Fantasy Football Draft Board Generator

Ideas
1

I needed a way to randomly order a list of people for my fantasy football league. This was pretty simple to do using RandomSample[], but the final ouput left something to be desired!

RandomSample[{"Jim", "Bob", "Dave"}, 3]
Out= {"Dave", "Bob", "Jim"}

So, wanting something that could be a little cleaner, I created a more robust function that actually creates the full draft list for nrounds, assuming you wanta snake (rather than linear) draft order.

DraftOrder[players_, rounds_] := {
  playerorder = RandomSample[players, Length[players]];
  Do[
   Print[Style[StringJoin["Round ", IntegerString[currentround]], 
     "Section"]]; 
   Do[
    prefacestring = 
     StringJoin["Draft pick number ", IntegerString[i], " goes to "];
    finalstring = 
     StringJoin[prefacestring, ToString[playerorder[[i]]]];
    Print[Style[finalstring, "Text"]], {i, 1, Length[players], 1}];
   playerorder = Reverse[playerorder];
   , {currentround, 1, rounds}]
  }
[/i][/i]

The function can then be called with

DraftOrder[{"Bill", "Jim", "Dave", "Sam", "Adam", "Matt"}, 18]

If anyone wants to lend a helping hand, there was one sticky issue I couldn’t work around. I wanted the rounds parameter to have a default value, so that if you only pass in a list of players it automatically gives you, say, 14 rounds. Using a function definition like

DraftOrder[players_, rounds_:1] :=

didn’t work, and I couldn’t seem to find a reason why.

Anyway, I hope someone besides me gets at least a little use out of this bit of code.

2 Likes
2

This seems to work for me:

DraftOrder[players_, rounds_: 10] := {playerorder = 
   RandomSample[players, Length[players]];
  Do[Print[
    Style[StringJoin["Round ", IntegerString[currentround]], 
     "Section"]];
   Do[prefacestring = 
     StringJoin["Draft pick number ", IntegerString[i], " goes to "];
    finalstring = 
     StringJoin[prefacestring, ToString[playerorder[[i]]]];
    Print[Style[finalstring, "Text"]], {i, 1, Length[players], 1}];
   playerorder = Reverse[playerorder];, {currentround, 1, rounds}]}

DraftOrder[{"Bill", "Jim", "Dave", "Sam", "Adam", "Matt"}]
3 Likes
3

Well, I’m not sure why that wasn’t working for me before, but I got it working by upgrading from 9.0.0 to 9.0.1.

It seems like a weird thing to be broken by missing that upgrade, but it fixed it.