NFBC Message Boards

It is no wonder that the Draft Champions are setting records for participants. If ever a contest was meant to be played during a pandemic, it is the Draft Champions.
From October to March, while eagerly waiting for baseball to start in earnest, Draft Champions offer us a respite from every day life. And every day life is hard and has been difficult with this damned pandemic.
Draft Champions mean something different for many.
For some it is study for larger contests.
For some it is something to keep our minds occupied in hard times.
For others, it is THEIR Main Event.

It has become the supreme contest spanning the whole of the draft season.
Even better, it has been improved on from year to year.
The draft room is of ease to use.
And better, we now have choices of half hour, one hour, two hour, and four hour drafts.
Gone are the days of those horrid eight hour drafts and drafters making excuses in why they needed eight hours to draft just one player!
The different time slots have helped folks of like minds grouped together at a pace of their own choosing.
Sure, the four hour drafts still have slow folks and those that want to push them along, but such is human nature.

Thank you to the NFBC for furnishing us with a contest that is for the fantasy masses.
A Draft Championship Draft is like watching a long, good movie at a theater (remember theaters?)
When finished, we immediately miss being in the setting where that movie put us.
Not to worry though, we can do it again and again and again.
Each draft is a different movie in their own way.
We are about to leave the Draft Champions season behind us and embark on the more high priced season.
Before they go, I just wanted to add another thanks to the NFBC for giving us a respite from a covid environment with the mind play that are the Draft Champions.
Thank you.

Very well said, Dan, and I just want to echo your comments. I absolutely love the Draft Champions format and its value as a welcome distraction during the pandemic cannot be overstated.

Mike

I appreciate the kind words about this contest format. Honestly, the idea for the format and the improvements for the software all came from NFBC owners and I think it really changed the industry in a good way.

We don't deserve credit for creating the draft 'n hold format as CDM had a draft 'n hold game many years before us and there was a site that specialized in that format. I remember Ant Sports doing this for like $5 or $10 a team and they had a lot of people playing there. As you guys all know, mock draft sites were all the rage 15-20 years ago and when we were with Ryan Houston and Fanball we tried to buy MockDraftCentral.com. Getting that big site of players who were mocking continuously seemed like it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (along with the draft software).

When we didn't acquire that company (they sold to Rotowire.com), we had to build our own software and a year later Fanball folded. However, we did create the Draft Champions format before leaving Fanball and took it to STATS with us.

It was actually KJ Duke who called me up with the idea to do this format. He also was familiar with Ant Sports and said people were tired of mock drafting and that this would be hugely popular with the NFBC and NFFC audience. We actually thought the same thing and wanted to offer pay leagues on MockDraftCentral.com if we had acquired them with basically draft-and-be-done leagues. That was the idea, so when KJ called I was very receptive to the idea.

I remember quickly saying that instead of just private leagues it would be great to have an overall contest and he agreed. It was a modest grand prize to start and I think we had 45 rounds initially, but you guys quickly went from mock draft sites to this format and it was a bigger hit than I expected. I remember Shawn Childs calling me after the first year and saying we had to add more rounds because many teams didn't have an active catcher at the end of the first year. I was shocked that he wanted 50 rounds, but we added the extra rounds and now we'd never go lower than 50.

One story that Tom can confirm is that when we moved to STATS in February 2011, we already had some finished DC leagues and so we needed STATS to get the software up to speed for more of these. They did, but there were no features to make drafting easy. We were happy to get 2011 off the ground by Opening Day and again demand really picked up in March of that year. We had a lunch meeting with our boss (Steve Byrd) and the programmers at Buffalo Wild Wings in Northbrook and we told them that this contest had the potential to really become big. We told them that Draft Champions leagues were replacing mock drafts and with some added features we could really grow this market.

One programmer just didn't see it our way and didn't want to do extra work and he fought us at that meeting. Finally, Steve lost his temper and said "would you just listen to these guys and do what they say?" Of course, they just couldn't fix or improvise the software to what we wanted, yet we still grew the format with STATS. But there was always resistance to this format from one aspect of the programmers, which always surprised us.

When we came to SportsHub, we talked about growing all of our contests through technology and right away the programmers saw this potential. Changing the hours of the clock was the first step and then it took a little longer than we wanted to get Queues for every round and multiple round auto-pick features, but both have been fantastic for the DCs. We were able to get it so that drafting from your mobile device was as easy as drafting from a desktop and soon we added the mobile app. Again, all of those improvements came from customer suggestions.

We're working on one other feature that we hope to have done for football that will also help the DCs in the future. In fact, it will help all of our contests. It involves loading your own lists into the draft room, but the bug-a-boo has always been that you need the Player IDs when uploading the players. We're working on a solution and if we can solve that it will be so much easier for you to upload your own rankings and to tweak them before every online draft you do with us. Give us a little time, but we're working on that piece.

Thanks again for the kind words and thanks to everyone who got us this far. Forget about mock drafts; put your money where your knowledge is in this great format and spend multiple days in a draft room with like-minded baseball fans. It's the best way to kick off the season. Thanks all.