Projects /the-football-draft
The Football Draft
The platform that runs the weekly re-draft college fantasy league I have played in with friends for over a decade. Every week is a brand new snake draft from the entire NCAA pool, and real game stats score it automatically once Saturday is over. No mainstream provider supports the format, so I built the thing that runs our game: player research, matchup tags, an AI league assistant, and a records book going back years.
Why this exists
Every mainstream fantasy platform assumes you draft a roster in August and live with it until January. My league has never played that way. Every week is a brand new draft from the entire NCAA FBS pool, five slots, usually narrowed to a rotating set of conferences so nobody just re-drafts the same three stars every Saturday. ESPN discontinued college fantasy years ago and nothing that replaced it supports a format like ours, so we had two options: change how we play, or build it.
The league is much older than the app. This version is a .NET 9 Blazor rewrite of the ASP.NET MVC5 app that ran it before, and it carries the original database forward in place, so a pick somebody made a decade ago is still live in the product. That history turned out to be the best feature in it. The records book, the all-time leaderboards, and the head to head rivalry pages are what people actually open in the off-season, when there is nothing to draft.
How a week goes
An admin sets the draft order and then mostly stops working. The draft window opens on its own against the real kickoff schedule and locks itself at the first kickoff. Members draft in the browser or entirely by text message, which is how the league played for years before phones were good enough for a real UI. After the games, stats come in from the CollegeFootballData API and the league's own scoring rules turn them into points. Top score that week gets a win.
The rest is research and trash talk. There is a player hub that will profile any college player, not just the ones somebody drafted, a draft value board, matchup tags that tell you whether a guy has a smash spot or a trap game, a transfer portal board for who entered and left the pool, and an assistant you can ask "how did I do against Dave last season" and get a real answer from, because it reads your own league's data through fixed tools rather than making things up.
The stack
.NET 9 and Blazor WebAssembly on Azure, EF Core against Azure SQL, MudBlazor for the UI, SignalR so the board updates live while everyone is picking, Azure Communication Services for the SMS side, ECharts for the charts, and Stripe for the part where a commissioner outside my league can run one of their own.
Built solo with heavy AI assistance, same as AlgoForgeX. This one is the fun project though. The users are a handful of friends yelling in a group chat on a Saturday, which turns out to be an extremely effective QA process. Nobody files a bug report faster than someone whose running back just scored the wrong number of points.
No money touches gameplay. No entry fees, no pots, no payouts. It is just the league.
Live at thefootballdraft.com.