Squish (268)
E-roc (127)
Shirley (66)
Jeff (53)
Tommy (53)
Mal (51)
Ken (44)
Amir (40)
TJ (29)
I was starting to get worried that my Yahoo! Fantasy Football app for my iPhone was going to say 2009 all season long, but thankfully they’ve finally released the 2010 update. Log into the App Store and download the update if you have an iPhone and use Yahoo! for your fantasy football leagues!
Updates from August, 2010
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Yahoo! Fantasy Football app for iPhone updated for 2010
Brandon
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Free 2010 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet
Brandon
While searching for a free cheat sheet online to use as the basis for my own rankings, I realized that most websites don’t put them in a format that is great for using as a draft day list. So, while I was putting together a really quick cheat sheet for reference during my upcoming drafts, I wanted to share it with our readers to use at least as the basis for their own cheat sheets (it’s a Google Docs spreadsheet):
FFGeekBlog.com’s 2010 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet
Keep in mind that I threw this together in about half an hour and didn’t take painstaking effort to make sure all of the wide receivers in the 40-60 group (for example) are exactly in the order I’d draft them. Most of the players atop the lists are close to how I would pick them in a standard league though.
If you see anything crazy on the lists that doesn’t make sense or have left out important players, please let me know so I can update it ASAP!
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Fantasy Football Tweets
Brandon
Matt and I have run a Twitter account (@FFGeekBlog) along with the blog for a few years now, but to be honest, we really haven’t done a whole lot with it besides link to our blog posts. This year we’re hoping to change that and have already started by watching the account more vigilantly, responding to fellow fantasy football tweeps and re-tweeting the most important, breaking news.
Along with this, we’re looking to further integrate Twitter with our site so that readers can see what everyone is talking about in regards to fantasy football. We’ve added a new page to the site called Fantasy Football Tweets (I know, very original!) that is currently home to two Twitter widgets and can be found at the top right of the page. The first displays all of the most current tweets about fantasy football, from bloggers and everyday fantasy team managers alike. We’ll be scanning this off and on to see if we can offer help to some random managers out there (and hopefully gain a few followers in the process!)
The second widget is home to tweets by fantasy football bloggers. At the moment, there are only 5 or 6 blogs that have made the cut (including our own, of course), but we’re always looking to add more accounts to the widget. If you feel like your blog should be listed, just shoot us an e-mail or tweet and we’ll take a look at your recent updates. If they meet our satisfaction, we’ll be sure to add you to the widget!
Let us know if you have any suggestions on the new page!
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Ask the Geeks: Collecting League Fees
Matt
Andrew asks:
Hi, I am trying to set up a FF league with some of my buddies from college. Problem is, we are all located in different places, which makes money collection very difficult. What site do you recommend for our league so that we could collect the money through a service such as paypal? Thank you for your help.
There are a number of services out there that offer to help with fee collection, but I’ve never felt compelled to use any of them. Collecting league fees can be a pain no matter how you slice it, but I don’t see how a third-party service will make things so much easier that I’d be willing to pay a fee for their service. If you want to give one a try, take a look at WePay, which launched this spring with some venture capital funding and received a positive writeup in TechCrunch.
For the keeper league that I commish, I collect via check or PayPal (which no longer charges any fee for personal transactions) and then dump all the money into a secondary savings account that my wife and I have had forever and never touch. This league has been together for a long time, and guys are always pretty good about getting their fees in before the draft with minimal kneecap-bashing on my part. For a new league, you’ll want to make it abundantly clear that there are repercussions for not getting league fees in on time – for example, you could lock down add/drop privileges for anyone who hasn’t yet paid until they do. Just make sure to clearly define those rules ahead of time, and be obnoxious enough about it so that nobody can claim they didn’t know the rules.
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Yahoo Fantasy Football leagues open for sign-up
Brandon
So naturally I had to sign up for a league with a live draft…TONIGHT! The league is named “only the best2″, so the assumption is that I have my work cut out for me. My team name for the year will be Real BrandonMarshall, since Yahoo cuts the name off at 20 characters and Will the real Brandon Marshall please stand up? wouldn’t fit.
At first glimpse, a few of the changes Yahoo! Fantasy Football has implemented this year include:
- Message Board update e-mail notifications – Could be useful for leagues with very little trash talk, so you don’t have to constantly check when no one is posting any messages. Might end up being annoying for leagues where there is constant chatter though.
- Emphasis on Team Slogans – For some reason there’s a whole tab devoted to Team Slogan changes, in case you were someone who enjoys that kind of thing. Currently, I have mine set to “Whoop. There it is.” Quoting the classic Jock Jams tune.
I’ll attempt to update this list as I navigate the site a bit more, but will definitely have it updated once the draft is over.
Update: Here’s the draft room. Same as last year if I’m not mistaken…
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Blogger League Update: 31% Chance to Make Playoffs
Brandon
With the final week of the regular season approaching in The Hazean’s Blogger League and after a two game winning streak, FFGeekBlog.com is still in the running for a playoff spot…but it’s not looking all that good. If you look at the League homepage below you’ll notice that FleaFlicker gives us a 31% chance to make the playoffs (and a 0% chance to earn a first round bye.
) This is a pretty cool feature and something that I haven’t seen any other site provide up to this point. How they calculate the odds is a small mystery to me though and is assuredly not based the players each team has in their line-up. In general I’ve been pretty impressed with FleaFlicker this year and while the UI still doesn’t have the flashy appeal of Yahoo! and other bigger sites, I hope that at least the Blogger League continues using the site in the future. Anyways, wish us luck as we try to clinch a spot and show the fantasy football blogging world that FFGeekBlog is the real deal!
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ESPN Fantasy Focus and Stephania Bell: My two favorite discoveries this season
Matt
I’ve got to credit both of these finds to my iPhone – more specifically, the fantastic (and free) Stitcher Radio app, which has a fantasy football channel. This is how I first encountered the ESPN Fantasy Focus podcast, which has become a regular companion on my dog’s nightly after-dinner walk.
Hosted by Matthew Berry and Nate Ravitz, Fantasy Focus is great once you get past the obligatory five-minute warm-up, which generally consists of personal anecdotes you won’t care about and jokes you won’t laugh at (no matter how many times you repeat the line, “That is factually correct,” it still isn’t funny). Thankfully, Berry and Ravitz more than make up for it with their knowledge of and obvious love for fantasy football – I almost always learn something important that I didn’t know before, and their enthusiasm is contagious.A frequent guest on the show is Stephania Bell, an orthopedic clinical specialist and fantasy football geek whose blog is easily the most thorough resource for NFL player injury info. Definitely one to add to your feed reader.
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Brandon
Remember to vote on the FFGeekBlog.com commenting system if you haven’t done so yet. Who knows if we’ll end up changing anything, but we just want to see how our readers feel about it!
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Commenting on FFGeekBlog.com?
Brandon
As The Fantasy Football Geek Blog continues to grow, Matt and I are noticing a lot more activity from our awesome readers. On certain posts, we’ve gotten upwards of 40-50 comments and with the current format we use, this means that all those comments show up on the main page (FFGeekBlog.com.) This may cause some readers a bit of frustration if they’re searching for a specific post that we’ve published. We’ve already mentioned the “Hide Threads” button, which allows you to collapse all comments on the page, as well as added a new sidebar section (“Latest Posts”) that allows you to view the five most recent posts, but maybe this isn’t enough. We’re interested to how our readers feel about our current commenting format and see if anyone had suggestions on how we could possibly improve it. We definitely don’t want to discourage anyone from commenting, so if you feel that hiding comments on the main page will prevent you from responding to our posts, please let us know. Please let us know what you think and thanks in advance for the input!
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Matt
Many of our regular readers have probably already figured this out, but if you’re looking for a quicker way to browse this site, check out the “Hide threads” and “Keyboard shortcuts” buttons near the top of this section of the page. “Hide threads” allows you to collapse all the comments (which can take a lot of scrolling to get through on particularly active posts), and “Keyboard shortcuts” gives you a quick way to navigate through all the discussions.
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Matt
This season’s version of the Yahoo StatTracker is terrible. It takes forever to load, the chat feature is more or less useless because it covers up your stats if you have it open, and it’s randomly stopped pulling in new info so many times that I can’t trust it any more, making it essentially useless to me. Hey Yahoo guys – bring back the old yellow StatTracker. Please. It wasn’t as pretty, but it worked.
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Yahoo! fantasy football apps launching on September 8
Matt
A tweet from YahooFootball just now:
Holla indeed. Great news for Yahoo! users with iPhones and Crackberries. I hadn’t heard the news and tried to figure out why Yahoo! thinks we might already know. All I could dig up was this press release from August 12 which mentions the mobile apps:
This year, Yahoo! fantasy football enthusiasts will be able to track their favorite team’s success right in the palm of their hands. On September 8th, Yahoo! Fantasy Football goes mobile, launching three different ways to stay on top of their game. Included in the Yahoo! Mobile offering will be an iPhone app, a BlackBerry app, and a version for the mobile web. With mobile fantasy football you can get real-time scores and player stats, the ability to bench and start different players, and even the ability to trade with others in your league – all through your mobile device.
If there’s one thing I’m a bigger dork about than fantasy football, it’s my iPhone, and all my leagues are on Yahoo!, so this is pretty much the perfect storm of awesome. I’ll get a review up here as soon as I get my grimy mitts on it.
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Having trouble picking a draft date for your league?
Matt
We were getting frustrated finding a date that worked for everyone, so I set up a quick spreadsheet of all the remaining weekend dates before opening day so that people in my league could indicate in one central place the dates that didn’t work for them. I only used weekend dates, since drafting on a weeknight kind of sucks. Here’s a template if you’d like to do the same.
I used Google Docs so that everyone in the league could just edit it right online. Definitely easier than e-mailing an Excel file around. Just copy my stuff into a new spreadsheet, and then use the “Share” button in the top-right corner to give everyone in your league editing privileges.
Click the thumbnail at right for a full-size preview.
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Spiffy new popups in Yahoo! fantasy sports
Matt
Yahoo! is taking a page out of ESPN’s book by applying even more Javascript goodness to their player info popups. Whereas you used to just get player updates, you now get a glimpse at their schedule and a few other little details, all neatly packaged into a window that you can drag around the screen, which you will of course only do once, because there’s really no point.
Here’s a preview from my fantasy NBA league. Yes, I play fantasy NBA. I know. I know.
[vimeo 3587858 nolink]
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T.J. Houshmandzadeh: Best-case scenarios
Matt
At this point, it’s really anybody’s guess as to where soon-to-be free agent Houshmanzilly will be playing next season, so it’s nearly impossible to say how much we’re going to like him going into this year’s draft. If he lands in a situation with sky’s-the-limit potential, don’t be surprised to see him become the trendy #2 WR taken in drafts (after Fitzgerald, who probably has a lock on the top WR pick). Nobody wants to pass on this year’s version of Randy Moss circa 2007, and all of the other options for #2 WR taken have question marks:
- Brandon Marshall might have a higher ceiling than any receiver in the league, but he’s maddeningly inconsistent at times.
- Andre Johnson is great… when… he’s… healthy.
- I’m keeping Randy Moss at arm’s length until I know for sure what’s up with Brady’s knee – which means I’m probably not drafting him until 2010.
So where would Housh have to land in order to warrant a higher pick than any of those guys? A few intriguing scenarios that are at least somewhat plausible: (More …)
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ESPN alerts straight to your mobile phone
Brandon
Earlier this year, Matt blogged about the different services that companies offered for your mobile phone regarding fantasy football. However, there’s an additional service that he did not mention, which is ESPN’s alert service to provide “breaking news” on fantasy football, as well as all other sports, straight to your phone via text message. Up until now, I didn’t think that I needed additional updates on my cell phone, but today I decided that I’d give it a shot (during the Championship week…go figure!) and see what all the fuss was about. I signed up for the fantasy football alerts, as well as an update on all score changes during Patriots games (let’s hope for lots of spam this Sunday against the Cardinals!) this morning and so far this is what I’ve received today:
- “Bills QB Trent Edwards practiced Wed; likely to play Sun. after missing 2 games (groin injury)” (More …)
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NFL Weather Report on Weather.com
Brandon
How many times have you started a quarterback against a team with an atrocious secondary, only to see him put up minimal fantasy numbers because a snow storm came to town? While it’s probably not the only site out there that does it, Weather.com provides a game day weather forecast that can be pretty useful when considering which players to start and bench for a given week and hopefully can help prevent this situation from happening. (More …)
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Week 7 Weekend Wrap-up: Running backs gone wild!
Brandon
After staying up late to watch my favorite baseball team lose to the Tampa Bay Rays (!) last night, I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle staying up for what will most likely be a disaster of a game tonight when the Fantasy Football Librarian‘s boys from Denver come into Gillette Stadium to take on the Patriots…but I’ll give it a shot. The good news is that even though the Sox are done and the Pats chances tonight are not all that promising, the fantasy football gods seemed to shine down on me this week and I should pull off some solid victories in most of my leagues (although the fact that Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall having huge games against New England would help many of my teams causes quite the personal conflict!), including a potential victory in which I idiotically started Larry Fitzgerald on a bye. Anyways, enough of my rambling about New England sports and my fantasy teams, let’s get to the action from the weekend that caused my good fortunes, including a few running backs gone wild!
- Tennessee 34, Kansas City 10: I was pretty pumped about this game for one reason…the Chiefs helped me break the FFGeekBlog Hits/Misses cover curse! Kansas City came into this game allowing 180+ yards per game on the ground and what do you know…the Titans nearly doubled that average with 330+ yards. Hopefully you took my advice and started LenDale White (149 yards, 3 TD) and Chris Johnson (168 yards, TD), as you were rewarded heavily. (More …)
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An interview with Matt Maroon, co-founder of Draftmix.com
Matt
Draftmix is a website that offers a novel approach to fantasy sports. A Draftmix “league” is a very short-term commitment – it lasts only a week. You participate in a normal fantasy football-style draft on a Wednesday, drafting players who you think will put up the best numbers in just that given week. The following Tuesday, payouts are awarded and that’s it – league over. Draftmix is aimed at those people who like playing fantasy football for money but are looking for some short-term gambling gratification.Brandon and I first heard about Draftmix last year when we were invited to join the Draftmix Blogger Challenge (and thanks to big games from Joseph Addai and Hines Ward, we won). I’ve been keeping an eye on Draftmix ever since. I think it’s a fun concept that’s implemented very well. They’re still flying a bit under the radar at the moment, but they were just getting started in ’07 and I think they could really catch on in a big way this year.
This afternoon, I had a chat with Matt Maroon, part of the three-man Draftmix team (and a former professional poker player). (More …)
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Get fantasy football info on your cell phone or mobile device
Matt
As the mobile Web continues to mature, the fantasy football world is slowly finding ways to migrate from your PC to your pocket. Most of the major fantasy football providers now offer mobile access in some (usually limited, but improving) fashion. If you like the idea of on-the-go access to your fantasy teams as well as important player updates and other news, here are some resources to help you stay connected to fantasy football wherever you are. (More …)
