Building Fantasy Football Draft Prep

What it is

Fantasy Football Draft Preparation is a local draft board I built to replace my annual hand-built spreadsheet. I save my leagues and scoring, pull or import projections, see who is actually valuable under my rules, and export a CSV for draft day. This isn’t a public app yet. It runs on my machine.

How I built it

I started from the same painful yearly loop: research, reshape rankings, and stitch a spreadsheet before the draft. Without an engineering playbook, I opened Cursor and built the smallest useful version of that loop into a real app: leagues, scoring, a board, and an export.

The hard part wasn’t a pretty table. It was teaching the app that “good player” depends on my league. Different scoring and roster shapes change the board. So the app recalculates projected points and value from the settings I save, instead of pretending one public ranking fits everyone.

I also needed a path that doesn’t depend on a paid data key. I can upload or drop in projection CSVs I already download, and the board still rebuilds for my scoring. News and optional digests sit beside the board so research isn’t a second tab scavenger hunt.

What I learned

What stuck with me wasn’t fantasy theory. It was how to turn a recurring personal chore into software with AI.

I learned how to stand up a local web app with a small database on my machine. I learned that draft value is league-specific, so the product has to recalculate for my scoring instead of copying a generic list. I learned how to import messy projection files and still get a usable board. I learned how to use Cursor to go from “I hate this spreadsheet every August” to something I can open and draft with.

The biggest lesson: if the old process only works because I remember the quirks, the app has to encode those quirks, or I’m just staring at someone else’s rankings again.