Draft Queue and Autopick

The draft queue is a small but important safety net. Drafts run on a clock, and life happens — kids interrupt, work calls, the wifi cuts out. Without a queue, the autopick falls back to a generic "best player available" ranking that may not match the team shape you're building. With a queue, you decide in advance which players autopick should grab on your behalf.

How the queue works

• It's personal and per-draft. Your queue is your own list — every team manages their own, and you can't see anyone else's. Each draft has its own queue tied to the DraftQueue model in the database.
• You order it. Players are listed top-to-bottom in your preference order. Drag a player up to prioritize them; drag them down to deprioritize. The top entry is the one autopick will reach for first.
• It updates live. Reorder while the draft is running — your changes save the instant you drop a player into a new position. You don't have to commit anything.
• It persists across reconnections. Close your browser tab, reopen it, log back in — your queue is exactly where you left it. The draft engine reads from the database, not from your session.

What autopick actually does

When your pick clock hits zero before you confirm a selection:

1. The draft engine reads your queue, top to bottom.
2. It picks the highest-ranked player who is still available. Players already drafted (by any team, even since you last reordered) are skipped automatically — you don't have to clean up after picks.
3. The pick is recorded as a normal pick, the same as if you'd clicked Confirm yourself. It counts against your roster and (if applicable) against your salary cap and position limits.
4. If your queue is empty OR every player in your queue has already been drafted, the engine falls back to the league's "best player available" ranking and picks the top of that.

Loading your queue before the draft

Open the draft room before the start time and use the queue tab to pre-load your top targets. You can also reorder from the available-player list during the draft — every player row has a "queue" action that adds them to the end of your queue or moves them to a specific position.

A solid pre-draft queue covers more than just your first pick. If you're picking 8th in a 12-team snake draft, queue your top 25 to 30 players. The first eight are usually gone by the time it gets to you, so the depth helps autopick make a sensible choice if you're disconnected for the entire opening round.

Queue + auction drafts

Auction drafts use the queue slightly differently. Instead of "who gets picked when you go AFK," the queue in an auction draft holds:

• Nominees, with target opening bids — when it's your turn to nominate, the system can grab the top of the queue.
• Watch targets, with maximum-bid amounts — the auto-bidder will bid up to your set max on these players during their nomination window.

The auto-bidder is opt-in per player; it doesn't bid blindly across your whole queue. See Auction Draft Walkthrough for the bidding flow.