2021 NFL Draft Game Spreadsheet Template

It’s been one year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Last year, since March Madness and other sports at the time were cancelled, I started thinking about what other things I could do to fill in the void of not having any March Madness brackets to fill out. The answer came in a suggestion from a reader to create an NFL Draft game spreadsheet. I’ve updated the template for this year.

Inside this template I've listed the top 100 draft prospects according to ESPN. Each draft game player (and the template is currently setup to handle ten players) are randomly assigned ten future NFL players by using a randomize macro. The earlier your players get drafter the better, as the draft position counts for points and the lowest number of points wins!

The random number macro is pretty simple:

'define range of cells for random numbers

Dim Player1 As Range

Set Player1 = Range("AN2:AN101")

Player1.ClearContents

For Each a In Player1

Do

a.Value = (Int((100 * Rnd + 1)))

Loop Until WorksheetFunction.CountIf(Player1, a.Value) < 2

Next

Based on some good user feedback I added the option where each player can now try to predict which team will select their players for additional bonus points. Well, negative bonus points that is, as it subtracts points from your total score (remember, lowest score wins).

See how the Draft Game spreadsheet works in the video below:

Even if you have no interest in the NFL, football, or drafts, you can still learn a bit about Excel by examining the random number generator macro, or the vlookup and sumif formulas used. The scoreboard uses a “rank without ties” formula:

 =(IF(D3<>"",(RANK(D3,$D$3:$D$52)+COUNTIF(D$3:D3,D3)-1),""))

For now, the spreadsheet is setup to handle ten players. To add more, the formulas and macro will need to be modified. If enough people are interested in using this sheet, I will work on making it scalable so it can automatically adjust to the exact number of players.

2021 NFL Draft Game Spreadsheet Template.xlsm 

Let me know if you like this game or if you have any suggestions or questions.