SuperCoach Draft expert Paige Cardona reveals her tips and advice to holding the best Draft Day experience
SuperCoach Draft is an alternative season-long campaign in SuperCoach that offers something different, keeping leagues and teams unique all year round. Here’s an expert’s tips on setting up your own draft.
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SuperCoach Draft is an alternative season-long campaign in SuperCoach that offers fans something different – if you’re a fan of American-based fantasy games you’ll be familiar with it, as you engage in draft style formats that keep leagues and teams unique all year round.
The aim of the game is to take on the role of an AFL list manager, carefully piece together your one-of-a-kind team in a league of up to 18 and coach your roster throughout the season to Premiership glory.
To take part in SuperCoach Draft, you don’t need to be a SuperCoach expert – at Fox Sports, we’ve got your drafting strategies, trade advice and waiver wire pickups covered week to week.
But for the seasoned, rusted-on AFL fans, it’s the chance to flex your AFL knowledge and select role players as much as your top-line guns to create a team that can take you to the ultimate bragging rights.
STEP 1: REGISTER FOR SUPERCOACH
If you haven’t registered for SuperCoach 2020, then that’s your first port of call.
STEP 2: CREATE OR JOIN A LEAGUE
In order to play SuperCoach Draft, you must create or join a league. Your league can be set to public (so that anybody can jump in and join) or private where you can control the exclusive invitations to friends, colleagues or family. If you’ve been sent a unique six-digit league code by your league’s commissioner, simply follow click the ‘Join League’ tab.
STEP 3: CUSTOMISE YOUR LEAGUE SETTINGS
If you’ve created your own league (and thus becoming the almighty commissioner) you can run your league as a democracy or a dictatorship. That is, you can choose to input the settings and the rest of your league goes along with it or, alternatively, start a group chat and come to a happy medium with your fellow coaches as to how your league should run.
The main settings include;
Team League name
Draft date and time
League size (4 – 20 teams)
Team size (12 – 22 players)
Draft Selection time
Draft Style
Captains on / off
Finals campaign slots (top 4, 6, 8 etc)
How often each team will play each other
Rolling lockout on / off
Choice of skipping bye rounds (Rounds 12 -14)
Auto emergencies
Trading rules
Commonly, Draft leagues are set up with captains turned off, are held in a snake format and teams have 90 seconds to make a selection or an auto-pick occurs. League sizes vary as do team sizes, but for the full draft experience, having a minimum of 12 teams with 22 players to select makes drafting as well as the entire season quite entertaining. Set your finals series to the top six and let the games begin!
Allowing coaches in your league to trade players is an absolute must as it adds to the overall experience. Particularly when you get savvy coaches offloading three players for one gun.
PRO TIP: If you’re a hardcore fan then we’d recommend going the whole hog to really test your knowledge. The maximum number of teams in SuperCoach Draft is 20 and maximum player configurations is 22 making for a league of 440 unique players!
STEP 4: CREATE DRAFT SELECTION FORMAT
This can be a bit of a mouthful to wrap your brain around, so we’ll break it down like this. There are three different draft styles:
SNAKE
The most traditional and widely-used draft format in Fantasy Draft games is snake format. It works like this: the team with the No. 1 pick in a 10-team league will then have the last pick of the second round.
For example, if you take Brodie Grundy at No. 1, then your team will not pick again until No. 19. The downside of this format is the time you have to wait in between picks; the upside is that every time you make a selection, you’ll get back-to-back selections if you have first or last pick. In this instance, if you have pick 1 then you’ll next select a player at pick 19 and 20, giving you three picks inside the top 20 and a huge leg-up on your rivals when it comes to building out key field positions.
LINEAR
This is the exact format the AFL National raft follows. If you Pick at No. 1 in a 10-league team, your next pick will be at pick 11 to begin Round 2.
BANZAI
The banzai format is like a snake format that is until the end of Round 2, but instead of reversing again in Round 3, the selections stay the same as Round 2. It then returns to a regular snake order. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. It means a player with pick No. 1 in a 10-team league will have pick 20, 30 and 31.
STEP 5: PRE-DRAFT SETUP
Once the league has been finalised with the number of teams and playing positions and your draft order has been established, it’s time to set up your pre-draft ranking strategies. For the serious drafter, this is exactly what AFL list managers do in the lead up to the National Draft.
List managers do their due diligence, set up spreadsheets and put together their rankings on who they rate overall, and then by position. Just like the AFL Draft, there are always players who fall through to your pick that you might’ve thought you wouldn’t get a look at.
If you’re picking at pick 6, then you can probably rule out the likes of Brodie Grundy, Max Gawn and Lachie Whitfield. But somebody like a Jack Macrae, Lachie Neale or Patrick Cripps might just slip through to land you a solid first-round pick. Even with your known selection in hand, it’s worthwhile rating players you think might slip through. If you go in with a strong draft strategy, you’ll bound to execute a more even and competitive team rather than selecting a team on the fly.
Fox Footy will have complete draft rankings, strategy guides and other valuable drafting content to help you formulate your own rankings which will help you determine which players could fall at your next pick. Keeping this guide available will give you a leg up on your rivals.
STEP 6: DRAFT DAY
It’s the day of days and riddled with anticipation and excitement. Who is going where, and who might slide? There will be sleepers and breakout contenders you’ll be hoping to land mid-draft that might blossom into key pillars of your team, but draft day always throws up some wild moments.
Choose carefully, have printed out versions of your draft rankings beside you, and tick off players as they’re selected – just like AFL recruiters do on draft day.
Ensure any players on long term injury lists (EG: Tom Mitchell in 2019) are removed from your rankings in case an auto-selection gets used on a player who won’t play.
Most importantly, ensure you’ve got access to good Wi-Fi and you’ve got a cold beverage at the ready.
The best type of draft day experience is having your league all together, drafting and on the clock. The psych-outs, the banter … the tantrums! It’s all encompassing.
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STEP 7: WHEELING AND DEALING
At the completion of your draft, trading and waiver wire pick-ups will commence, usually within 24 hours. If you’re weak in a position or simply just love a certain player that you missed out on, it’s time to start devising a trade plan.
The commissioner can select to approve league trades in the interest of league fairness. It deters teams who’ve bombed out in the season from offloading their gun players to a grand final contender and thus creating an imbalance in the league; or as we call it – league collusion!
For the best draft experience, it’s recommended you engage in trading and always keep an eye on the waiver wire pick-ups. Every year there are stories about players who’ve been overlooked in the draft proper, only to burst out in the season and become season-long high scorers; Ricky Henderson in 2019, anyone? Nobody saw that coming!
COMMISSIONER’S TIPS AND TRICKS GUIDE
TIP 1: The Commish recommends in the lead up to your private SuperCoach Draft, that you join a public league. If you’ve never played Draft before, consider this as a test run to help you wrap your head around the process. If you’re a seasoned drafter, then it’ll help you establish where you might be able to take players throughout your draft. Think of it as a rehearsal before the big day.
TIP 2: Although the option is available to make use of captains, this does create an unfair advantage for teams who pick inside the first six selections. The Commish recommends captains be turned off not just for fairness, but to really test the steel of all competitors.
Tip 3: League size is everything. The smaller the league, the better access to players and the easier the draft. The bigger the league and higher amount of players on the field, the more strategy and risks involved. As such, the Commish recommends two different draft styles.
Newcomers: If you’re new to SuperCoach Draft, then limit your draft to 6-8 team leagues and a field set up of four defenders, five midfielders, one ruck and four forwards with bench spots for each line. This is a great introduction to the game and your team is likely to post competitive scores each week.
Returning Drafters: If you fancy yourself and your league compatriots as having a strong AFL knowledge base of players and teams, then the Commish recommends a 12-20 team league with a full team of 22. This creates a great strategy and forces you to select players in the draft you wouldn’t usually consider as you’ll rely on role-players to ensure you can field a full team each week. Furthermore, this opens up the game to greater trading and you can bet your bottom dollar the waiver wire dumps and pickups will be running hot!
Tip 4: Figuring out the OOM (order of merit) of your draft order can be a difficult part of the process. Because of this, there are a number of things you can do. This can be done as simply as picking names out of a hat, but another quirky way of doing this is choosing a country horse racing meet and assigning each team a horse in the race. Not only will you have your league watching a race 5 at Ararat on a Monday at 3pm in the afternoon, but it’s just another fun element of the drafting experience. The finishing positions of each horse will determine your selection order on draft day.
Tip 5: Hold a draft day with your mates. The Commish recommends going to your local watering hole or holding a backyard barbecue where the banter becomes a huge part of the drafting process. Use your phone, tablet or laptop, gather around with drinks, snacks and your best trash talk and let the fun and games begin! If you can’t all be in the one place, then hooking up video conference or a group phone call will add to the chaos.
Tip 6: If you’re a close group of mates who regularly play SuperCoach Draft, considering pitching in for a league trophy to be made up for the winner. It adds further incentive throughout the year and years to come to not only win, but back up your efforts.
Tip 7: If your league is held prior to the beginning of the Marsh Cup Community Series preseason competition, you’ll need to keep your finger on the pulse. Chances are that players who were overlooked in the draft really boom in the preseason and go from being fringe or depth players for their club to be starting 22 options. This applies to seasoned recruits as well as freshly-minted draftees in their first season. We recommend holding your SuperCoach Draft one week out from the beginning of the AFL season to account for any preseason injuries.
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Originally published as SuperCoach Draft expert Paige Cardona reveals her tips and advice to holding the best Draft Day experience