Mock drafts and draft plans

A mock draft is the cheapest way to find out that your plan does not survive contact with a real room. RotoAlpha's mocks are free, and you do not need an account to start one.

Start a mock

Choose Mock Draft in the left sidebar, or go to the mock draft page directly. The setup asks three things.

Who you are drafting against

• Ten managers with history. Every seat is a manager with years of real draft history behind them, modeled on a real 20-year league. You can scout each one before you pick, watch their tendencies show up on the board as the draft runs, and see in the recap exactly who you got ahead of. This is the room to use if you want the rehearsal to feel like a league rather than a ranking exercise.
• Clean preset room. Standard bots drafting on current average draft position. Choose your own league size and scoring and run a straight rehearsal of the board.

The team count is a question only in the clean room. The ten managers carry tendencies measured in a ten-team snake, and those numbers do not transfer to a different size, so the room stays at ten.

Your draft slot

Pick the seat you will actually be drafting from, or leave it as Not sure yet and RotoAlpha assigns one.

Scoring

Use a preset, or set your own point values. If your league is already in RotoAlpha, starting the mock from inside the league carries its settings in.

In the room

The room is built differently for a desktop and for a phone, on purpose. On a desktop you get the plan rail, the board, and a three-pane player cockpit. On a phone you get a one-thumb pick list with the board, your roster, and the strategist as sheets you pull up. Both are the same draft.

The AI strategist is there on every pick, in both rooms, free. Ask it what it would do, or why it disagrees with you.

After the mock

Every completed mock gets an honest letter grade and a written recap: what you built, where you got value, and where the room got ahead of you. An account is what saves those. Without one the mock is playable but not kept.

Draft plans

A draft plan is what a mock leaves behind: a strategy you can name, test, and reuse instead of re-deciding it every August. Find them under Draft Plans.

A plan carries:

• An archetype, the shape of the strategy: Balanced, Zero-RB, Hero-RB, Robust-RB, Elite-TE, or Late-Round-QB.
• Constraints: for each position, the earliest and latest round you are willing to take one.
• A win target, the projected point total the plan is aiming at, drawn from what actually won leagues rather than from a format preset.

Open a plan and you see the runs behind it: every mock played on this revision of the plan, and how each one finished against the target. Run a mock with this plan starts another. A plan with no runs says so plainly, because a plan you have not tested is a hypothesis.

Change a constraint and the plan takes a new revision, so results stay attached to the version of the plan that produced them.

What this costs

Mock drafts, the strategist inside them, the grade, and the recap are free. There is a limit on how many free mocks you can run in a week, and the season pass lifts it. Draft plans are free to keep and to run mocks against; editing their constraints is part of the pass.

See what is free and what the pass adds.