Draft Boards At The Live Drafts For 2014

[Greg Ambrosius]

As a lot of you who competed in our football live events know, we switched from cardboard draft boards to projector screens this past August and September. Picks were entered on the spot on the computer and then projected to a 10-foot screen at the front of the U. The process worked smoothly in football and it even cut down the draft times considerably, but we still needed to tweak the draft board to make it more visible and we didn't have the dollar values calculated automatically for auctions.

That being said, we've improved the board for baseball and the projected picks will be on a screen for all drafts. A big sticker with the player's name and photo will appear on the projector screen for 10 seconds once the pick is entered and then another 60 seconds will begin after the big sticker disappears. It should be a good process for all drafts and with the player's name and photo on the screen we shouldn't have too many "who was picked?" questions.

For the auctions, however, we didn't finish the software to calculate the money and in football we thought it was tough for owners to know a money count without the actual boards. So we will stick with the cardboard draft boards for all NFBC auctions and will use three facilitators to calculate the money, enter the picks online in real-time and keep the money count on the big board. It's the best way to do this for now and by football auctions we will have the money count on the electronic board. This also allows us to have some physical boards around for owners to talk about values on the baseball weekends.

We know that congregating around the physical boards for hours and days was part of the recreational trip to the live drafts in the past and again we'll try to accommodate with the auction boards and by keeping the finished drafts on the screens for as long as folks need, but the fact of the matter is that we always felt uncomfortable with the big draft boards being visible after live drafts. Our intention was never to allow other owners to see the team owner names and check out their previous drafts. In fact, we often tried to hide those boards or we turned them around so that the results couldn't be seen because we thought it was unfair to those owners who just drafted, but every time we looked someone had dug them out and brought them in to look. Finally, we just left them out these last couple of years, but again we didn't think it was fair to the owners who had drafted early.

Again, we'll keep the draft boards on the screens for as long as we can and we might even create an area in Las Vegas where we have a separate screen on with access to previous drafts that have no owners' names on them. Just having blank boards from other drafts that we randomly choose to show without any owners' names would be better than what we've had before and we're looking at a way to maybe do this. Stay tuned.

We understand the lure of cardboard draft boards, but economically the move to LCD projectors and real-time results make sense. If you are bringing an iPad and want to call up the draft board from your league page, you can do that. We don't have wireless access in the ballrooms, but I believe in football it was available for like $7 per day. All results for all drafts and auctions will be entered in real-time and will be available for viewing on your team pages as the events go on.

Doing this electronically also keeps these drafts moving along at a nice pace as the time to look through 400 pitcher stickers was consuming. It also was difficult for facilitators. Now one person can enter the draft results and project those picks onto the screen at the same time and the drafts will move at a quicker (yet not too quick) pace.

That's the plan for all three cities, so plan accordingly. I saw the updated draft board last week when I was in Chicago and the electronic stickers are improved from football with bolder and bigger last names. I think this will work well.

Thanks all and we'll see you at the live drafts soon.

[76erfan]

This means sack can still call me sticker boy. Oh boy

[Sack]

Andy,

You'll always be sticker boy my friend. I'll even try and be nice to you if you bring Jenna.

[76erfan]

She's working friday and saturday Sack....she'll be there. She doesnt seem interested in going to Ruth Chris though. Think we may bar hop instead.

[Baseball Furies]

One question: Are these new electronic boards porn star-friendly? It's very important that they be able to manipulate the technology effectively at the MTM.

[Greg Ambrosius]

One question: Are these new electronic boards porn star-friendly? It's very important that they be able to manipulate the technology effectively at the MTM.

Boobs work on cardboard or on a laptop!! Shouldn't be a problem!!

[Roy's Outlaws]

Greg, Do you have a backup plan if something goes wrong with the LCD projectors?????? Don't have much faith in your tech crew.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Greg, Do you have a backup plan if something goes wrong with the LCD projectors?????? Don't have much faith in your tech crew.

Thanks Roy. LCD projectors are right there in every hotel ballroom Roy. We are bringing our own, but you can always just rent the ones in position at the hotel. This isn't rocket science.

[76erfan]

Worked well in football

[Walla Walla]

Thank God for Auctions!!!