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The Draft Room

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Free for everyone. It builds a team, not a list: five names when you are up, scored by what each adds to your roster. Swipe who is gone, tap who you took, next round.

The room, in three questions

It asks how many teams are in your league, where you pick in round one, and what your roster looks like: starting seats, scoring and bench. Then it names five players it expects to still be there when you are up, ranked for that league rather than in general, with the full rated board one tap below for planning the rounds ahead.

Every name carries what he adds to the team you have so far, how far clear he is of the next man at his position, and how many of that position come off the board before your next turn. The plus number is season points added to your starters, not his own total. Swipe a name away if he is already gone; tap “I took him” for your own pick, and the round advances by itself. Nobody else’s picks get entered: the board already expects the likely names to be gone by your turn.

Nothing you enter leaves your device. The room itself needs JavaScript; the arithmetic it runs on is written out under “How the numbers work” below, and needs none.

Your roster changes the answer.

Ja'Marr Chase: +67 to your team as your first receiver. As your fourth: +10.

Your league changes it again.

A 10-team league starts 20 running backs. A 14-team starts up to 42.

You never keep score.

It expects the likely names to be gone by your turn. Swipe away any that already went.

How the numbers work

Why your league needs its own board

A 10-team league with two running back seats and one flex starts between 20 and 30 of them every week. A 14-team league with the same seats starts between 28 and 42. The player sitting on that boundary is what a pick is worth measuring against, and he is a different player in the two leagues. That is the whole of value over replacement, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion.

What each league shape actually starts

League-wide starting seats per position. The range exists because a flex is won by whichever of a back, a receiver or a tight end is best at that moment, so the exact split depends on the players; the bounds do not.

Starting seats per position for five common league shapes.
LeagueQBRBWRTE
10-team, 1 flex1020–3020–3010–20
12-team, 1 flex1224–3624–3612–24
12-team, 2 flex1224–4824–4812–36
12-team superflex12–2424–4824–4812–36
14-team, 1 flex1428–4228–4214–28
  • 10-team, 1 flex: The shallow default. Replacement is a real starter, so depth is cheap and the top of the board is where leagues are won.
  • 12-team, 1 flex: The common shape, and the one most published rankings assume.
  • 12-team, 2 flex: One more flex seat moves 12 more players into the starting pool, all of them backs, receivers or tight ends.
  • 12-team superflex: A second quarterback seat doubles the position's starting pool. This is the shape a general ranking is most wrong about.
  • 14-team, 1 flex: Deep. Replacement falls to players nobody would start in a 10-team league, so the gap between a starter and the next man up is at its widest.

Why the quarterback who scores most is not the best pick

Quarterbacks outscore every other position and always have, which is why a board sorted on projected points puts them at the top and why that board is wrong. In a one-quarterback 12-team league only 12 of them start, and the twelfth is close behind the first. Take a projection set where the best quarterback is worth 400 points and the thirteenth 352: the best is 48 points better than a man you could have for nothing. Do the same for running backs, where the same league starts 24 to 36 and the board thins fast, and the gap between the best and the replacement is routinely double that. The back is the better pick despite scoring a hundred points fewer.

Change one setting and the answer changes with it. Add a superflex and the same league starts up to 24 quarterbacks, the replacement drops to a far worse player, and the position becomes the scarce one. No general ranking can hold both answers at once, because a ranking is a single order and this is a question about your settings.

What we do not claim

We do not publish a season-long projection. The Lineup Desk projects each week and grades it in public at the open board, with the record at the accuracy page. A week-one number multiplied by seventeen is not a season forecast and we will not dress one up as one. The room above opens with our own draft board: where the market has each player within his position, priced by what that slot has gone on to score across eight seasons of real results. Prefer your own projections? Paste them in the room’s settings and it ranks your set for your league instead.

Rookies are on the board and priced like anyone else: placed where the market has them within the position, at what that slot has gone on to score. What a rookie does not get is a weekly usage projection, because there are no NFL snaps to read yet; the Lineup Desk picks them up once there are. The names this board lists but will not rank are kickers and team defenses. We hold no weekly history for either, so they are searchable and takeable, never priced, because a board that quietly dropped them would be worse than one that says what it cannot speak to.

Nothing on Maiden is betting advice.

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