MFL Power

There’s another great resource of customized fantasy football rankings available to you for your fantasy draft.  Check out the MFL Power section of the FFToday.com web site.  Mike MacGregor has used our Open Developer’s API to create a customized cheat sheet for your league.  Just enter your 5-digit League ID from your league on MyFantasyLeague.com, and then it does the rest of the work for you.  Their system imports your league scoring rules and rosters (in case you have a keeper or dynasty league), and then it combines that with their stat projections to generate a customized cheat sheet for your draft!

In addition to a draft cheat sheet during the preseason, they also have MFL Power tools for in-season weekly rankings, and for customized player news and injury information for your fantasy team.  Be sure to check it out.

Player Stats

One of the most powerful reports that is jam-packed with options is our Top Performers/Player Stats report.  You can access it from the “Reports > Players > Top Performers” menu item. Right now, since the season hasn’t started yet, it shows the top performing players based on your league’s scoring rules for all of last season.  You can see, at a glance, the players that scored the most points in your league last year, broken down by week.  There are controls at the top to change the time frame, or the number of players to display, as well as selections for showing just a specific fantasy team and a specific position.  And you can click on almost any of the column headers at the top of the report to sort by that column.  If you want to limit the report to just fantasy free agents that are available to be picked up, you can do that as well by changing the “Overall” pull down menu.

But that is only the beginning!  You can also click on the Advanced Search link that is just to the right of all of the pull down selection boxes.  After you click, you’ll see a whole new selection of controls.  From here, you can choose more than one position, or more than one fantasy team to display at the same time.  In addition, you can show the raw stats instead of the weekly fantasy point totals by changing the “Fantasy Point Scorers” pull down list.  For example, if you select “Rushers” from that list, then it will show all of the common rushing stats for the players on the report, such as rushing attempts, rushing yards, rushing TDs, and fumbles lost.  It will also show the receptions, receiving yards, and receiving TDs.  Other selections include “Passers” and “Receivers” as well as “Kickers“, “Returners“, and “Defenders.”

The other additional option on the Advanced Search screen is the NFL Team pull down list.  With that option, you can choose to view all players from just one NFL team if needed.  All versions of this report will show a player’s status, so you know right away if a player is available to be picked up on the waiver wire, or who to propose a trade with.  There are also quick links to initiate a trade or make a waiver move.  And the Bye week of the players is displayed as well, along with the salary and contract if you have a salary cap league.

So be sure to check out this report and give it a work out!  We’ve also recently added a couple of extra “quick links” to this report from the “Reports > Players” menu.  The new “Top Passers“, “Top Rushers“, and “Top Receivers” menu items take you directly to the Advanced Search version of this report with some preselected options.

Draft Recap Analysis

With the busiest fantasy football drafting weekend behind us, it’s time for most leagues to settle in and start analyzing how well their draft went. For team owners, this means taking a close look at your roster compared to the other rosters in the league to figure out the strengths and weaknesses. It’s the last chance to brag about your awesome team that you just drafted before the reality of Week #1 hits and your roster is put to the test in a real-life game. So with that in mind…

We’d like to introduce the “Draft Recap” report! It’s a tongue-in-cheek analysis of your league’s draft, based mostly on the ADP Rankings we discussed yesterday. In other words, it looks at the players you drafted and which round and pick you selected them, and then compares that to the overall average round and pick that those players were selected in by all the other leagues at MyFantasyLeague.com. It’s a quick and dirty way to compare how well your team did in the draft on a relative scale compared to the others.

The best part is that we’ve taken it a step further by throwing in some random quotes about the draft, and turning it into a fun recap that should hopefully provoke some trash talking amongst your owners here during the rest of the pre-season. So give your Draft Recap a look. You can access it from the “Reports > League > Draft” screen by clicking on the “Draft Recap” link at the top of that page.

Here’s a sample excerpt from a Draft Recap:

Coach Jeff Smith had an impressive showing in the recent 2008 fantasy draft. Their Fighting Tigers franchise came away feeling exuberant about their top grade in the league based on analysis by MyFantasyLeague.com.

The Fighting Tigers made their best pick of the draft in round 3, selecting Tony Romo with the 27th pick of the draft, as compared to the 16th spot he should have been selected in, according to ADP rankings. “You draft the best available player,” Fighting Tigers coach Jeff Smith said.

They made their worst pick of the draft in round 4, selecting Selvin Young with the 46th pick of the draft, as compared to the 64th spot he should have been selected in, according to ADP rankings. “He’s a project,” Fighting Tigers coach Jeff Smith said.

Keep in mind that this report is intended as harmless entertainment, and is not by any means a thorough technical analysis of your league’s draft. Hopefully your owners will get a kick out of the report and enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed concocting it

Also be aware that this report is still in a developmental stage, so we’ll continue to enhance it for next season. As it stands right now, it is primarily intended for standard redraft leagues. It does not really read well for keeper or dynasty leagues with rookie-only drafts, and therefore it does not show up as an option for those types of leagues.

FantasySharks Draft Coach

In addition to our ADP Rankings that we discussed last time, there is also another great resource integrated into your league for owners to use for assistance on making their draft picks.  It is the FantasySharks.com Draft Coach.  The Draft Coach was developed quite a few years ago by Tony Holm over at FantasySharks.com, and it was integrated into MyFantasyLeague.com and has been available to assist with draft picks ever since then.  It uses our Open Developer’s API to fetch league information for your specific league, including the scoring rules and roster requirements and draft info, and then it uses the player stat projections from FantasySharks.com and combines it with ADP Rankings and other info to help make recommendations about which player to select next in your draft.  Very cool stuff!

You can access it from the Live Draft room in your league, and from the PreDraft screen as well.  Note that it is part of the “Fantasy Links” section of your league, so if you don’t see the link to the DraftCoach, be sure to ask your commissioner to turn that option on in the “For Commissioners > Setup > Menu Setup” screen (it is on by default).

ADP Rankings

Now is about the time that most fantasy football owner start realizing that they are not as well prepared for their draft as they should be.  We’ve all been through it.  Life is happening all around you, and then suddenly your big draft day is upon you in a flash.  With that in mind, we wanted to make sure you were aware of our Average Daft Position (ADP) Rankings! Click on the link to check out the latest player rankings from all of the drafts that have already taken place on MyFantasyLeague.com. You can slice and dice the data in various ways, such as by position, by league size, or by scoring system.  You can also choose keeper or non-keeper drafts, and mock or real drafts.  And you can specify the time frame, and choose to view data only for recent drafts instead of all drafts in the system.  It’s a great resource to help you prepare for your draft to get a feel for which round players have been drafted in by other leagues, especially if you have faith in the wisdom of crowds.

And if you’re a coder that likes to manipulate data like this, you can use our Open Developer’s API to grab the data from an XML feed to do whatever you want with it.  We also have an ADP Home Page Module that you can add to your league so all of your team owners have quick and easy access to it.  And we have an ADP  Widget that you can put on any web page.  Use the “Reports > League > MFL Widgets” screen for more info on doing that.

Manage League Finances with LeagueSafe

We’re happy to announce a new feature and a partnership with the LeagueSafe.com web site to help commissioners relieve themselves of one of the biggest burdens for commissioners…  collecting league dues before the draft and paying out league prizes after the fantasy playoffs.  Any commissioner knows about the annual nuisance.  You have to hound your team owners in the weeks leading up to the draft to make sure they remember to pay the annual league dues before the draft.  Then for the two or three owners that forget, you have to continue to nag them all season long until they finally pay up.  And it doesn’t end there. After the season is over, you have to figure out how to contact the winners and get them their prizes in a timely manner.

Enter LeagueSafe!  It was conceived and developed by Paul Charchian, who has been involved with fantasy football leagues for over 15 years as a radio show host and as a co-founder of Fanball.com.  So he has thought through the process thoroughly and come up with a great solution for leagues that want to have someone else manage their finances.  You can read a Wall Street Journal article about it, or read the Press Release for more information.

For leagues that want to take advantage of the LeagueSafe service, we’ve made it very easy to do with the new option under the “For Commissioners > Setup” screen called “Manage League Finances Using LeagueSafe“.  Just click on that option in your league and follow the steps on that screen, and then you’ll be all set.  You won’t have to worry about the hassle of collecting dues from your owners, and all of your owners will be able to rest easier knowing that their money is being held by an FDIC insured account, and that it will only be used for paying out the league prizes (and optionally the league hosting fee on MyFantasyLeague.com).

That’s the other great thing about this service.  If the commissioner doesn’t want to pay for the MyFantasyLeague.com league up front, he can designate that as an option when signing up for LeagueSafe.  Then when owners start paying their league dues, the cost of managing the league on MFL will be taken care of automatically as well.  Be sure to visit LeagueSafe.com for additional info or details.

Fantasy Football Movie

It’s not every day that you hear about a fantasy football movie, so we wanted to pass along the news about a feature film focusing on our favorite topic. Check out the web site with the details at 10yards.com. Here’s the description…

10 YARDS: FANTASY FOOTBALL – THE MOVIE From Award-Winning Filmmakers, Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell (10 MPH, 2007) comes the hilarious, offbeat, and all-encompassing portrayal of fantasy football. 10 Yards captures the phenomenon of fantasy football in our society with specific focus on wacked-out j.fred’s INTERGALACTIC CHAMPIONSHIP League, where the top prize is a box of Twinkies. As the season progresses, filmmakers Hunter & Josh (both members of j.fred’s league) travel the country interviewing a variety of diverse fantasy football leagues, NFL players, commentators, and the guys who started it all in 1963. From all women’s tackle football to Mexican mariachi bands, get ready for some of the best camaraderie ever in this 90-minute fantasyland.

That pretty much says it all. You can download the movie for free from iTunes for a couple of weeks, too.

Draft with FantasyAuctioneer

Continuing on the theme of third party applications that work with MyFantasyLeague.com, we wanted to mention FantasyAuctioneer.com as well.  While they haven’t implemented full integration of the auction results with our system, we have worked with them for the past several years to allow completed auctions to be transferred to your league.  You’ll just need to contact our support team to make it happen.

For what it’s worth, FantasyAuctioneer has been offering the ability to conduct live, on-line auctions for several years, and they still are about the only option available for that type of auction format.  Hopefully in the next year or two we’ll have complete integration with their system, and/or a separate live auction option built into MyFantasyLeague.com!

Draft Dominator Application

Yet another third party program that has been updated this season to include some integration with MyFantasyLeague.com is the Draft Dominator from Bruce Henderson at Footballguys.com.  It now has a league import option that utilizes our Open Developer’s API to import your league settings.  This will save you a ton of time entering your league rules and configuration as  you prepare for your draft.

So if you use the Draft Dominator to help you draft your team, be sure to check out the Footballguys.com web site for the latest version and updates, including the optional Import program.

Draft with MockDraftCentral

Another company that has taken advantage of our Open Developer’s API is MockDraftCentral.com.  They offer a flash-based live draft web application that can be used to conduct mock drafts or real drafts.  They worked with us to integrate an option to transfer the results of a fantasy football draft that was conducted at MockDraftCentral.com to your league on MyFantasyLeague.com.

So if you have used MockDraftCentral in the past, or you prefer its interface for any other reason, you  now have  a way to conduct your draft there and then quickly and easily transfer the draft results to your league on our system.