Starter Points by Position Chart

We’ve updated a popular report by adding a dynamic graph to the bottom of it, which will really help see at a glance where the strengths of each fantasy team are. This report, which is accessible from the “Reports > League > Starter Pts – Position” menu, already shows the breakdown of each fantasy team’s starters (or bench) for any time period. It includes the actual points and the percentage of the total that each position has scored in the specified time period. It’s a great report to use to find who to target for trades when you know your team is weak at a specific position.

Now it’s even easier to eyeball the data with the bar chart at the bottom. You’ll see each team’s point total broken down by position, and you can dynamically remove or add the positions that you want to focus on. Right now, since there isn’t any weekly points data for your 2008 league, the chart won’t appear. So you’ll need to view this in your 2007 league to see what it looks like. Or you can check the report in our 2007 sample league.

With this new chart view, we’ve also added a new home page module module with the same name. If you add the “Starter Points By Position” module to your home page, then you’ll see this dynamic graph right on the front page!

Purchase early to Save $10

We have an early bird discount promotion that saves you $10 if you order your league by August 1st!  So be sure to purchase your league now to save yourself a few bucks.  It’s also probably a good time to start notifying your owners that another season is here so you can start making arrangements for your draft day.

LT campaigns to be top draft pick

This week’s Saturday Silliness topic revolves around NFL players getting in touch with fantasy football. We’ve all probably seen the various references to fantasy football by real NFL players from time to time, such as a couple of years ago when Redskins TE Chris Cooley admitted that “I beat myself against Dallas. The guy on the other team had me, and I scored three touchdowns against Dallas, and I lost to myself on fantasy points.” It definitely brings new confusion to Fantasy versus Reality when NFL players start playing against themselves in their fantasy leagues!

This year LaDainian Tomlinson is taking it up another notch by campaigning to be the #1 pick in your fantasy draft. It is admittedly part of a tongue in cheek marketing campaign for FoxSports fantasy games, but it’s still rather creative. “I should be the No. 1 pick because I’m proven,” Tomlinson told The Associated Press. “I’ve been doing it for a while and have experience helping owners win their leagues. I got a good track record, and I’ll be ready on day one.” Check out the rest of the article for some more funny quotes. Interestingly, LT admits that he has never played fantasy football himself. What is he waiting for?

More Home Page Messages

We added a few more home page messages to the system, so now you can have up to 15 of them to use as desired on your league home page (instead of the previous limit of 12).  While the home page message concept originated many years ago as a way for you (the commissioner) to write some notes or comments to post  on your league for the owners to view, they quickly took on a life of their own as creative commissioners used them to enter custom HTML and javascript to spruce up their league home pages.  We now have a thriving community of commissioners that share ideas and code with others.

These home page messages can of course also be used as home page modules, and you can control their layout and arrangement on the “Setup > Home Page Modules and Tabs Setup” screen.  For those keeping track, we now have 83 different home page modules that you can arrange as you see fit on your home page.  And since 15 of them are basically free form text home page messages, it gives you virtually unlimited possibilities for adding content and custom code to your league.  Of course, not everybody is into that sort of thing, but even those of you without any coding or HTML knowledge can quickly and easily rearrange your league home page to make it look just how you want it.

Nightly News

You’ve read about all of the additional player news that we’ve integrated into MyFantasyLeague.com recently. This additional content from all of our sources is readily available from various screens and reports in your league, such as the “Reports > NFL > News Articles” menu item, or directly on your league home page in the “5 Newest News Articles” home page module, as well as any player information pages that are readily available from your roster report or any other listing of players.

To help get a handle on all of this in-depth player information, we’ve added a new option to the “For Owners > Franchise Setup” page. If you click on the “Advanced” section of this screen, you’ll find the option to “Send Email For: My Player News (within the last day, sent at 3am ET)“. Franchise owners can select this option to automatically receive an email message overnight whenever there is fresh news for any players on their roster. It’s a great, easy way to be notified about updated news for all of the players on your fantasy team.

Copy Your League

If you want to start another fantasy football league with the same basic format as your existing league, we have a very easy way for you to get started with that.  Just use the “Duplicate This League” option in the lower left of your “For Commissioners > Setup” screen.  You’ll be given the option of whether or not to copy the Franchises as well as the Rosters and Weekly Lineups.  So if you’re starting a 2nd league with the same group of people, you can use this option to get up and running very quickly.  Or if you want to create a copy of your league for testing purposes, you can do that as well.  Also, keep this feature in mind if a friend wants to start their own league based on your settings.  You can create a duplicate copy of your league (without the Franchise Info) and then change the commissioner email and password so they can get started with your same rules and other settings.  It can be a great time saver in a number of different situations!

Another common request is to be able to copy just the scoring rules from one league to another.  This can be done from the “Select a Packaged Scoring System” menu item on the “For Commissioners > Setup” screen.  While this screen is generally used to select one of our standard sets of scoring rules, it can also be used to copy the scoring rules from any other league in our system.  You just need to know the 5-digit League ID to copy the rules from.

Player Salaries are another piece of data that can be copied from another league.  If you know someone in another league that has taken the time to enter the salaries of all of the players in their salary cap league, you can use the “Select Packaged Player Salaries” screen under “For Commissioners > Setup” to copy those player salaries to your league.  Again, you just need to know the 5-digit league ID to copy the salaries from.

Amazing Ballgirl

OK, this has nothing to do with fantasy football, but here is a little more Saturday Silliness for you…

Check out this video of a ballgirl with amazing jumping and catching skills that’s been making the rounds:

Like the Shaun Suisham kick, you have to figure out if it’s real or not

Tony Holm Joins MyFantasyLeague.com

I recently discussed how we beefed up the quality and quantity of our Fantasy Player News that’s available on your league home page. Now we have the rest of the story for you. This improved news came about as one of the first initiatives after hiring Tony Holm of FantasySharks.com fame. Check out the complete Press Release for all of the details. Tony has been working hard to integrate fantasy content from various sites to help you stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in the fantasy football world while you run your team on MyFantasyLeague.com.

We’ll have more details on the various news sources and additional content throughout the preseason.

FSTA Conference

We are a member company in the FSTA (Fantasy Sports Trade Association), which is a great non-profit organization that promotes the fantasy sports industry.  They help companies both big and small by conducting market research and facilitating networking opportunities among the member companies.  We had the pleasure of attending their semi-annual industry conference in Chicago last week.  We met a lot of folks that we have worked with in the past on various projects, as well as plenty of new companies and individuals that we’ll surely be working with in the future.  I’ll expand on some of the partnerships and projects in the next couple of weeks here in this blog!

You can read more about the actual conference from one of the attendees (Nando Di Fino) in his article at the Wall Street Journal.  One interesting observation about the fantasy sports industry in general was made during an informal poll during the opening comments of the conference on Tuesday morning.  Attendees were asked to stand up when the year of their entry into the market was announced.  They started with the early 1990’s, and only one or two of the approximately 200 attendees stood up.  When they announced “1994″, that’s when we stood up.  As the progression continued, only about half of the attendees were standing when they made it to “2005″.  That means that half of those attending the conference just started in the fantasy sports business sometime in the past 3 years.  It’s exciting to have so much new blood in the industry, and there were lots of entrepreneurs with some great ideas at the conference.  But it was also fun to know that we’re one of the more established companies in the fantasy football space!

If you’re interested in keeping track of developments in the Fantasy Sports Industry, there are a couple of great blogs that may interest you.  Derrick at Rotonation keeps his blog up-to-date with all sorts of industry news and developments, and Jim at Fantasy Sports 2.0 does a great job of gathering relevant links to news about the industry along with commentary and analysis.  Feel free to comment with any other industry news sites that you’re aware of.

Shaun Suisham 110 yard Field Goal

OK, time for a break from reality. In case you haven’t seen this video yet, it’s pretty spectacular:

But is it real?   View it for yourself to decide!