DRAFT TYPES

There are 5 different draft options available to managers in Maximum Fantasy Sports Fantasy Football leagues. No team may join a league once the draft room has been opened, though drafts can be restarted or deleted and started over with new participants, if necessary.

• Live Online Draft - Each manager drafts players in our browser-based draft room. This option allows managers that live in different geographic areas to assemble virtually, talk smack and draft efficiently. Your league can generate its own draft order offline and enter it through a Commissioner Tools option or MFS can generate a random selection order for your league. You will have the ability to dictate how many days in advance of the draft we randomize the draft order for you or to even randomize the order once the league is full. Every team selects one player per round until their roster is full. The draft order reverses each round (snake draft), so the team that picks first in the first round will pick last in the second round and the team that picks last in the first round will pick first in the second round. If a manger cannot be present for all or part of the online draft, our rules engine will select players for that team. There will be a time limit set by the Commissioner for each draft pick, though this can be changed during the draft. If a team does not select a player in this time allotment, the autodraft rules (see section below) will kick in and MFS will draft a player for that manager. If you are participating in the Live Online draft and need to leave or take a nature break with newspaper in hand, our draft control allows you to click an “I’m Away” checkbox so the Autodraft kicks in automatically when it is your turn and makes a pick for you for each round until you return and uncheck the box. If this does occur, the draft control has a player queue. If your turn comes up and you are “Away” or wait too long and time expires, the rules engine will draft from the “On Tap” area, which is the top of your player queue, followed by the players listed in the player queue. If you would like to see this description in practice, you can run a simulated draft in our Draft Demo League. Also, you must have JavaScript enabled in your browser settings.
   
• Immediate Draft – Immediate is kind of a misnomer since the draft actually kicks off 24 hours after the league fills up. Everyone is notified via email when this happens. This is a Live Online Draft league with a maximum draft pick duration of 12 hours to provide ample notice for everyone to get into the draft room and make picks. Each draft pick is emailed to the league members after the pick is made. Keep in mind, the draft pick time can be changed. It is common practice for the Commissioner to drop the time down to a normal Live draft time of 60-120 seconds once everyone has settled on a good night to finish off the draft.
   
• Slow Draft – This is a scheduled Live Online Draft league with a maximum draft pick duration of 12 hours. Each draft pick is emailed to the league members after the pick is made. These drafts are useful for those who cannot settle on a draft date. Once again, the draft pick time can be changed to a normal Live draft duration if all members have decided that the pace is far too slow and have chosen a night that they can all enter the draft room and finish off the draft.
   
• Offline Draft – The draft is conducted in whatever fashion you chose and the results are entered manually into your MFS league using our browser-based draft control. The Commissioner, or designated flunky, will use a modified version of the draft control to select players in the order that they were drafted offline. This is a great option for leagues that like to get together in person prior to the start of the season in a central location, like Vegas, to run their draft. You can even use the control to enter as your draft is taking place. Should this job become too tedious, you can suspend entering the results and pick up where you left off when sobriety returns and you are more focused.
   
• Autodraft – MFS will generate the draft results for you. This will be a computerized draft. The autopick logic in our rules engine will use a combination of your player pre-rankings, MFS player rankings and your specified position order to draft an entire starting lineup first. After all of your starting positions are filled, the system determines a list of bench positions based on the number of starters at a position vs. the overall roster size and continues with the same logic described above. The exception to this rule is that MFS position pre-rankings allow you to slot a position to be chosen last. For example, much like the real NFL, kickers typically get no respect and vary little from team to team. So, you could slot that position last. This instructs the rules engine to make the last pick a Kicker. This is done to determine a maximum number of players to draft per position (starters plus bench) so that no roster ends up with an inordinate number of players at any single position (e.g., five quarterbacks in a league that has a single starting quarterback). MFS suggests all managers pre-rank players and positions to assist in the Autodraft logic. Our goal is to have the autodraft logic emulate your thought process while drafting players, without the influence of draft-time beverages, of course. To set your pre-rankings, go to your Team Home page and click on the Pre-Draft Rankings link.