Time Machine: Football
Choose a player pool. Every reveal gives you one team and one pick.
How football drafts work
Eight picks. Eight roster spots.
Reveal one random NFL team and season, then take one of its players for an open spot, or take that team’s whole defense. Fill QB, RB, two WRs, TE, FLEX, K and DEF. A running back, wide receiver or tight end can fill FLEX. Ends from the early seasons can fill WR, TE or FLEX.
Each player can appear once. Time Machine and Super Bowl Drafts reveal each franchise once, including relocated teams. Year Draft reveals each team from the chosen season once. Franchise Draft uses different seasons of one team. A team you shuffle past counts as shown.
Only Daily has a Pick Clock
The Daily has one ranked play per Eastern day for signed-in accounts, on the same teams for everyone in a different order, plus three unranked plays for anyone on different teams. Each team has a 30-second Pick Clock. At zero, the server picks an eligible player or defense and reveals the next team. Leaving the page doesn’t pause the clock. Your best eligible ranked record counts for that date.
Time Machine, Year, Franchise and Super Bowl Drafts are untimed. Each draft has one extra shuffle when another team can still finish the roster.
Real season statistics
Players show their recorded regular-season totals with that team. A defense shows points allowed per game, that season’s league average and its league rank. Kickers show games played and made/attempted field goals and PATs. Unknown attempts stay unavailable. The collection covers 1950 to 2025. Quarterbacks need 100 pass attempts, or 60 if they led the team in attempts, running backs and fullbacks 50 carries plus receptions, wide receivers and ends 15 receptions and tight ends 10 receptions for the team that season. Seasons with incomplete source statistics are held out.
Your finished roster plays a 17-game season under DreamDraft’s game model. The record is a game estimate. It doesn’t predict or reproduce a real NFL result.
Rankings keep each format separate. More wins rank higher, and equal records share a rank only when their team ratings also match. Each account or guest browser keeps its best eligible result per pool. View football rankings.
Data sources and coverage
- nflverse data releases (CC BY 4.0): 1999 to 2025 schedules and player statistics
- FiveThirtyEight NFL game history (MIT): Team records and points allowed, 1950 to 1998
- Pro-Football-Reference: Original source of the player statistics for 1950 to 1998, compiled in the two Kaggle datasets below
- NFL Football Player Stats (Kaggle, from Pro-Football-Reference) (CC0): Player game logs, 1950 to 1998
- NFL Fantasy Data (Kaggle, from Pro-Football-Reference) (Apache 2.0): Positions and season totals used to check the game logs, 1970 to 1998
- NFL.com career kicking statistics, captured by NFL Statistics Scrape: Verified kicker season totals before 1999; unavailable values remain unknown.
Seasons from 1999 on use nflverse data (CC BY 4.0). Earlier player statistics use Pro-Football-Reference game logs and NFL.com career kicking tables captured in public datasets. Earlier team records use FiveThirtyEight's NFL game history. DreamDraft is not affiliated with the NFL, Pro-Football-Reference or Sports Reference.
- Regular season only.
- Quarterbacks need 100 pass attempts, or 60 if they led the team in attempts, running backs and fullbacks 50 carries plus receptions, wide receivers and ends 15 receptions and tight ends 10 receptions for the team that season.
- From 1999, each player keeps the position nflverse lists most often for that team that season. Earlier positions come from Pro-Football-Reference. Fullbacks count as running backs. Ends from the early seasons can fill wide receiver or tight end.
- A team defense is rated from regular-season points allowed per game against that season's league average and ranked within its league. AFL defenses from 1960 to 1969 are compared with the AFL.
- Super Bowl winners from the 1966 season on. Earlier NFL and AFL champions are not marked yet.