MyFantasyLeague.com

As mentioned a couple of days ago, we have free public mock drafts available for you to join at anytime.  New drafts start every 10 minutes and they are available 24/7.  And today we’re announcing yet another reason to try our free mock drafts…

For the rest of August, we’ll be giving away great prizes to randomly selected participants. We’ll select 20 participants each day to receive either a MyFantasyLeague.com t-shirt or a free entry into a Salary Cap game at Head2Head Sports. Each entry has a retail value of $24.95 and gives you a chance to play for the $25,000 grand prize.  All you have to do to be eligible for our daily random drawing is to participate in a free mock draft.  Winners will be notified by email each night.  It’s free and fun to join a mock, and you’ll be helping yourself prepare for your actual draft.

More Draft Preparation tips
Be sure to study the MyFantasyLeague.com Average Draft Position (ADP) Rankings before your draft. The ADP Rankings are updated daily and are a great guide to how soon players should be drafted in your league.

If you’re looking for an in-depth draft guide to help you gain an edge at your fantasy draft this season, then check out the 2008 Rotoworld Draft Guide. It includes profiles of every significant player (over 500) and customizable cheat sheets, plus extras like fantasy tiering and dynasty coverage. It is updated daily and can be viewed on-line or used to generate printer-friendly pages to bring with you to your draft. Click Here for more info and purchase details!

For the best free fantasy football site available, surf on over to FantasySharks.com for updated player stat projections, cheat sheets, and insightful articles.

If you prefer a premium fantasy football site that is a great source of fantasy news and analysis all season long, be sure to check out The Huddle.com. They offer award-winning and entertaining information that will help you draft a championship team and keep your team winning throughout the season. MyFantasyLeague.com customers can save over 10% on a subscription to their service.

With MyFantasyLeague.com, the commissioner of the league can choose whether or not to participate in the league as a franchise owner.  Some other league management systems force the commissioner to be part of the league, but that is not required with us.  Sometimes a league assigns a non-participant to act as the unbiased commmissioner, and that is easy to accomplish with MyFantasyLeague.com.

On the other hand, if you want to act as the commissioner for a league and also participate as a franchise owner, then there is a nice shortcut to be aware of.  Go to the “For Commissioners > Setup” screen and click on the “Select Commissioner’s Franchise” menu item.  Then select your franchise from the pull down list.  After that is done, you’ll see a new “Become Owner” link in the upper right of your league page.  Click on that link to quickly switch from being logged in as the commissioner to being logged in as an owner.  Then click on that link again to switch back.

This is a great way to enable you to switch back and forth between the role of commissioner and the role of franchise owner.  Most of the time you can remain logged in as an owner, but there are times that you need to switch to commissioner mode (such as changing the home page appearance, or approving trades, etc).

At MyFantasyLeague.com, you can conduct your live, on-line draft whenever you want.  A lot of our big media competitors, such as Yahoo, make you schedule your on-line draft well in advance, and certain popular times on the evenings and weekends fill up quickly.  They also sometimes force you to select draft start times in 1-hour or even 3-hour increments.   That’s not the case with us.  The only limit is that you have to start on a 15-minute interval.  But otherwise, it’s all up to you.   You can choose any time of the day or night to conduct your on-line live draft, and our site will be ready and waiting for you and your owners.

And if you want to practice drafting using our live draft room, you can do that anytime as well.  Just visit our free Public Mock Draft site and jump in on any of the mock drafts that start every 10 minutes throughout the day!

Now that the preseason is officially underway, most commissioners are scrambling to select a good draft date for their fantasy football league.  And that means fantasy team owners everywhere are starting to look for ways to get an edge on their future opponents for the big day.  Well, one of the best ways to prepare for any upcoming fantasy draft is to participate in a mock draft.  You get a chance to experience the thrill of selecting players, and you get a feel for where players should be drafted in each round compared to where you have ranked players on your personal cheat sheet or draft list.

Here at MyFantasyLeague.com, we have just what you need when it comes to mock drafts.  We have live mock drafts happening every 10 minutes throughout the day! Just Click Here to Get Started. The drafts are available 24/7 throughout the preseason.  We rolled out this feature in May, and have been refining it ever since.  Some highlights about our mock draft system:

1. They are totally free to join and use.
2. All of the mock drafts take place in our live draft room, with a one minute timer for each pick.
3. You have the choice of 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 team drafts.
4. You can select your preferred draft position to match your real league.
5. If any of the draft slots are not filled by a real participant, then the computer will fill in to make picks for those teams as needed.
6. You can visit our Mock Drafting Community Forum to get together with and schedule mock drafts with others that are interested in joining a mock draft.
7. Use the live chat within the mock draft room to discuss strategy or trash talk to the other participants.
8. You can review the ADP (Average Draft Position) Rankings for all of the completed mock drafts as well as actual drafts completed on MyFantasyLeague.com.
9. There is no registration or sign-up required, but we do ask for your Email Address and Team Name. The Email address is only used to send you a confirmation message with the address of the live draft room in case you get disconnected for any reason.

That’s the scoop.  It’s quick and easy to join a draft anytime you feel like it. And it will help you prepare for your own draft later this month.  Check it out right now and tell your friends about it as well…  Click Here to Join a Mock Draft Now. Happy drafting!

We’ve updated the Player Information Pages to include a lot more information about each player.  These are the pages that you see when you click on a player name from any of the various screens and reports throughout the site, such as this Brett Favre Player Page example.  Now these pages include the current weekly stats (as they did previously), but also include the yearly historical stats back to the 2001 season.  In addition, you’ll see a player photo along with some biographical information, such as height/weight and birthdate/age, and the college and draft pick details.

Along with this new player information, you’ll also see a summary of the latest news headlines for the player, and a link to view all of the news about this player in addition to just the most recent headlines.  And all of this news is culled from our many new sources, so it’s always up-to-date and comprehensive coverage for every player.  In short, we’re giving you more pertinent info at your fingertips, with more additions to come in the future.

We’ve always taken an “open” approach to our league data, and we encourage others to use the data as needed for developing third party add-ons. To that end, it’s worth pointing out our Developer’s Program that is perhaps too well hidden. It’s been available for several years, and it allows you to easily gain access to raw league data in XML format. With this XML feed, you can quickly and easily fetch the information into whatever programming environment you’re most comfortable with, be it PHP, ASP, Excel, Java, Perl, or any other programming language that’s capable of reading XML files. Check out the export page for the details of exactly what XML documents we offer via this service.

In addition to accessing league data, you can update league data as well. Check out the import page for the details on what league data can be updated this way.

As with everything else on our site, we’re always looking for customer suggestions and feedback regarding what we offer.  So, if you’re thinking you might be able to use this service, but are looking for different types of data to export, or import, please let us know!

Some of you may be familiar with our Fantasy Football League Manager (FFLM) program. It is a PC based league management program that runs on the Windows operating system. It was created in the early 1990’s before the web became so popular, and allowed you to run your fantasy football league by entering the rosters and other league data, and then calculating the weekly scores and generating various reports which you could then print out or post on the web for the owners to view. While it was a great program for running your league, it’s popularity peaked in the late 1990’s and slowly faded as the web became more prominent and on-line alternatives such as MyFantasyLeague.com grew in popularity.

Because there were so few leagues remaining that used FFLM in 2007, we have discontinued it as of the 2008 season.   Therefore, it is no longer available as an option to be used for running your fantasy football league. However, it has been updated for the 2008 season, so you can still use it for the various other functions that it is capable of, but not for full fledged league management.

Perhaps the most popular use of the FFLM program was to generate complex and detailed customized reports. This functionality will not be lost, since we plan to release a program similar to FFLM here in the near future. This new program will allow you to generate the same type of customized reports, and it will allow you to output them in various formats similar to the current version of FFLM. For now, though, you can continue to use the most recent version of FFLM to generate reports as needed. It will continue to be maintained until the upcoming replacement program is available.

Another popular use of the FFLM program over the years has been for conducting live drafts with everybody in the same room. It can be used to keep track of all the draft picks as they happen, and it even has audio capabilities so you can have it announce each player’s name and position and NFL team as they are drafted. Some users project it onto a big video screen so all of the owners can see the draft board and quickly analyze all of the current rosters and available players. It also has a timer and alarms that sound off when the clock is winding down to help keep things moving along. It can be used for auctions as well, and it will prompt for winning bids and keep track of each team’s remaining funds throughout the auction.

Other common uses for FFLM beyond league management include setting up complex fantasy schedules, setting up complex draft orders, and calculating player salaries based on fantasy point values from the previous season.

All of these options are still available now in the latest update of FFLM. The program and the corresponding player database have been updated for the 2008 preseason. And the player data will continue to be updated for as long as needed until the new replacement program becomes available.

In the meantime, if you used FFLM to manage your league last season, it’s time to make the switch to MyFantasyLeague.com! Complete instructions and details are here on the FFLM web site. In addition, if you used FFLM in prior years and still have your old league files, now you can use the current version of FFLM to transfer that history to MyFantasyLeague.com for future reference.

We enhanced the Franchise Info report as discussed a couple of days ago. In addition the extra links at the top for quick access to various franchise related reports, we also added a new Weekly Results Chart to the bottom of that page. At a glance, you can see the weekly high score and weekly low score, and how your team’s weekly fantasy score stacks up compared to those upper and lower bounds. As of this moment, there aren’t any fantasy scores to report, so the chart is blank in your 2008 league. You’ll need to look back at your 2007 league to view this chart, or take a look at our 2007 sample league.

Sample Weekly Results Chart

Along with this new chart view on the Franchise Info Report, we’ve also added a new home page module with the same name. If you add the “Weekly Results Chart” module to your home page, then you’ll see this dynamic graph right there on your league home page. By default, it will show your team’s weekly results if you are logged into your league, but you can also use the pull down menu at the top of that module to select a different team as needed.

This weekend’s episode of Saturday Silliness goes to a guy named Chris Davis. And the other guy named Chris Davis. Both of these guys play Wide Receiver for the Titans. That’s right. The Titans just picked up another Chris Davis, formerly with the Jets. Granted, neither of these players has done much in the NFL, but this could definitely cause some confusion in the fantasy world for someone that’s trying to go deep and pick up one of them.

We all know about the occasional confusion caused each year by the likes of Steve Smith (WR, Panthers) and “the other Steve Smith” (WR, Giants), or Adrian Peterson (RB, Vikings) and “the other Adrian Peterson” (RB, Bears). There have been others over the years: WR Mark Clayton, WR Jermaine Lewis, RB Keith Jones have all had another guy with the same name and position in the league at one time or another. But I think this Chris Davis thing may be a first for two players with the same name, position, and NFL team, at least on the offensive side of the ball!  Owners beware when trying to pick up that 5th string WR

Whenever you click on a Franchise Name from the Standings on your league home page, or quite a few other reports and links throughout the site, it takes you to the “Franchise Info Page” for that team. Click Here for an example from our 2007 demo league. From this page, you can see some basic info about each franchise. And if you are logged into the league as an owner, then you can use this page as sort of a “command central” for various operations for your team. For example, you can update your Franchise Information, submit a lineup or propose a trade, make a pool pick, update your draft list, etc.

Now we’ve updated this page to make even more team related information available with just one click from this central location. You’ll see this links across the top of this report now:

Main | Roster | Roster w/Stats | Scoring History | Transactions | Schedule | Accounting | Series Records

Most of these are pretty self explanatory, but the bottom line is that you can quickly access the rosters (with or without stats) and the weekly scoring history, transactions, fantasy schedule, and even the historical records for any franchise with these links.

Also, if you want to change the default view to show the Rosters (instead of the Franchise Info) whenever you click on a Franchise Name from the Standings report or various other screens, you can do that as well. This is selectable on the “For Commissioners > Setup > Reports and Other Settings” screen. You can change the default option for “When clicking on franchise name, go to” from “Franchise Info” to “Roster”.