Ranking Choices & Your Board

Fantasy Joes has two ranking games because draft prep and weekly football ask different questions.

• Draft rankings (preseason): six players appear at once. Choose the three you would draft first, in order. Finish the third choice and your full draft board updates.
• Weekly rankings (in season): choose between two players at the same position based on who will score more that week. These weekly rankings reset with new projections and use their own matchup receipts.

The six-player game is the main preseason loop. The weekly two-player game remains separate and uses player-by-player kickoff locks.

You start from consensus, not from zero

Your draft board starts in current half-PPR ADP order. Your weekly rankings start from that week's projections. You are never asked to type out 180 names or drag an empty sheet into order before the product becomes useful.

Each finished draft screen bends the board toward your opinions. If you stop early, the untouched parts keep their starting order. You are graded on the ranked list you finish with, not on whether any individual choice looked smart at the time.

How to play one draft screen

The six cards stay in place while you choose:

1. Tap the player you would draft first.
2. Tap the player you would draft second.
3. Tap the player you would draft third.

The gold 1, 2, and 3 marks show the order. Tap your most recent choice again to undo it. All three choices are required; the board updates automatically after the third.

Cards show personal rank, the gap from the current consensus rank, and half-PPR ADP. The six cards are displayed in ADP order so the screen is stable and scannable; display order does not decide how your answer is interpreted.

What one ordered top three tells the board

Suppose you choose A first, B second, and C third from players A through F. You directly said:

• A belongs above B, C, D, E, and F.
• B belongs above C, D, E, and F.
• C belongs above D, E, and F.

That is three human choices and 12 stated ranking relationships. You did not say whether D belongs above E or F, so Fantasy Joes does not invent an order among the unselected three.

The 12 relationships are normalized as one screen. They do not count like 12 separate taps, and your lifetime progress increases by three, not 12.

Fantasy Joes uses a hidden ranking score to translate those relationships into one ordered board. Expected choices make smaller adjustments; a choice that disagrees with your current board can move players more. Players you have compared less often can also move more than players you have settled repeatedly. The score is machinery, not another number you need to manage: your rank order is the product.

All 12 relationships from a screen save together. If the save fails, the same three choices remain available to retry instead of leaving a half-updated board.

How Fantasy Joes chooses the six

Each set stays inside a competitive neighborhood on your current board. Every card is within ten current ranks of the player the set is built around, so you are usually resolving a real tier question instead of comparing an obvious first-rounder with a deep bench player.

The game prefers players you have seen less often, but novelty never forces a bad, wide-gap set. It also avoids immediately repeating the previous six when another useful nearby set is available. As your answers move players, the neighborhoods move with your board.

Editing by hand

The ranking game is the fast path, not the only path. On your board you can:

• Drag any player to exactly the slot you want (until he's locked).
• Add a player in draft mode — see the swap rules below.
• Tap any player for his recent takes, stats, and matchup before deciding.
• Import a CSV to replace the preseason starting board.

Draft mode: add/drop is a swap

Want a deep sleeper who isn't on your board? Adding him swaps out the current bottom player at that position — the board never grows. The dropped player can still count against you at season's end if he goes on to matter (he stays in the scoring universe), which is exactly the trade-off you're accepting. Candidates come from the next players in the ADP pool, which deepens as the season approaches. Add/drop closes when your board snapshots (five days before Week 1).

Your draft board is snapshotted five days before Week 1 kickoff and graded all season. The snapshot freezes the ranked board, not the method you used to build it. Your live board can keep moving for real-life drafts after that copy is saved. At Week 1 kickoff, draft mode retires and your draft board becomes view-only.

Weekly mode is a separate matchup game

Weekly rankings ask "Who scores more this week?" and always compare players at the same position. Preseason top-three choices do not count as weekly matchups.

Two things manage your weekly board for you once games start:

Kickoff locks. Each NFL player freezes at his own kickoff — no more weekly matchups involving him, no moving him, and he's graded at the rank he held when his game started. The rest of your board stays live until each player's own game begins. There's no early-week full-board freeze; a Thursday game only locks the players in it. When every player at a position has kicked off, that position is closed for the week.

Out-player replacement. If a player is officially ruled out (Out, IR, Suspended, PUP), he's removed from that week's player pool on every board that has him — even after his game started, as long as he never played — and replaced by the highest-projected player not already on your board. The replacement enters at the lower of his projection slot or the removed player's slot, never higher than either. Players already on your board are never auto-moved; re-ranking around the news is your job (and big movers will start showing up in your weekly matchups so you can act fast). Late replacements only draw from players who haven't kicked off yet.

Two statuses that do not trigger removal: Questionable and Doubtful. Those players just get a status badge — playing them or fading them is your call.

Every removal and replacement is logged in This Week's Changes on your rankings page, so nothing happens silently. If the replacement step misses an officially out player and he never plays, he is excluded from scoring. Players who are not officially ruled out count at their actual score, even if that score is 0 — details in how scoring works.

Guests and accounts

You can build rankings without an account — progress is saved to your device, with no play cap. Creating a free account keeps your board everywhere, lets you claim a username, puts you on the leaderboard, and unlocks the draft kit (exports, imports, your public board page, and live Sleeper draft sync). Upgrading from guest to account keeps everything you've built.

One thing to know: importing a CSV replaces your editable draft rankings and clears the choice history used to refine them. Your lifetime activity count and any board copy already saved for grading stay intact. Import first, then use the ranking game to refine the imported order.