Alright, so running my fantasy football league, things can get messy. Especially setting up the divisions each year. Someone always thinks the divisions are stacked, or that I played favorites as the commish. Got tired of the whining, honestly.
I figured, why not make something that just does it randomly? Takes the decision outta my hands completely. No bias, just pure luck of the draw. Seemed like a simple enough idea.
So, I started messing around. First thing, obviously, I needed the list of all the team managers in our league. Pulled that straight from our group chat history. Just a plain list of names.
Then I had to think, how do I actually split these names up fair and square? The simplest thing I could think of was just shuffling the list, like a deck of cards. Get a totally random order. I remembered doing some super basic coding stuff a while back, thought maybe I could use that again.
Took me a bit to remember how to actually shuffle a list using the computer. Had to look it up, tried a few things. Kept getting weird results at first, or just errors popping up. Spent probably an hour just getting the shuffling part to work reliably. You know how it is, typos and forgetting simple commands.
Finally! Got the list shuffling correctly. Once that was done, the rest was pretty straightforward. We have 12 teams, and we wanted 3 divisions. So, the plan was: shuffle the 12 names, then just grab the first 4 for Division 1, the next 4 for Division 2, and the last 4 for Division 3. Simple chop-chop.
I put our actual team names into it and ran it a bunch of times. Looked pretty random each time. Different teams ended up together, no obvious pattern. Exactly what I wanted.
So now, instead of arguing about it for an hour on draft night, I just run my little generator thing. Takes like, two seconds. I paste the results into the chat. Done. People still complain about their schedules later, but hey, at least they can’t blame me for the divisions anymore. It’s all random chance now, just how it should be.
