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!
Posts Tagged ‘draft’
Rate My Team
Friday, September 11th, 2009Draft Recap Analysis
Sunday, September 6th, 2009With the busiest fantasy football drafting weekend behind us, it’s time for most leagues to settle in and start analyzing how well their draft went. For team owners, this means taking a close look at your roster compared to the other rosters in the league to figure out your strengths and weaknesses. It’s the last chance to brag about your awesome team that you just drafted before the reality of Week #1 hits and your roster is put to the test in a real-life game. So with that in mind, be sure to check out the “Draft Recap” report! It’s a tongue-in-cheek analysis of your fantasy football draft, based mostly on ADP Rankings. In other words, it looks at the players you drafted and which round and pick you selected them, and then compares that to the overall average round and pick that those players were selected in by all the other leagues at MyFantasyLeague.com. It’s a quick and dirty way to compare how well your team did in the draft on a relative scale compared to the others.
The best part is that we’ve taken it a step further by throwing in some random quotes about the draft, and turning it into a fun recap that should hopefully provoke some trash talking amongst your owners here during this last week of the pre-season. So give your Draft Recap a look. You can access it from the “Reports > League > Draft” screen by clicking on the “Draft Recap” link at the top of that page.
Here’s a sample excerpt from a Draft Recap:
Coach Tony Holm had a distinguished draft in the recent 2009 FanEx draft. Their The Sharks franchise came away with the number 2 ranked draft (out of 12) in the league based on analysis by MyFantasyLeague.com.
The Sharks made their best pick of the draft in round 6, selecting Roy Williams with the 67th pick of the draft, as compared to the 45th spot he should have been selected in, according to ADP rankings. “Players like that don’t come around very often,” The Sharks coach Tony Holm said.
The Sharks made their worst pick of the draft in round 12, selecting Ricky Williams with the 139th pick of the draft, as compared to the 170th spot he should have been selected in, according to ADP rankings. “His attitude is a question mark,” The Sharks coach Tony Holm said.
Starting in week 7,The Sharks won’t be able to submit a full lineup, due to having 1 defensive team on bye.
With a little bit of work on the waiver wire this season, or a few strategic trades, coach Tony Holm should be able to turn their 2nd ranked draft effort into a championship fantasy team this year.
Keep in mind that this report is intended as harmless entertainment, and is not by any means a thorough technical analysis of your league’s draft. Hopefully your owners will get a kick out of the report and enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed concocting it 
Also, this report is only intended for standard redraft leagues. It does not really read well for keeper or dynasty leagues with rookie-only drafts, and therefore it does not show up as an option for those types of leagues.
FantasySharks Draft Coach
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Welcome to Fantasy Draft Weekend! Based on past experience, this is the weekend that a majority of fantasy football leagues conduct their draft. With that in mind, we want to let you know about another great resource integrated into your league for owners to use when they want assistance with their draft picks. It is the FantasySharks.com Draft Coach. The Draft Coach was developed quite a few years ago by Tony Holm over at FantasySharks.com, and it was integrated into MyFantasyLeague.com and has been available to assist with draft picks ever since then. It uses our Open Developer’s API to fetch league information for your specific league, including the scoring rules and roster requirements and draft info, and then it uses the player stat projections from FantasySharks.com and combines it with our ADP Rankings and other info to help make recommendations about which player to select next in your draft. Very cool stuff!
You can access it from the Live Draft room in your league, and from the PreDraft screen as well. Note that it is part of the “Fantasy Links” section of your league, so if you don’t see the link to the Draft Coach, be sure to ask your commissioner to turn that option on in the “For Commissioners > Setup > Menu Setup” screen (it is on by default).
Draft with FFLM
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009Now that fantasy football draft season is in full swing, there will be thousands of drafts conducted every day from now until kickoff. Some leagues will conduct their draft on-line using the live draft room capabilities of MyFantasyLeague.com. But a lot of leagues will make it a social event as well by gathering all of the team owners at the same physical location, such as a house or a bar or a conference room. If that’s the scenario that you are looking at for your league, then we want you to be aware of a great option to enhance your draft experience while keeping track of your draft picks and making it really easy to update your league when the event is done: FFLM!
Fantasy Football League Manager
FFLM is a Windows program that can be used to conduct your live draft. All you need is a PC with Windows at your draft event. You don’t even need an internet connection. Just be sure to download and install the program ahead of time, and then click on the “Update” button in FFLM after you run it to make sure you have the most recent player updates. Then follow these steps to prep for your draft ahead of time:
1. Use the “File > New League” menu item in FFLM to create a new league file.
2. Use the “File > Import from MyFantasyLeague.com” menu item to import all of your settings into FFLM.
3. If you already set up your draft order, then you’re ready to start. If you want to create or edit your draft order, then use the “Draft > Set Draft Order” screen in FFLM.
4. When you are ready to start the draft, click on the “Draft > Interactive Draft” menu item.
From there, FFLM will guide you through the process by showing the current round and pick in the upper left, and a timer bar on the left side, along with a list of available players to choose from in the center of the screen, and the rosters of each team as the draft progresses. It even includes player rankings as provided by TheHuddle.com based on their cheat sheets, as well as the latest ADP Rankings from MyFantasyLeague.com. So you can quickly see which players are remaining with the highest rankings. You can sort the player list by these values, or narrow down the list to only show certain positions. And you can Find any player quickly just by typing their last name. In short, it provides you with an always up-to-date list of players to choose from during your draft. As each pick is made, the players are taken off the list, and the rosters are updated accordingly.
Now for the fun stuff… You can optionally include announcements of each pick by downloading and installing the FFLM sound files. If you install these ahead of time, and then turn the Audio options on, the computer will announce each player as he is selected during the draft. So when you click on a player to draft them, you’ll hear something like this over your computer speaker: “Team 1 selects Tom Brady, Quarterback for the New England Patriots. Team 2 is now on the clock. Team 3 is on deck.”
In addition to the audio, you’ll also see a countdown timer to keep the draft on track, and the system will announce when there is one minute remaining, and 30 seconds left, and then it will say “Please make your selection” in an ominous voice to let owners know when their time is up.
Another fun part to all of this is letting everyone else view the draft program by projecting it onto the wall or a screen. If you can borrow a projector or a large monitor from work or home, or use the equipment at whatever location you are conducting your draft, it makes for a great way to keep everybody on track and informed throughout the draft. There are several views of the draft in progress that you can toggle between, including the available player list with the various rankings and stats, and the rosters of each team, or the draft summary that shows the last 20 or so picks that have been made. And if you have an auction instead of a draft, there is also a view of each team’s funds spent, player count, and remaining funds and the minimum bid based on how many open spots you have left to fill your roster.
Be sure to check out FFLM if you plan to conduct your draft in a social environment where all of your owners will be in the same location. The best part is that after you are all done with your draft, you use the “Exchange” button in FFLM to transfer your draft results to your league in MyFantasyLeague.com with just the click of a button.
ADP Rankings Updated Daily
Saturday, August 22nd, 2009With fantasy football draft day quickly approaching, make sure you check out our Average Daft Position Rankings! Click on the link to check out the latest player rankings from all of the drafts that have already taken place on MyFantasyLeague.com. You can slice and dice the data in various ways, such as by position, by league size, or by scoring system. You can also choose keeper or non-keeper drafts, and mock or real drafts. And you can specify the time frame, and choose to view data only for recent drafts instead of all drafts in the system. It’s a great resource to help you prepare for your draft to get a feel for which round players have been drafted in by other leagues, especially if you have faith in the wisdom of crowds.
And if you’re a coder that likes to manipulate data like this, you can use our Open Developer’s API to grab the data from an XML feed to do whatever you want with it. We also have an ADP Home Page Module that you can add to your league so all of your team owners have quick and easy access to it. And we have an ADP Widget that you can put on any web page. Use the “Reports > League > MFL Widgets” screen for more info on doing that.
Draft with FanDraft
Friday, August 21st, 2009MyFantasyLeague.com has its own integrated draft room for conducting a live, on-line draft. You can also conduct an email draft over the course of days or weeks directly from our site. And we also have our own free off-line draft program (FFLM). But there are still other ways to conduct a draft if desired. Because of our Open Developer’s API, there are several third party draft tools that you can use to conduct your draft or to enhance your draft experience.
For an alternate off-line draft program that works similar to our own FFLM program, you can use FanDraft, a program from FanSoftMedia. They have integrated one click ability to import your league into FanDraft so it is really quick to get ready for your draft. Then after you draft is completed in FanDraft, you can transfer the draft results back to your league with another click. You do of course need to enter your League ID and password, but otherwise it is all very automatic! Thank you to Randy over at FanDraft for working with us on this integration ability.
If you’ve used FanDraft in the past, or you prefer its interface for any other reason, you now have a great way to quickly transfer the draft results into your league on MyFantasyLeague.com.
Improved ADP for Team Quarterbacks
Thursday, February 12th, 2009Now that we’ve launched our leagues for the 2009 season, we are hard at work making various improvements, big and small, to MyFantasyLeague.com for the coming year. One change we made this past week involves the way that our Average Draft Position rankings are utilized during the draft for leagues that use Team positions such as Team QB or Team Kicker, for example. In the past, since not very many leagues used these positions, our system wouldn’t always have enough data within the ADP Rankings at those team positions. So if a team owner was relying on our ADP rankings to select a Team QB, it wouldn’t always have enough data to make a good pick. Now, we’ve updated the system to use the corresponding individual QB as needed, so if your league uses the Team QB position, and Kurt Warner was the highest ranked QB in the ADP, then the Arizona Team QB would be selected where appropriate for that league.
So if you are part of a league that uses Team QB, Team Kicker, Team Punter, or Team TE as a position, you’ll now have a more intelligent draft helper tool during your draft!
Free Mid-Season Leagues
Saturday, October 18th, 2008Can 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!
Pause Timer!
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008With only 2 days left before kickoff, most leagues have already drafted and are starting to submit their lineups for Week #1. But there are still quite a few leagues that conduct their fantasy football draft on these last two nights.
So we wanted to give one more reminder to all of those commissioners that will be running a live draft on MyFantasyLeague.com — the Pause Timer link is your best friend! If you are in a live draft, and someone makes an incorrect pick, or loses their internet connection, or anything else unexpected, then start by doing the following:
Click on the Pause Timer button in the Live Draft Room (only the commissioner has access to this option).
Then calmly figure out how to resolve the issue – for example, you can use the Undo Pick button to change a pick that was made in error. Then after everything is up and running again, you can use the Reset Timer link to resume drafting as normal.
Just some last minute advice to help your draft in the case of a crisis!
MFL Power
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
There’s another great resource of customized fantasy football rankings available to you for your fantasy draft. Check out the MFL Power section of the FFToday.com web site. Mike MacGregor has used our Open Developer’s API to create a customized cheat sheet for your league. Just enter your 5-digit League ID from your league on MyFantasyLeague.com, and then it does the rest of the work for you. Their system imports your league scoring rules and rosters (in case you have a keeper or dynasty league), and then it combines that with their stat projections to generate a customized cheat sheet for your draft!
In addition to a draft cheat sheet during the preseason, they also have MFL Power tools for in-season weekly rankings, and for customized player news and injury information for your fantasy team. Be sure to check it out.