Okay, so today I decided to dive into building a “pro football draft simulator.” I’ve always been fascinated by the NFL draft, and I figured, why not try to make a simplified version of it myself? It seemed like a fun little project to mess around with.
I started by just brainstorming what I wanted this thing to do. Basically, I needed it to:
- Have a list of teams.
- Have a list of players with different positions and ratings.
- Let teams take turns picking players.
- Maybe show some basic info about the drafted players.
I decided to go the easy to use and simple program, just to keep things simple. I started by creating a few lists to represent the NFL teams,I created simple team names.
Next, I made up a bunch of fake players.I gave them names, positions (QB, RB, WR, etc.), and a simple overall rating number.I wanted a big to pick from.
The Draft Process
The core of the simulator is the draft loop. So I set it up like this:
- I made a loop that ran for a certain number of rounds (like a real draft!).
- Inside that loop, another loop went through each team, one by one.
- For each team’s turn, I initially just had the program randomly pick a player from the available player * wasn’t very realistic.
- Once a player was picked, I removed them from the available player list, so they couldn’t be picked again.
After each pick,I make it show the team name, the player’s name, position, and * some basic output to see what was happening.
Making it (Slightly) Smarter
Random picks are boring, though. I wanted the teams to at least try to fill their needs. So I added a very basic “team needs” system. Each team got a list of positions they were supposedly “weak” at.
Then, instead of picking completely randomly, I had the program look for players matching the team’s needed positions first. If it found some, it would pick the highest-rated one among them. If not, then it would pick a random player.
Running the Thing
I ran the simulator a few times, and it was… well, it worked! It went through the rounds, teams picked players, and I got a list of drafted players at the end. The “team needs” system seemed to make a little bit of a difference, but it was still pretty basic.
Overall, this was a fun little afternoon project. It’s definitely not a perfect NFL draft simulator, but it was cool to build something from scratch and see it actually run. I might add more features to it later, like maybe trading picks or a more complex player rating system. It shows how to make a simple program.