DRAFT
FIFTEEN YEARS OF
THE SAME TEN TEAMS
Degenerate Draft was not a startup idea. It came out of a league that has been drafting in the same room, in person, every August, for fifteen years.
- 15
- Seasons and counting
- 10
- Teams, unchanged
- 6
- Original owners still in it
- 15
- Live drafts, zero skipped
THE DESPICABLE DEGENERATES
Ten teams, going on fifteen seasons, with six of the original ten still in it. Managers have moved, had kids, changed jobs and changed time zones, and the one thing that survived all of it is draft night.
It is not a room full of the same kind of person, and it never has been. Couples who draft against each other, friends who have never met in person, people who joined because their partner would not shut up about it in October. If your league looks like that too, this was built with you in the room.
We have never once done a mock, offline, autodraft, everyone-set-your-queue draft. It is a room, a board, food, and three hours of everybody being insufferable to each other. That is the whole product of a fantasy season for us. The Sunday scoring is a fifteen week epilogue.
TWO YEARS ON CLICKYDRAFT
Credit where it belongs. ClickyDraft is what finally got our live draft off a whiteboard and a stack of printed cheat sheets, and it did the job for two years. It is the reason we know a live draft deserves real software instead of a spreadsheet and a loud voice.
But two years in a tool teaches you exactly what it does not do. We kept a list. The list got long enough that building the thing became the smaller project.
FIVE THINGS WE KEPT WISHING FOR
- 01
The room and the couch were not equal
Every year somebody could not make it in person, and every year that person had a worse night than everyone else. They heard the pick late, reacted late, and got laughed at for reacting late. Half our league is remote now. Remote had to stop being second class.
- 02
The clock was not actually fair
If your phone is a few hundred milliseconds behind the room, you lose a few hundred milliseconds of your ninety seconds, every single pick. Nobody notices until the one time it costs somebody a player. Our clock is stamped by the server and every device corrects itself against it.
- 03
Nothing was built for the TV
We were casting a laptop with a browser window and a page that was designed for a desk. A board on a television across the room is its own screen with its own rules: bigger type, no chrome, nothing that expires, nothing that asks you to log in.
- 04
A pick landing did not feel like anything
A new row quietly appearing in a list is the least interesting way to deliver the best moment of the night. A pick should print. It should be loud on every screen at the same instant, so somebody four states away yells at the same instant as the room.
- 05
Keepers and trades lived in the group text
Fifteen years of who owns which pick, who kept whom, who traded what in March. It worked, but only because one person kept all of it in their head. That person would like a night off.
ONE NIGHT, DONE PROPERLY
The best live and virtual draft experience there is, and one that is trivial to put on a television and broadcast to everybody watching. In the room, on a couch, or on a phone in an airport: same board, same clock, same moment.
Nothing about running a season. No waivers, no lineups, no week nine trade veto drama. We do the three hours everybody actually shows up for, and then we hand you the results to paste wherever your league lives.
WE RECOMMEND SLEEPER
Not sponsored, not affiliated, no arrangement of any kind. Our league moved there and never looked back, and when somebody asks where to run a season, that is the answer we give.
Before that we spent a long stretch of years in a different four letter draft room. We are not going to name it. If you have been playing a while you already know the one, and you have your own stories about it.
Use whatever you like. Degenerate Draft sits next to it, not on top of it.