We’re happy to announce some new functionality on the MyFantasyLeague.com site – now, you can enter your league history back as far as the 1990 season!
To enter your historical league information, you have a few options:
If you’d like to just enter league championship and award related items, you can do that via your “For Commissioners > Setup > History Setup > League Champions & Awards Setup” page – this is the quickest option, but only gets the most basic information into the site.
If you happened to have a historical league in FFLM, you can follow these instructions for importing your historical league from FFLM to MyFantasyLeague.com.
If you’re really motivated, and want to hand-enter detailed historical league information for a prior season, just go to the “For Commissioners > Setup > History Setup > General League History Setup” page, and you’ll see a link there allowing you to set up a historical league for any season, 1990 to present, on MyFantasyLeague.com
Hopefully you’ll find these new options useful for maintaining your full league history on MyFantasyLeague.com!
We’re happy to announce a new feature for fantasy football leagues that use Injured Reserve. If you go to the “Injured Reserve Setup” page, you’ll see a field there called “In case of an IR violation, prevent owner from submitting lineup?”. It defaults to “No”, which is the way that the site’s always worked – owners can still submit a lineup even if they have an IR violation.
However, if you change that option to “Yes”, that will prevent owners from submitting a lineup if they have an IR violation – for example, a player whose status has been upgraded from Out to Probable may now be in violation of your IR criteria and therefore the owner has to reactivate the player before the owner can submit their lineup.
As always, let us know if you have any questions regarding this new feature, or any other suggestions for improving the site.
Can you believe we’re already approaching the midway point of the fantasy football season? Hopefully your team is still at or above .500 and doing well. But if not, we have a “second chance” opportunity for you. We’ve announced our FREE mid-season fantasy football league service. Click on the link for more details and to create your own league.
You can use the mid-season league to gather a bunch of your friends or co-workers and start a new league just like your old one. Or you can try a new league format if you want to experiment with other ideas for the 2nd half of the season. We offer various types of leagues:
Draft or Auction Leagues – You can conduct a draft, either live on-line or via email over the course of several days, or conduct an Ebay style auction, and then run the league as desired for the 2nd half of the season…
Head to Head – You can create your own weekly schedule, including double or triple headers if you want to squeeze more games into the shortened season.
Total Points – If the season is too short for your tastes to create a schedule, yo can just use the Total Points format to tally up the weekly points.
All Play – Another popular format is to have every team play against every other team each week. So if there are 10 teams in your league, the team with the highest weekly score will be 9-0 for that week, and the team with the 2nd highest score will be 8-1, and so on down to the worst scoring team which will be 0-9 for that week.
Best Lineup – Generally, fantasy football leagues require each owner to submit a starting lineup each week. For example, if the roster size is 16 players, they have to choose 8 of those 16 players to start. But we also have an option to automatically choose the best lineup each week. It’s a good option if you want to focus on the draft and then just let the season play out without having to worry about roster decisions and lineup changes each week.
No Draft or Rosters – You can also choose a “Tournament Style” format, where there is no draft and teams don’t have a roster. Instead, each owner selects a starting lineup from the entire pool of players each week. It’s a great option for a “no hassle” league if you don’t have time to organize a draft, and you just want to give every owner a chance to pick an awesome lineup each week. If you don’t want a totally “free-for-all” format, then there are options to make it harder and avoid duplicate lineups, such as the “Start ‘Em Once” format where each owner can select any lineup, but they can only use each player once per season. So if they start Brett Favre in Week 8, then they can’t use him at all for the remaining weeks.
The bottom line is that we have tons of options to allow you to run an exciting league for the 2nd half of the season, and it’s totally free. And of course, if you’re using a system other than MyFantasyLeague.com for your regular league, this is also a great opportunity to see what we have to offer compared to what you are currently using, with no obligation or commitment!
We added two new columns to the Player Profile pages in your fantasy football league. See Steve Smith’s player page here for an example. The new columns are “Opp Rush” and “Opp Pass“. These columns indicate the ranking (1 is best, 32 is worst) of the NFL opponent’s defense against the Rush and the Pass. So if you see a low number in the Opp Rush column for a given week, then you know this player is going up against a highly ranked rush defense. Conversely, if you see a relatively high number in the Opp Pass column, for example, then you know this player is going up against a poorly ranked passing defense. The rankings are based on the average rushing and passing yardage allowed per game by the defense. Hopefully this additional information will help you evaluate players for future match ups as you make your roster and waiver decisions each week.
And while you’re viewing a player, don’t forget about the Compare Player option at the bottom of each Player Profile page. You can click on the pull down list to bring up a comparison between any two (or more) players for some side-by-side analysis.
We’ve recently added a new stats columns to the “Top Performers/Player Stats” report in your fantasy football league. Now as part of the Top Receivers report, you’ll see “Targets” as a column, such as this example from our sample league. The column is labeled “Tgt” and as always you can click on the column header to sort by that stats. So what is the target stat all about? It’s the number of times a player was the intended receiver on a passing play. It can be helpful to get a feel for which receivers (or tight ends or running backs) were most active in the passing game. Even a player only had a couple of receptions, he may have had two or three times as many targets, which could point to some potential if/when they can turn those targets into catches. Just another stat to help you make better lineup decisions. Enjoy! Note that you’ll also see this column now on the Player Profile page, such as this example.
If you’ve had a fantasy football league with us in prior seasons, you’ll be happy to see a new report available on your league pages today – “Season Records”. This new report, available under the “Reports > Records” menu, offers several season-long records, including:
Most/least wins, losses and ties in a season
Most/least total points scored, and total points allowed, in a season
So, check out this new report today, and let us know your thoughts on this. What other historical record reporting would you like to see on MyFantasyLeague.com? Let us know!
One of the coolest new web sites we’ve seen recently is pickemfirst.com. It’s a Firefox extension that automatically highlights NFL player names on any web page, providing you detailed information about that player, including if he’s available as a free agent in your league or not. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, check out this video to see this extension in action.
We’d definitely encourage all of our customers who use Firefox to check out this extension, and give the fine folks at pickemfirst.com some feedback on this.
Fumbles and Laterals and Trick Plays in the NFL can cause all sorts of confusion for commissioners of fantasy football leagues. To help with that issue, we’ll highlight and document all of the various “strange” or “unusual” plays each week, so you can confirm that your scoring rules have been properly set up in your fantasy football league. Just go to the “Help > Strange Plays” menu item in your league to view the summary list each week. Then come here to read more details as needed in our blog. We’ll discuss various types of unusual plays and how they might impact your league.
This week’s most unusual play for a lot of leagues involved the “fake” field goal that resulted in a Rushing TD for the Redskins by their punter. As noted in our strange plays summary, this is scored by the NFL and shows up in any typical box score as just a regular Rushing TD. Therefore, the stats are scored that way for your league. The NFL does not track “fakes” or other events like this at all, so there isn’t any automatic way to have it scored for your league as a special type of touchdown. The raw stats and the box score for this will be the same as any other rushing play in the game. It does show Hunter Smith (a punter) as the person that ran it for a score, but that is really the only indicator that it was an unusual play, unless you scrutinize the play-by-play listing to see what exactly happened on that scoring play.
If you want this touchdown to be counted as a TD for your Punter position, then be sure to add the “Rushing TD” rule to your Punter position. However, if you want to score this as a touchdown for your Special Teams or Team Defense position, then you will have to manually add the points for this to your league by using the “Setup > Adjust Scores and Standings > Player Score Adjuster” screen. Note that you won’t want to add the “Rushing TD” rule to your Special Teams position, because that would cause all rushing TDs for the entire game to be credited to the Special Teams.
So the bottom line is that “fake” plays, either on a punt or kickoff, are not tracked as a raw stat by the NFL, so therefore they cannot be scored automatically for your fantasy football league. Our recommendation is to treat them like any other rushing or passing TD rather than trying to find them each week and score them as a special teams play. However, if you want to credit them to your Special Teams position, then you can scan the “Help > Strange Plays” listing each week to check for them and then manually add the points to your league as needed.
Now that your fantasy football draft is done, you’re probably wondering how well your fantasy football team will do this season. You can find out at least one professional opinion with one click of the mouse from your Franchise Information page in your league. To get there, just click on your franchise name from any report or screen in your league. Then in the upper right you’ll see a link that says “FBG Rate My Team“. Click on that link and you’ll be taken to the Rate My Team application, which was developed by footballguys.com this year. It’s a great way to receive an in-depth analysis of your team, complete with recommendations about what you can do to improve your roster. Since they worked with us to integrate the application into our leagues using our Developer’s API, it saves you the time of entering your league parameters, so you can get an analysis of your team very quickly. And it’s free! So check it out this opening weekend and enjoy the games!
Kickoff is almost here… Your draft is done, and now it’s time to submit your lineups and prepare for the first week of the season! Enjoy the Thursday night game, and good luck with your fantasy football match up this week. Depending on how your league is configured, you may be able to modify your starting lineup after tonight’s kickoff, but it’s always best to submit a full lineup before the first game of the week.
