Paste your draft results

Pasting is the quickest way to get a draft into RotoAlpha. You copy the draft results from wherever your league drafted, paste them into a box, and check what was read before anything is written.

Where to do it

Open Draft Results in the left sidebar and choose Import Results…, then pick Copy & paste. Select your league's draft results wherever they live, copy them, paste into the box, and choose Read paste →.

What a paste should look like

RotoAlpha reads a table: one pick per line, with cells separated by tabs or by runs of two or more spaces. Most draft recaps copy out of a page in roughly this shape already, so in practice you select the recap, copy, and paste.

A snake draft usually copies out looking something like this:

Round   Pick    Player                       Team
1       1       Ja'Marr Chase (Cin - WR)     Bench Mob
1       2       Bijan Robinson (Atl - RB)    Gridiron Ghosts
1       3       Justin Jefferson (Min - WR)  Two Minute Warning

An auction draft carries a price instead of a pick number:

Player                          Salary  Team
Ja'Marr Chase (Cin - WR)        $61     Bench Mob
Bijan Robinson (Atl - RB)       $58     Gridiron Ghosts
Justin Jefferson (Min - WR)     $54     Two Minute Warning

Two things are worth knowing about how that is read:

• The player cell is unpacked for you. Ja'Marr Chase (Cin - WR) becomes a name, a real-life team, and a position. You do not need to split it into separate columns first.
• "Team" in a draft recap usually means the fantasy team. RotoAlpha assumes the team column is the manager who drafted the player, and takes the real-life team from inside the player cell. That is nearly always what a recap means, but it is worth a glance at the preview.

A header line is optional. Pick numbers, round numbers and prices come across if they are there and are simply left out if they are not.

Some sites copy out as the draft board itself rather than a table: each pick as a few short lines (the pick number, the player, the position and team), with the manager's name at the top of each column. That shape is read too. Paste it as-is, manager headings included, and select the whole board if you can. A full board lets RotoAlpha work out each pick's overall number, where a partial one only says the round.

One more thing worth knowing: when a paste doesn't read correctly, RotoAlpha keeps a copy of the pasted text so we can teach the importer that format. The copy is the text alone, stored privately, and it isn't tied to your account.

The preview is the safety net

Nothing is written until you confirm. After the paste is read you go through two more steps.

Match the columns. RotoAlpha guesses which column is which and shows you the guess. Player and manager are required; price is required as well for an auction draft, unless you tick the box saying this source never recorded prices (true of plenty of older leagues, where the commissioner wrote down who got whom and nothing else).

An auction import tells you here that no draft order will be recorded. That is deliberate: a results page numbers picks for display, not in the order they were won, so a recorded order would be fiction. Map the pick column yourself if your source really does track it.

Preview the matches. Every row is shown with the player it matched, tagged exact, fuzzy or none. You get counts at the top, a filter to look at just the fuzzy or unmatched ones, and a one-click way to accept all the fuzzy matches once you have eyeballed them. Rows with no player chosen are skipped, and you are told how many. Rows with no manager are skipped too.

You are also warned about the things that are usually mistakes:

• Players the season does not have yet, which will be created.
• Players that already have a recorded pick, which are left alone unless you choose to re-import them.
• Prices in the paste when the season is set up as a snake draft, or the reverse. Usually this means the season's draft type is set wrong. Fix it in Settings and come back.

Confirm, and the picks are written.

When a line does not parse

An unreadable line is skipped with a warning rather than failing the whole paste, and the warnings are listed above the preview. So a paste that mostly worked is worth keeping: fix the handful of odd lines by hand afterwards on the Draft page.

Notes are shown separately from warnings. A note is the paste telling you something true, such as a pick that never happened, rather than a line RotoAlpha failed to read.

If pasting will not work

Some sources do not copy cleanly out of a page. In that case export what you have to a spreadsheet and import it as a CSV instead. Both paths converge one step in: the column-matching and preview steps are the same.