Today was draft day for the main Fantasy Football league I play in. Unlike most leagues, we do an in-person auction draft with a salary cap to fill rosters rather than the traditional snake draft. This format is great, but the downside is that it eliminates a lot of software out there to help on draft day. Granted, there are commercial packages out there that can help you out, but this year we found a simple, free solution that gets even better if you have an Internet connection and multiple computers where you draft.

One of the owners in the league created a simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing all the teams with all of their roster slots along with a simple set of formulas to record total cap spent and remaining. This way, he just needed to record it as the draft went on and it could be emailed out.

That worked well, but put a lot of pressure on him. Most years, I also ran the big draft board with stickers, which at least meant two people aside from the commish were logging all the picks and points. With my recent departure from ESPN, though, I didn’t have a free source for the board and forgot to order it. My bad! So, to help out this year, I tried taking the spreadsheet and sharing it with Google Docs. Since we had Internet access at the draft location, and three people with laptops, plus 1 remote user, we were able to collaboratively share entry responsibilities among two of us with another 2 verifying the data as we entered it.

This solution worked amazingly well. The other folks that had the spreadsheet open would see the changes as I typed them, within a second or two, and we were able to even invite “spectators” into our draft to watch along. The spectators only had read-only access, which I was able to control as I invited people into the document.

Couple of thoughts: This is literally how simple a day-of-draft tool needs to be. No fancy analysis, no extra features. Just tally up the spending, record the picks, and know the teams and roster layouts. All it needed was a list of players with autocomplete and that would be it. Oh, and did I mention that Google Docs can import Excel and Word documents along with a number of other formats. It also exports the same for those folks who would rather have an offline copy.

You can check out our draft spreadsheet on Google Docs, and see if you can make one for your league.

And a note to the peeps back at ESPN: This is the easiest way to build this! No need for anything fancy, and combined with Google Gears, you’d have a simple offline/online application with just the browser.