Join Alone or with Friends

Join alone and we will place you in a league with other individual owners, giving you a chance to compete against some of football's biggest fans. Or join with friends, and you can talk trades and assert bragging rights whenever you get together. If you know enough fellow fans to form a complete league, you can hold your own draft - the best party of the year!

If you join as an individual, or with just a couple of friends, we'll place you in a 12-team league with other individual team owners. 12 team leagues have 3 divisions, with 4 teams in each division. You will play each team in the other divisions once, and each opponent in your division twice, for a 14 game regular season. The three division winners plus two wild-card teams (the other teams with the best records) qualify for the playoffs, played during weeks 15, 16, and 17 of the NFL season.

If you join with friends and want to play just among yourselves, you can form a complete league of any size, though we suggest having at least 6 and at most 16 teams. Owners who form their own complete league can either hold their own draft, or have us run their draft.

Take part in a real draft

As soon as we receive your team order we will send you a draft packet that includes a list of the NFL's projected 2008 starters at every position (except offensive line). We will include each player's Scoresheet Football point rating from last season; both season totals and points per game played will be included, along with each player's age and position.

You'll draft a team of 6 offensive starters, 6 defensive starters, a kicker, a punter, an NFL kick return team, and 15 backup players. If you join alone or with a small group that wants to be part of a larger league, we will place you in a league and run your league's draft. Unlike contests or pools this is a real draft; a player can only be on one team in each league!

With the help of our player list, you'll rank players in the order you want them. You can list players from different positions in whatever order you want. You can even specify when to draft a second QB or other key backup before you have all of your starters. Full instructions and roster-balancing rules are included with the draft packet.

The draft order will be determined randomly, and whoever picks first in round one will pick last in round two. When it's your turn, we'll give you the highest-ranked, undrafted player on your list, subject to our procedures for giving you a balanced team. We'll then send you complete draft results and rosters for all the teams in your league. All leagues will also have their draft results posted on the web as soon as the draft is held.

We also have a web based draft system where you can change your ranking list between every round of the draft, giving you the same control over the draft as if you were doing a live in-person draft. A description of the new web draft system can be found at this web drafting link. A full explanation of the draft rules for both web drafting and for drafts that send lists to our office will be included in the drafting packet that we will send you as soon as we receive your team order. The first web draft leagues will be formed and start drafting in late July. We will be forming web draft leagues from July thru mid-August, but the sooner you sign up the sooner you can begin drafting your team.

For those of you who want to send and receive draft lists and results by e-mail, postal mail or fax, you should join (send in your order form) by/before July 15th to draft in two separate stages. With a two stage draft you will get your starters in the first draft stage, and your backups in the second stage, allowing you to see your starters before deciding which subs to go after. If we receive your team order after July 20th you'll play in a league which picks all 30 players in a single draft.

If you have a complete league you can choose to do your own live draft, holding it whenever you like.