calls. Fearing the worst a little bit if I'm honest.

Just wanted to get some ideas from you lot on how best to handle it.

I've communicated a deadline of next week before we move on without him.

The league is open to having his team auto draft and then run by committe for the upcoming season.

Anythoughts on how to best do that or shared experiences and how you handled it would be welcome.

EDIT:

Appricate the responses so far, I'll reply individually, but suffice to say I put it to a league vote and despite a vocal minority wanting to hold his spot (as people are suggesting) we've voted to give him a week then replace with another mate who's wanted in for some time now. Sucks for him but it's been over a month and people don't like the idea of having a "zombie team" (managed impartially by me)

When they added this it cost 25 dollars per league which was silly tbh. Am I looking at this right, let me change the teams to 7 playoff without charge? Is this right did they finally smarten up lol

Looking for outside perspective from keeper-league managers.

12-team paid keeper league. Each team keeps 2 players. We have a 2-year keeper timer.

Under the prior rule, if an expiring keeper was traded, the timer could reset for the new manager. This year, the league voted to change that so the keeper timer follows the player. In other words, a player can only be kept for 2 years total even if traded.

The commissioner has already posted the 2026 “back to draft pool” list of expired keepers. The draft is this week, and managers have had time to plan/mock around that posted pool.

Now, because of the rule change, there is a question about how to handle the transition. The concern is that managers with expiring keepers might have made different trade/keeper decisions under the old rule if they had known exactly how the transition would work.

What is the fairest way to handle this?

Option A: Keep the already-posted 2026 back-to-draft-pool list locked for this draft, then apply the new timer-follows-player rule going forward.

Option B: Reset or reopen keeper timers this year because of the rule transition, even if that changes which players are available after the back-to-draft-pool list was already posted.

Option C: Something else.

For a paid keeper league with the draft this week, how would your league handle this?

EDIT for clarity: No offseason trades involving the expired players have happened since the rule change. The issue is that the expired-player / back-to-pool list was already posted for this year, and the draft is this week. The question is whether that already-posted list should remain locked, or whether timers should be reset/reopened now because the trade-reset rule changed.

Under the old rule, an expiring player could have been traded and the acquiring owner could reset the keeper clock. Under the new rule, the timer follows the player. The concern raised is that owners with expiring players might have made different moves under the old rule if the transition had been clearer earlier. My question is about the fairest transition now that the back-to-pool list has already been published.

I’m curious how other commissioners handle the money side of paid fantasy football leagues.

If you run a paid league:

How many people are in your league?

What’s the buy-in?

How do you collect and hold the league money?

What’s the biggest headache when it comes to collecting dues or paying winners?

Have you ever had issues or concerns around one person holding the entire pot for the season?

Mostly interested in hearing what different leagues do and what’s worked best for you. The reason I’m asking is that I’m currently building a pre-launch product called FantasyVault around this exact problem.

The idea is that leagues would still run normally on Sleeper, ESPN, Yahoo, etc., while FantasyVault would handle the separate dues and payout side so the commissioner doesn’t have to personally hold the league pot.

I’m mainly looking to understand how commissioners currently do this and what would actually make something like this useful.

If anyone here runs a paid league and would be open to giving feedback or potentially testing it later, I’d definitely be interested in hearing from you.

Not trying to pull a dear diary but... we've been doing FAAB for the last 2 seasons and I thought it was going well. Now someone brought up how they don't want the "ebay" system and most people agreed. Feel like going back completely nerfs the fun as it punishes you for being active and taking fliers. Any other commishes experience this? I don't really have much recourse here as the league has voted.

This year we are drafting in person and going to be doing a combine of sorts to determine what order we all get to choose our draft spot in. A handful of events that are timed/measured and the best person gets to choose their spot first and so on. For the person or people who can't make it to draft night, how would you figure out which place in the order do they get to choose their draft spot?

Two ideas ive come up with are have them try to guess the final rankings of our combine and the inverse of however many they get correct is where they choose their spot (so 11 out of 12 correct they would choose second, 8 out of 12 they would choose fifth), or I tell the person who can't make it to do the combine on their own and give me their times/measurements, which could threaten the honor system unless they record everything and send it to us.

I would like to hear arguments in favor of and against voting to veto in dynasty leagues particularly. Trades have a large and lasting impact on dynasty leagues for sure. However, I am of the opinion that bad trades are bad trades and just part of the game, especially for dynasty purposes. I feel like collusion is the only real reason to veto a trade and that would be better left to the commissioner to investigate and determine. What are the communities thoughts?

We’re expanding from 12 teams to 14 teams this year, and I’m trying to decide between 4 bench + 1 IR or 5 bench + 1 IR.

Last year we were 12 teams with 6 bench spots, and a decent number of people already felt like the waiver wire was a bit barren.

Here’s the math on total bench spots league-wide:

• 12 teams x 6 bench = 72 bench players rostered
• 14 teams x 5 bench = 70 bench players rostered
• 14 teams x 4 bench = 56 bench players rostered

So 5 bench in a 14-team league is basically the same stash pressure as last year, while 4 bench would open up waivers quite a bit more.

My hesitation with 4 bench is that I don’t want to completely screw over teams during heavy bye weeks or when injuries hit. At the same time, part of me feels like that actually adds to the fun and makes roster decisions matter more.

I’m also curious what people think from a skill perspective: is managing a thinner bench more skillful, or does it just create more randomness?

For context, our league likes working the wire. We use $200 FAAB with $0 minimum bids, so people are active with pickups and churn. We’re also a trading league, on average we get about one trade done per week, so there are usually ways to maneuver besides just sitting on a deep bench.

Given that setup, what do you think plays better in a 14-team league: 4 bench + 1 IR or 5 bench + 1 IR?

Starting a ladies league this year and I got more traction than I expected! We have 15 teams, so the 16th will be a ghost team I fill with garbage players, essentially a bye week. Skill level ranges from ppl who’ve won my other league to ppl who have never watched a full game of football in their life.

I’m struggling on setting the roster size - I’ve only ever done QB/2WR/2RB/1TE/2Flex/K/D + 5BN but that was in a 12 man league.

I’m considering just dropping to 1 flex, or 1 RB, or both? Also struggling with whether I should decrease bench size. If you’ve been in a large league before, what roster size did or didn’t work?

My main goal is just for everyone to have fun - I don’t want the waivers to be super brutal or have everyone hoarding players. The league is chill, just trying to introduce some of my friends to fantasy and make sure they have a good time!

Hey commissioners — I built something this offseason that I thought some of you might get a kick out of.

It’s called The Blunderlic.

The idea is pretty simple: instead of hitting “randomize” to determine draft order, your league actually has to earn it.

Everyone takes the same 30-question, 6-minute test. You can choose between a Wonderlic-style cognitive test or football trivia. Once everyone finishes, the results determine your draft-order advantage.

As commissioner, you can set it so either:

Highest score gets the #1 pick, second gets #2, etc.

Highest score gets first choice of draft slot, second gets the next choice, and so on.

I also added BlunderSpin, which is basically the opposite idea — a wheel you can use to determine a punishment for whoever finishes last.

I built the whole thing specifically around fantasy leagues rather than trying to repurpose some generic quiz site. It’s $15 for the entire league, not per person. Code FIRSTPICK gets you $5 off!!

Site is blunderlic.com.

Would genuinely love feedback from other commissioners. This is the first fantasy season I've had it live, so if there’s something you think would make it better for your league, I'm all ears.

Last year, I wanted to use an actual horse race to determine our draft order. But, there were no horse races occurring that had 12 horses running. Plus, I was afraid one would scratch or something which I felt would be unfair.

So this year I created my own "Derby Decider" that I'm going to use. When my guys pay dues, I tell them whoever pays first will have an advantage for their draft pick. So I also made sure the horses had odds as well so I could give whoever paid first the highest odds horse. But there is also an option for completely random as well.

Thought someone else may enjoy it, no strings attached it's completely free.

https://bnelson.fun/derby-decider/

Our redraft league typically does a different method of determining draft order every year, and this year my plan is to simulate a WWE Royal Rumble on one of the 2K games. The idea is that we would open the draft night with the rumble, so we all find out our draft position right before it starts. Does the idea and timing seem okay? Or should we set the draft order earlier.

Our league is low buy in ($25) and has a mix of people who do some research and some who do zero and just wing it.

ESPN Snake Draft:

The winner of our league is able to choose their draft position, and the winner of the consolation bracket also elects their draft position secondary to the league winner. The other 8 players will be randomly assigned a draft position. How am I able to randomize the 8 other players whilst manually imputing the two pre-selected draft positions? 

Our league approved this last year, and this is the first season we are implementing this draft rule change, looking for ideas whilst maintaining total transparency.