Fantasy Pool Picks

We added a new Fantasy Pool option to the Pool Setup screen.  This allows leagues to conduct a Fantasy Pool very similar to how the NFL Pool options currently work.  The commissioner can choose either a Confidence style pool or a straight Pick ‘Em style pool.

In case you aren’t already familiar with these types of pools, they add another fun weekly element of competition to your league.  With the previously available NFL pools, it allows owners to select which NFL teams will win each week, and keeps track of a running total throughout the season.  With these new fantasy pools, it allows owners to select which Fantasy teams will win their head to head match-ups each week, and keeps track of the total throughout the season.  It’s a great way to crank up the trash talking and let all of the owners try to predict which teams will come out on top of the fantasy schedule each week.

The Fantasy Pick ‘Em Pool is a simple weekly prediction of which fantasy team will win their game.  So each owner will make one pick per game on the fantasy schedule every week.  The Fantasy Confidence Pool adds another element of strategy by assigning a “confidence” point value to the winner of each fantasy game.  So if your league has 12 teams, and you have 6 fantasy games on the schedule each week, then each owner will be assigning values from 1 through 6 (each point value can only be used once) in addition to picking the winner of each game.  Of course, you should assign the the highest point value (6 in this example) to the game you are most confident of, and so on until you assign a point value of 1 to the game you are least sure about.

Enjoy the extra pool options!  There is a corresponding new Home Page module for the Fantasy Pool picks as well.

Hot Player News Home Page Module

We added a new home page module called “Hot Player News”. This gives you a list at a glance of the players whose names are in the news the most in the past few days. You can use it as guideline to figure out what players might be of interest for various reasons.

For example, as of right now, the top player on the list in this new home page module is Kevin Jones. Makes sense because he’s a sought after NFL free agent. But ironically, a lot of the other players on the list are there not so much for (fantasy) football related reasons:

Here are the next 4 players: Marshawn Lynch – hit and run. Brandon Marshall – arrested for battery. Javon Walker – beaten and robbed in the middle of the night. Jevon Kearse – DUI. You get the idea We jokingly considered calling this module something else like the “most unfortunate” or “most disappointing” or “most pathetic” player news, or even the “Top 10 players most likely to be involved in something their moms wouldn’t be proud of” or “players that probably should have known better” . But hopefully “hot player news” will be fitting enough to make sense more often than not from a fantasy perspective!

Submit Lineups Home Page Module

We’ve recently added a new Home Page Module called “Submit Lineups”. This allows owners that are logged into the site to submit or change a lineup directly from the league home page.

Hopefully you’re already familiar with the highly configurable league home page layouts that we offer. We allow you to use templates and skins to change the appearance of your entire league, but we also allow you to change which “home page modules” show up on your league’s front page as well. They key to all of this is our huge selection of modules that you can choose to arrange on your page however you want. You can also set up multiple “tabs” on your home page to fit even more modules onto the home page, but still avoid cluttering up the home page with too much information all at once. If you haven’t played around with what’s available in the various home page modules, be sure to check it out! You can use the “Home Page Modules and Tabs Setup” option on the “For Commissioners > Setup” to see what it’s all about.

Top Adds/Drops

If you believe in the wisdom of crowds concept, then one very useful report for researching player is the “Tops Adds/Drops” report on the “Reports > Players” submenu. This started out as a separate report for adds and drops, but we recently combined it into a single report so you can view them both side by side. It’s basically a summary of all of the players with the most add/drop activity across all of the leagues on our site. So it gives you a great feel for what other owners are doing with their roster, and makes you aware of who the hottest players pick-ups are and who’s being dumped as well. Granted, this report may be more useful during the season when most leagues open up their waiver wire, but you can get the idea of what it represents and how useful it will be even now with the current data from the preseason.

In addition to showing you who’s hot now, it’s also an interesting report to look back on to see what happened in previous weeks. For example, in 2007 Week 8 last year, Ryan Grant had his first 100 yard rushing game and emerged on the scene out of nowhere. The following week, as you can see in this report from our sample league, owners in 82% of leagues picked him up and Deshawn Wynn was dropped by owners in 47% of leagues! Hopefully you were one of the lucky ones to grab Grant before the rush…

Today we enhanced the report even more by adding a filter to view only Free Agents that are available to be picked up in your league. Just click on the “Any Status” pull down menu at the top and change it to “Free Agents” to get this view. Happy studying!

Rookie Drafts

We added a new feature in May to allow for a Rookie Only Draft. This option should be useful for all of the dynasty leagues that conduct a draft consisting of only the recently drafted rookies from the April NFL draft. You can access this option on the “General Draft and Timer Setup” page. If you change that Rookie Only option to “Yes”, it will force the system to require all draft picks in your draft to be rookies. The rest of the league functionality remains the same – only the draft is changed to consist of only the rookie players.

Refer a Friend and Earn $20

MyFantasyLeague.com has always relied on word-of-mouth support for our site. It’s a powerful force, and we sincerely appreciate all of the enthusiasm from our commissioners and their willingness to spread the word about our league management system. We know there are a lot of owners and participants in our leagues that are involved in more than one fantasy football league every year (based on our end-of-year survey results, over 50% of owners in our leagues are in more than one league). There’s even a fair number of fanatics that participate in 5 or more leagues! That’s showing some real passion for your hobby

As a way to show thanks to owners as well as commissioners when spreading the word about MyFantasyLeague, we’ve introduced a special promotion for the rest of June. You can earn a quick $20 Amazon gift card just by referring another new league to MyFantasyLeague.com!

So if you are a member of more than one league, and some of your other leagues are hosted at a different site, now is the perfect time to do some recruiting and convince the commissioner to make the switch. They’ll thank you for upgrading their fantasy football league experience this season, and you’ll enjoy the ease and convenience of viewing and accessing all of your leagues right here on MyFantasyLeague.com.

Or if you’ve been thinking about starting a second league for your friends and co-workers, now is the ideal time to get started. And of course if you know anybody else that is thinking about creating a league on MyFantasyLeague.com, this is also the perfect opportunity to give them a nudge and earn yourself $20 for your efforts! Click here for the full details of the offer.

Welcome to the MyFantasyLeague.com Blog

MyFantasyLeague.com has been hosting fantasy football leagues since 1995, and we’ve been steadily growing and improving every year since. Currently, we are the home to thousands of leagues and are proud to be perhaps the most feature-rich fantasy football league management system available. Over the years, we’ve listened to literally thousands and thousands of suggestions from our customers and have turned a ton of those ideas into new features on our site. We love all of the new and cool features as much as our customers do, but we also realize that one side effect of offering such a wide range of features is that our system has become rather complex! And we realize that can be both good and bad.

With that in mind, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years improving our system by making features easier to find and use, as well as adding more documentation and building up our community message boards to allow customers to help each other and share ideas and tips as much as possible.

This blog will hopefully be another step in the right direction of helping our customers by providing a way for us to inform all of you about the latest news and happenings at MyFantasyLeague.com, including tips and tricks about features and options that you may not have discovered yet! We’ll discuss our products and offerings as well as the fantasy football industry in general, and throw in some advice and along the way and share our own experiences that we’ve enjoyed over the years.

Welcome and have a great season!

Mike Hall – MyFantasyLeague.com