So one question we need to look at is the draft day start. The default based upon some initial feedback will be Saturday morning, although I'll also see what the interest is on Friday morning (after round 1 over the night before) because by Saturday the NFL will be heading into round 4 before we got going. I need to load in the NFL order as the default for teams that don't make their picks and don't have their queue set up, so can't really start at the same time as the NFL draft because I need some time to load in the NFL results for our pick defaults.The NFL draft moves to primetime for the first time in 2010, with the first round taking place Thurs., April 22 at 7:30 p.m. ET, followed by the second and third rounds on Fri., April 23 at 6 p.m. ET. Rounds 4-7 will be held Sat., April 24 at 10 a.m. ET.
I was also reading through some of the comments from last year's draft. Some thought the first round dragged. We had time windows for the first time throughout, with I think most liking a set time they knew their pick would be up (3:00-3:15pm) but some others liking the old way that more mirrored being on the clock in the real draft with the timer resetting with each selection. It was 20 minutes for each time window for rounds 1 and 2 last year, and 15 minutes per pick time window in 3-7, and there seemed to be some interest last year in shortening those.
As always, we will have a draft queue for teams to pre-load their selections ahead of time and have the computer pick if they are away. I am going to look at some possible enhancement to that, and there was also some talk about trying to get in an "away" autopick where it could be set to automatically tell the computer to do the autopick immediately instead of waiting until the time window up, but that was more useful the old way with the clock reset each pick instead of the time windows where it doesn't help much to get ahead of the time windows because eventually will be a long wait if get too far ahead of the schedule.
The default position will be to stick with the time windows like last year but shortening them. 15 minutes for round 1-2, and 10 minutes for 3-7.
There might be some possibility too of having a mixed system where round 1 on day 1 could be the old way on the clock with the timer resetting after each pick in real time (as soon as pick X made, the next team on the clock for 15 minutes starting now), and then moving to scheduled time windows in rounds 2-7 the following days.