Lets talk Fantasy Football website comparison

The Game Room
1

My league is looking in to switch fantasy football sites. For the past few years we have been using cbs’s site, which I can’t stand and have been lobbying against for years. Now that I am finally getting some traction, I now need to spearhead the migration. But what site to choose? There are so many, and I have only tried a couple of them. Here are my thoughts, please chime in with yours:

CBS: I hate absolutely everything about it. The pages are totally cluttered so its hard to find anything. Yet despite the data barf on the page, it is stupidly clunky. For example, it takes 2 clicks from the league home page just to see someone’s team. You can’t look ahead weeks to see matchups. The stat sorting page is a mess. It is also ridiculously expensive at $150. There is exactly 1 good thing about it that only a couple of other sites offer - it saves our history so you can go back and look at posts from years ago. Is that worth $150/year? I say no.

ESPN: I really wanted to like this, but it wound up falling short when we tested it out. The primary beef was that trade offers were totally buried. Football doesn’t have a lot of trading anyways so I suppose that isn’t a huge reason to avoid using it, but I recall it being pretty weak. That said, this site appeals to me for the same reason I like iTunes. I like the company behind it, I know they will put resources to it, update it regularly, respond to customer feedback, and in general care about it being good.

FanBall: Haven’t tried this one yet, but they seem like they are really on the fantasy tip. They have the best up to the minute player updates that I have seen online. Definitely worth investigating, although in the free fantasy era even $70 seems a touch steep.

Yahoo: Not flashy, but this site provides everything we need for fantasy football and it does it for free. Now that stattracker comes free I find it hard to come up with a compelling reason not to use it.

NFL.com: I know nothing about this site.

myfantasyleague.com: This is one I just found out about. It looks intriguing - keeps league history, highly customizable, good customer feedback, price comparable to fanball. I would definitely like to hear some first hand reports from this site.

So thats what I have. What site(s) do you use/recommend?

2

Yahoo is the only place I’ve ever played in fantasy leagues. It does everything I need done, and the price is right. Then again, I’m a very casual player, destined for middle of the pack finishes most years.

3

As long as Yahoo offers the scoring format your league needs, I see no reason not to use it.

4

The primary reason we might not use it is that a couple people in the league work at places that block it. Lame.

5

Unfortunately, I see more workplaces blocking access to fantasy sports. Luckily, football is unique since you don’t often need to make changes to a team. There aren’t any Wednesday day games.

I’ve played both Yahoo and ESPN and I give a slight nod to ESPN. My bias is probably based on ESPN’s mock drafts. I also found that Yahoo’s live scoring took a long time to load…

6

Interesting, I thought there would be stronger opinions about this subject. Guess fantasy football is so fun people don’t really care what site they use. I’m going to do some research on the subject this weekend and report my findings, if for posterity if nothing else.

7

Yahoo has always worked fine for me. We use ESPN for the SDMB auction league because yahoo doesn’t have an auction draft interface (and ESPN’s is very good), but we then import the results of that draft into the yahoo league so everyone has all their FF stuff in one place.

8

That’s as good a reason as any, as long as that’s the only site blocked.

Yahoo added auctions to their baseball options this year - I didn’t get a chance to try it out, but I’d think they’ll move it to football this year.

9

If they do, I’ll probably lobby for all my leagues to go auction this year. It’s just so much more fun a format.

10

Yeah it is no contest. Snake draft works well enough for fantasy baseball, but football is so top-heavy on the best players that it really demands an auction system, I am glad to see it getting rolled out and turning in to a defacto standard.

As for the quest, I am pushing for us to try out myfantasyleague.com. I like how it is an independent site and thus doesn’t have name-recognition to use as a crutch. It also just so happens to be having a special to get people to switch from cbs so now seems like a good time to check it out.

11

Yahoo all the way.

12

My main league used to be on CBS, but when they went pay for what we wanted, we jumped to Yahoo.

13

I play in three leagues and successfully lobbied all of them for a change from cbs/yahoo to fleaflicker.com and it is awesome, even though AOL bought them a year or so ago. Free site, very customizable, free real-time stats during games. I went for years with yahoo and cbs and they were generally ok but were for certain to generate at least 2-3 major complaints a year - nothing like that so far w this site.

14

Can you provide some examples of what it does better, and what sort of complaints your league would have so we know what sort of perspective you have?

15

Yahoo! is my recommendation. It is intuitive to use, the most casual players in our league can find what they need, and I have never had a complaint about the site from a usability standpoint.

And the price is right. My league uses the free option, and other than some folks wanting to have the live stat tracking, nothing has really compelled us to change. Granted, I am not in a league that is ultra competitive, but I’ve been in other leagues that are extremely competitive and Yahoo has always met my personal needs.

If you are going to jump from CBS (or whatever fantasy league), you will get the least complaints about Yahoo.

SFP

16

Yahoo was free last year with live stat tracking.

17

I can’t recommend which one to select, but reading this thread with interest because we are looking to switch in our league as well.

By the way, we are on Fanball, and I would not recommend it at all…

18

Yahoo FF 2010 just opened; time for commishes to renew your leagues.

Unfortunately they seem to have restricted draft times to 8:45pm Eastern at the latest. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon, or the left coasters may have to miss the first couple rounds of their yahoo drafts.

19

Has yahoo added a feature for people renewing leagues to let them keep their histories from years past? That is probably the only thing keeping me from demanding my league switch to it.

20

Yes, as of around 4 years ago, retroactive to at least 3 years before that.