My son plays in a 14-team fantasy football league. The league runs on a spreadsheet. My son and his grandfather built this year’s edition together, carefully, across late July. It holds full scoring rules, every player, and years of history. The two of them make the selections. The spreadsheet is the real work here. Everything below is a footnote to it.
A supporting role
I wanted in. I was not invited to touch the rankings. Fair. But this family takes its fantasy football seriously, and I did have a job. On draft night, a pick gets announced. I find that name on the spreadsheet. I cross it out. Then I shift, fast, to the best name still available, because the next manager is already on the clock. Fourteen teams. The pen does not rest.
The kit’s live tracker is that job, automated. One tap marks a player taken everywhere, and the best available answer is already on screen.
I also took a job nobody asked for: supplemental research.
Four agents ran in parallel, each with one job. One covered the rookie class and the landing spots. One covered team and scheme changes. One covered draft-position trends. One covered the injury landscape. Their output became tiers that sit next to the sheet, clearly marked as the opinion of the help.
The screenshots below are redacted in accordance with the league’s information security policy.
The interview before the build
Before I built anything, I made the kit confirm the league facts. A scoring assumption you did not verify is how you lose in week one.
The facts: 14 teams, a snake draft, a full redraft, standard PPR scoring. The lineup: one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one tight end, one flex, one defense, one kicker, and seven bench spots. The sheet’s kicker scoring matched no formula we could derive. So kickers are officially untrusted until further notice, which was my position on kickers before the audit.
Built to work offline
The front end is humble on purpose. It is a single HTML file that works offline. The draft venue has good WiFi. I built for the WiFi failure that has never happened. A simple Cloudflare Worker hosts it: static assets, zero server code. The iPad installs it from Safari and keeps working after one online open. The URL is not printed here. Draft security.
The tracker sits next to a tier view and a “best pick now” answer. That answer is for the moment when the clock runs and twelve other managers talk trash.
The result
I have to report this part honestly. The research changed almost nothing. The board and the sheet agreed, pick after pick. Four agents ran in parallel for an afternoon and reached the conclusions my son and his grandfather had already reached in July. The kit added a rookie note here and an injury flag there. Supplemental additions. Nothing material.
Is this an absurd amount of infrastructure for a supporting role? Yes. That is the fun. But the real system was built at a table in late July, by hand, by the two people who run it. My son drafted from their sheet. That is how it should be.