Earlier this month I wrote about the Yahoo! draft room and thought it was pretty solid. After participating in a few other drafts and mock drafts, I've now seen a few other draft rooms that I thought would be good to share with everyone as they get ready to draft...

EA Sports Draft Room

Analysis: Odds are that your league is not hosted by EA Sports, as the only reason I'm in a league there is because of the promise that I should be able to import my fantasy team into Madden '09 when it comes out. At the bottom left of the dialog, you see "0.97 a", which I guess means that this isn't even their official draft room yet and it's almost like a beta or something, but we had our draft with it none the less. Overall, the draft room gets the job done. It's a step above the FleaFlicker draft room (see analysis below), as it shows a picture of the player (not really important for fantasy purposes, but just makes it a better experience in my opinion...less industrial or something). While drafting, sometimes players were complaining that due to the queuing system, they were getting players that they didn't want, but maybe that's one of the bugs they're trying to fix in the next "0.03" of versioning. One of my issues was that there is no really good way to see what your starting lineup looks like. The "My Results" section in the bottom right of the dialog allows you to sort by position and round, but there's no "team" view, which was a bit annoying. I guess it's their first year doing fantasy, so I'll cut them a break, but if they want EA Sports to become site for the fantasy football masses, they have some work to do.

ESPN Fantasy Draft Room

Analysis: This is our first year using an ESPN fantasy football league and so far we're pretty impressed. The draft room is pretty impressive and definitely a lot more user friendly than either of the other two on this post. At the top of the dialog is a nifty animation that shows when your next picks are coming up. The room also has a "Scouting" section (shown above), which allows you to research the stats of your player and even has the projected stats, which as long as you believe ESPN's experts, should be helpful to you. The "Roster" section on the right is nice, showing exactly what your starting roster will look like (something that the EA Sports one didn't have), so that's a major plus. You also see a tab called "Rules", so that you have easy access to the league scoring rules, which is useful (and would have helped me in the EA sports league where I took Tom Brady with my top pick, only to realize that passing touchdowns were only worth 3 points!) ESPN has done a lot of work on their fantasy league system this year and I'd definitely recommend it if you haven't selected a league yet.

FleaFlicker.com Draft Room

Analysis: As with everything FleaFlicker provides, their draft room is the least flashy. There are no player pictures or stats, and no scrolling animation to show when your next pick is, but one thing this draft room provides that others do not is suggestions such as "Your biggest position need is QB. Your best move is to draft QB Manning, Eli." Now don't get me wrong...if I'm completely unaware of the bottom right panel of the screen, I might not realize that I need a quarterback, so this is potentially helpful. However, to most managers who have run a fantasy football team or two (or way more than that), this is in no way helpful. I'm not even sure what the basis for the suggestion is. If I have one running back and one wide receiver, will it also say that my biggest need is at the quarterback position? If that is the case, it will most likely be my biggest need for the next few rounds, as I'll probably be taking another running back and receiver before I take a quarterback (maybe even a tight end before as well). While this draft room serves its purpose, it does it in the most boring of ways and it earns my lowest grade of all the draft rooms I've seen so far.

Overall, I'm glad that my two primary leagues now reside in Yahoo and ESPN, because their draft rooms are by far superior to the others I've seen. I'm big on aesthetics when it comes to these leagues, so the draft rooms, along with the league websites themselves, that are the most user friendly and classy looking immediatly get a bump in my book. FleaFlicker is too plain, EA Sports is too buggy, FOX is too cluttered...but Yahoo and ESPN are my top two at this point. Note that I did not discuss the ability to set custom scoring and rules, etc...I'll leave those discussions to a later date.