Fantasy Sports Blogger

With the start of the fantasy football season fast approaching, there is a rush to get your league members’ commitments, find the right draft information and inevitably identify the right site to run your league.  Let’s roll back the calendars…oh 15 years ago…and recall the primary methodology used to collect the draft picks on draft day, make transactions and calculate the weekly scores.  Although it seems ancient today, there was some fun in writing everything on paper and faxing/emailing the details around each week.  However, a few real geniuses out there got together and decided there was a better way to do this.  Hence, league web-hosting was born a few years later.  Skip back to the future and we now know there are dozens of choices available to the average league today.  I want to take you through a few that I’ve used or researched in the next few days to help you make that same decision.

First, I highly recommend collecting a few important parameters about your league into account.  How much money does your league want to invest into a site (Free, $50, $100+)?  How complex is your league’s rules/scoring system?  What functionality do I need from the site (draft, transactions, waiver wire, score calculation, etc.)?

Once you know where you stand with those items, you can move forward with evaluating the sites.  Tomorrow, we’ll start our reviews by looking at Yahoo.

Wow, that was a great Superbowl… some 5+ months ago.  Is it me or is the NFL offseason the longest of the major sports?  Anyways, hope springs eternal as all 32 teams approach the start of their camps this month and we approach the beginning of our fantasy preparation.  Now some of you I bet watched hours of the NFL Combine and you didn’t move from your recliner for 2 days while watching and evaluating the NFL draft results in April.   

What did I do?  Funny you should ask …or care for that matter…I watched about 5 minutes of the combine and maybe 45 min of the draft.  I read the Mel Kiper grades and I picked through the blogs and articles of the so-called experts.  But I managed to fit in time for stuff like my job, my kids, my wife, relatives, a few old friends, a few new friends and some new-old friends (Facebook, can’t explain the fascination with finding people that I didn’t care to keep up with 10-15-20 years ago but search anxiously for now) while I played golf thrice and herniated a disk in my back.  A full offseason.  

Now it’s time for the 2 most important pre-draft activities for yourself and your league.  First, the obvious is finding that beloved and trusted source of draft rankings in order to plan out the 15-16 rounds of your upcoming draft.  For that, there are many methods and tools that I’ll discuss in the next few weeks.  Second, a more immediate need for new leagues and tough decision for old ones, is the impending choice of league websites.  (Note: if anyone is still using pen/paper for the administration of your league this year, you’re probably not the target audience for my blog; think about it.)  I also plan to discuss some of those options ranging from the free ones like Yahoo to the ones that cost some dinero like Web League Manager.   Anyways, it’s time to crack the knuckles, stretch the back and renew your Sunday Ticket orders (unless you’re like me and made the switch from DirecTv to U-Verse for the savings).  See you in the next post….