FortKnox's Journal: Fantasy Football...

Well, I got a few of you interested in Fantasy Football, and combine that with some other friends from my MUD, and I have a nice league ready. What I'd like to do is run a keepers league (where you get to keep a few players next year, making it more of a 'dynasty' league than a 'start from scratch' deal). Is that ok with those of you interested?

Also, I'm looking for a site where I can run a keeper league for free, if possible. If not, the cheaper the better (like espn keeper TEAMS cost $50 each. Yikes!). Any help is greatly appreciated.

Sportsline's "Free" site

[COBOL/MVS]

Sportsline has a free site available. However, it commissions the site, sets the rules, trades, etc. You don't get much control on how the league is run.

I'm a big Sportsline fan commissioning for 2 years on it, but now they want us to pay. Most everyone who's played last year is fine with that, but I guess the initial shock had some impact and made me bitter for a few minutes.

are you ready for some football?

[Em Emalb]

I know I am. Can't help you on the free stuff, but I am rocking an ready to go. :)

Re:are you ready for some football?

[Em Emalb]

uhm, as far as your question, I got so excited (yeah, I know, football dork here) I forgot to answer it. Keeper's league is cool with me.

keepers leagues cost $$

[daoine]

I generally have a team on Sandbox and a team on Sportsline (the free ones) -- I'm a bigger fan of Sportsline now that Spambox...err...Sandbox will sell your address every time you update your profile.

I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a keepers league that doesn't cost money (3 years ago you could - but now, there's no way)

Either way, I'm game for whatever. :)

You know?

[Cliff]

I've always wondered how hard it would be to actually WRITE a Fantasy Football based b-log, if only for the challenge. For this "keeper's league", what kinds of rules are we dealing with? How difficult would it be to collect player stats (it would be nice if there was a 'stats feed' or something one could just slurp down and apply to a database, somewhere). Heck, I could probably come up with a quick schema to keep stats, and all I would need would be a front-end to enter statistics and a CLI task to slurp the stats into the dB. What else would be needed?

Re:You know?

[daoine]

I think access to the stats feed costs an atrocious amount of money (I did a little consulting for an online fantasy site), but I do know that people who ran their own leagues generally used the sportsline stats.

That being said, they needed a bit of manual labor to get said stats in the db though, because it comes to you in a bunch of game formats looking like this [nfl.com]. I don't know what's worse, dealing with the whole mass o' stats, or sorting out which players you need.

Once it's in, it's not too hard -- mostly number crunching based on the yardage, tackles, and scoring based on position, and then tacking on extra noted points. (i.e. 1 pt for every 50 yds thrown for the QB, 1 pt. for every 15 yards rush/rec, 1 pt per tackle...etc) It only gets a little screwy every so often...like handling offensive tackles on a turnover.

On a mildly related side-note -- another way to handle the keeper's league for free is to get a bunch o' honest people who will properly trade at the beginning of the league -- thus the only responsibility is to remember who has who from year to year.

Re:You know?

[FortKnox]

Honestly, if I had the time, I could probably just use web stats (like the link you posted) and pump out something and put it on a website. On the other hand, I may just use yahoo's fantasy football site ;-)

Time is my biggest enemy. I'd have to pull something off now if I want to program it
-OR-
I'll get the stats from the newspaper and do it all by hand *cringe*

Re:You know?

[Cliff]

Writing parsing code is easy. I love doing that. It's just finding the right page to parse that's the real problem.

Does sportsline have their stats online at all?

Does NFL track individual player statistics by game?

Another tricky issue at doing this is injury reports. I know of no site that has these in any standard format.