South FFL

Everything you need before the board opens — when it starts, where you pick, how the format works, and the cheat sheets to study.

Draft order

Snake format, so round two runs back up the board from twelve to one. Odd rounds go top down, even rounds bottom up.

The format

The starting lineup has not moved in twelve years — 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 TE, 1 FLEX, 1 D/ST and 1 K, with a seven-man bench.

Mock draft

Run a practice draft against ESPN’s lobby to get a feel for where players are going before the real thing.

ESPN Mock Draft LobbyPractice against live opponents or the computer →

Cheat sheets

ESPN’s 2026 draft kit — depth charts, rankings by position, and every team’s bye week, built right into the page so they open with or without a connection. ADP is a player’s average draft position: the pick he usually goes at across thousands of real drafts. Every player name links to their page on ESPN. The ADP here comes from ESPN’s half-PPR draft room, captured August 19; the position tiers come from FantasyPros’ half-PPR consensus, captured August 19 — camp battles and preseason injuries will move the later rounds between now and draft night.

Every game of the 2026 regular season. Pick a week to see the slate, or pick a team to follow them through all eighteen — byes included. Times and networks are the opening slate; the NFL flexes some later games as the season goes on.

Every manager in league history. Pick a card to open their full profile — grade, attribute chart, season-by-season record, rivalries and draft history.

Every winner of The Alma. A gold edge marks a title that was not that manager’s first.

The trait badges from every manager's profile, gathered in one grid instead of seventeen. Earned off career numbers — hardware, scoring, activity, luck of the draw — not a vote.

Regular season and playoff records are kept separate. The Post column counts only playoff games actually played — a first-round bye is a reward for the seed, not a win in the record. Select a name to follow that manager through every season below.

Final order after the playoffs, newest first. Reg is the regular-season record, Post is that year's playoff run. Points, moves and splits are on file for every season.

Every game ever played. Pick a season, then tap any matchup to open the head-to-head boxscore — both lineups with each player’s points. From 2018 that means starters, bench and a full stat line for every man. For 2014–2017 ESPN keeps only the starters, and only where they still add up to the score it recorded — every 2017 game passes that check, and about two of every three from 2014–2016.

Pick a manager to see their record against every rival, sorted by how often they win. Regular season and playoffs combined, 2014–2025.

Show the full all-play-all grid

Swipe sideways to see every opponent →

Winning recordLosing recordNo matchup

What every record would look like if each team played the entire league every week, instead of the one opponent the schedule happened to give them. Regular season only. Points are on file for all twelve seasons, so this reaches back to 2014.

The season you had, dealt again. Every weekly score stays exactly where it fell — nobody scores a point more or less than he really did — and only the fixtures change, ten thousand times over. What comes back is how much of a season was the schedule: who was going to make the playoffs almost however the draw fell, and who needed it.

Every other board on this site answers what happened in a season. Standings reset in September and the Ledger flattens twelve years into one row, so neither draws the shape of a career. This does: one rating per manager, carried from season to season, moving with every game he has ever played. Tap a name to follow one line.

Full boards, round by round, in draft order. The latest board is open below — pick any season to switch, and find individual picks under each team in the season standings.

Choose a season above to open its board.

Every team’s draft, every year, best to worst — graded on one question: did each pick beat what a pick at that spot was worth? Nothing about what happened to the class afterwards counts. Drop the man in October and the pick still stands.

?How this works

One question, asked of every pick, and the honest limits of the answer.

• It ranks the draft, not the season that followed it. Nothing here reads a roster, a lineup or a trade. A pick is judged on what that player did all year, whoever ended up holding him — so a manager who drafted brilliantly and traded the lot away in October still has the better draft. That is a deliberate change. The version of this board that ran until 2026 measured what a class delivered to its own roster, which is drafting and roster management measured together, and it graded the second one badly: it ran at −0.41 against a manager’s moves, so the fastest route up it was to draft sixteen men and never touch the wire again. Its runner-up of all time was a 5–9 team that made one move all season.
• Every pick is worth what he beat the going rate for his slot by. The going rate is what a pick at that spot was actually worth that year — a curve fitted through all of the season’s picks, so pick 3 is expected to return a great deal and pick 180 almost nothing. Beat it and you gain; fall short and you lose. The curve is drawn across every position at once on purpose: a curve per position would only ever compare a quarterback to the other quarterbacks taken around him, and taking a quarterback too early would stop being a mistake the board could see. You spent pick 26, and pick 26 is graded against everything pick 26 could have bought.
• A player is worth what he scored over a man you could have had for free. Points alone make the answer to every question a quarterback — in 2023 nine of the twelve highest scorers in fantasy were quarterbacks, and measured against their own position it is four. So every man is measured against replacement at his position: the best player just outside the number that actually get started here each week, counted from real lineups rather than assumed from the lineup card. A pick can never cost more than the pick itself. Replacement is free, so a man who finished below it would simply not have been used — the pick bought an option nobody exercised, which is worth nothing rather than less than nothing.
• Kickers and defences count. A sixteen-pick draft graded on eleven picks is not a graded draft, and spending a ninth-rounder on a kicker when picks around there were returning a startable receiver is a real mistake that the going rate prices correctly. Defences appear here and, since 15 August 2026, on Steals & Busts too: a defence’s season can be reconstructed to within about 2%, which is small enough to judge a single pick by. It was 12% until the defensive scoring was corrected, and at 12% it was not.
• The score is relative to that season; the headline figure already isn’t. 100 is an average draft for its own year and every 15 points is one standard deviation, and that is what the all-time list sorts on. The figure beside it — how far past the going rate the class landed — needs no such adjustment, because replacement is recomputed under each season’s own rulebook. Measured, the half-PPR era since 2021 runs about 5% hotter than the years before it, against a 17% swing between two seasons under the same rules.
• Where the numbers come from, and what they miss. Every player’s season is computed from nflverse’s public play-by-play stats under this league’s own scoring rules for that year — including 2014, which paid whole points per block of yards rather than the fractional rates every later season uses. Checked against the league’s own export for 2018–2025, it reproduces 23,668 player-weeks exactly. Two things it does not: a defence’s weekly line differs slightly from the one ESPN published, and a man drafted who never played a down — suspended, retired in the summer, hurt in August — is scored at nothing, with the games he played printed beside him so you can decide for yourself what that excuses. The board states the fact and declines to diagnose it.

Best 10

The ten drafts that beat their own season by the widest margin.

Worst 10

The ten that fell furthest behind it — every manager has one of these somewhere.

Every draft, all 140

The full board, for the curious — every team-draft since 2014. The two that used to be missing are back: this board needs no roster history, so the corrupted records that kept them off it no longer matter.

Every roster, every week. Players picked up that week are marked, each line carries that week’s box score, and the moves below show exactly who came and went.

Choose a season and a team to open their roster.

Every deal the league has made — both sides of it, what each haul was worth, and who came out ahead. In-season player trades and draft-day pick swaps both. How the scoring works is spelled out just below.

?How trades are judged

One idea, one example. Thirty seconds.

• Every side is scored in extra lineup points. Each week he held the players, take the best lineup his roster could field — then take it again without them. The gap is what the trade earned him that week. Add the weeks up and that’s his number.
  You trade for a WR2 you needed. Best lineup with him 128.4, without him 117.9.+10.5 that week

  You trade for a backup QB who never starts. With him 121.0, without him 121.0.+0.0
• The haul is judged as a whole, not man by man. Two running backs fighting over the same FLEX spot are worth one upgrade, not two.
• A verdict needs a real gap. Won and Lost only appear when one side clearly got more: at least 8 extra points, and a gap that’s big next to the size of the deal — 12% of the larger side. Ten points decides a twenty-point trade; on a three-hundred-point one it’s noise. Anything closer is a coin toss and gets no tag.
• Injury cover gets no verdict. Where either manager was patching a hole he didn’t choose, the numbers stand but the deal is tagged Damage control instead — nobody is credited with beating a man who had no choice.
• A traded pick is judged by the man taken with it. Pick swaps are read straight off the draft board and reach back to 2014.
• Coverage: player trades need week-by-week rosters, so they run from 2018. 2017’s deals are rebuilt from starting lineups — they name the players but can’t price them.
• Mind the yardstick. This is a different measure than Steals & Busts below: Steals & Busts asks how a player compared with the best free agent at his position. A trade asks something different — how much better your own lineup actually got. That’s deliberate: a trade is only worth what it changed for you.

What every manager actually started, against the best lineup their roster could have produced that week. Points left on the bench are the difference. Covers 2018–2025, regular season and winner’s bracket only.

Who won and lost their season at the draft table and on the waiver wire.

?How this works

One idea, one example. Thirty seconds.

• The big number is what the pick beat its price by. A pick at 3 is expected to return a great deal and a pick at 180 almost nothing, so each one is measured against the going rate for its slot that year — the same curve Draft Rankings sums across a whole class. Beneath it sits the raw figure it is built from: extra points, meaning points beyond what a free agent at the same position would have given you.
  Your TE scores 14.2. Best free TE scored 4.1.+10.1 extra

  Your QB scores 20.4. Best free QB scored 18.6.+1.8 extra
  Same twenty points on the scoreboard, wildly different weeks. Add up a season and that’s the number on the card.
• Which free agent? In a normal week the twelve teams start about 12 QBs, 29 RBs, 31 WRs and 12 TEs. So line the running backs up by what they scored that week: the top 29 were in somebody’s lineup, and number 30 was not. He’s the one anybody could have had.
• A draft pick is judged on the pick, not on what you did next. Whether you kept him, started him or cut him in week two does not enter it — that is the difference between this board and the waiver board below, which is entirely about what you did next. Kickers and defences are both judged here. Defences were left off until 15 August 2026, when correcting their scoring took a rebuilt defensive season from within about 12% of the real one to within about 2% — from a quarter of the whole gap between the best defence in a year and the twelfth, down to a twenty-fifth of it. Trades have their own section above, on their own yardstick.

From the draft

The pick furthest above the going rate for its slot, and the one furthest below — Draft Rankings with the sum taken off, so the two boards cannot disagree. Three names per position, so the board isn’t all quarterbacks; every season since 2014, where this used to start in 2018.

From the waiver wire

A pickup gets credit for what he scored while you kept him. A drop gets charged with everything he scored for other teams after you let him go — and claiming him back stops the bleeding, because from then on he’s scoring for you again. Every position counts here from 15 August 2026, kickers and defences included. What you gave up is measured against the best man at that position nobody was starting — and that man is now looked up across the whole NFL rather than among the players this league happened to be holding, which is both the right question and the reason kickers can be on the board at all.

Manager by manager

The same four boards for one manager at a time, six deep.