Import your league's history

Past seasons are what make RotoAlpha different from every other draft tool. One year of drafts tells you almost nothing about your league-mates. Ten years tells you who always reaches for a quarterback, who never spends on a kicker, and who runs out of money by the tenth nomination every single time.

Importing history is on the free tier, as is the rival tendency report it feeds.

Add a past season

A league holds one season per year, so history goes in one year at a time.

1. Go to League → Seasons and choose Add Season.
2. Choose Set up manually.
3. Set the year to the one you are recording.
4. Work through the setup wizard. For a completed year, the phase is post-season.

If the league's rules were different back then (a different roster shape, a different budget, a snake draft in the years before you switched to auction), enter what was true that year. Each season carries its own settings, and the rival reports are more honest for it.

Fill the year in

The season's Season Data page lists everything a year can hold, in the order it is usually gathered, with a mark against what is already recorded. Work down it. Not every card applies to every year, and the page says which ones do not.

Most of these accept a paste or a CSV, with the same column-matching and preview steps described in paste your draft results and import data from a CSV.

If you only do one thing, do the draft. Draft history is what the tendency reports are written from. Standings and weekly results add depth; the draft is the substance.

Make sure managers line up across years

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the history is worth anything.

Each season records its own managers, so the same person can arrive under a slightly different name in different years. Until those are linked, RotoAlpha sees several people who each drafted once instead of one person who has drafted for a decade.

Open Managers under League in the sidebar (not the season's manager list, the league-wide one). It shows each manager with the years they appear in, and gives you:

• Merge to fold two entries into one person, when the same manager arrived under two names.
• Split to pull years apart, when one name was actually two different people (a team that changed hands, most often).
• Rename to settle on the name you want shown everywhere.
• This is me to mark your own entry, which is how RotoAlpha knows which team is yours in every season.

Managing identity across years is free, so there is no reason to leave it half-done.

What you get once it is in

• Rival dossiers, one per manager, written from their real draft history.
• Tendency reports showing the patterns each manager repeats.
• Career head-to-head records, where you have entered weekly results.

You do not need every year to make this worthwhile. Three or four seasons are already enough for the patterns to show.

Doing it in stages

You do not have to import everything in one sitting, and nothing is spoiled by coming back later. The Season Data page keeps a count of what is recorded per year, so it is easy to see where you left off.

A reasonable order, if you are working through a long history: settings and managers for every year first (they are quick), then the drafts, then everything else if you want it.