League Hosting Sites

As to league hosting sites, as I’ve mentioned above, MyFantasyLeague.com (“MFL”) is the most adaptable site available for complex leagues.  They have an enormous number of possible scoring categories, and can support leagues with large numbers of teams, players per team, variety in positions, redraft/dynasty/keeper/contract/salary cap variants, and a bunch of other options.  It used to be that if you could think up a rule, they’d do their best to accommodate you.  Alas, those days are long gone.  And even worse, I believe the site changed management last year and attempted a re-design.  There were long-term problems that needed fixing, like the site’s transactions set-up and the page for setting starting lineups.  Alas, the new team made things worse, rather than better.  Previous things that worked fine started not working at all.  And for those of us commishing complex leagues, suddenly we were having to manually do a lot of things that were previously automated.  I think they’ve created an opportunity for a competitor to swoop in and take a big chunk of their business, should one appear, and I’ll be looking into the possibility of switching hosting sites this offseason.

I use ESPN to host my home league, that I’ve been running since 1990.  That league has the simplest rules, so ESPN can easily accommodate it.  And I really like their ability to run our annual live player auction.  The user interface is easily the best around, too.  The site is clean, easy to navigate, and their transactions and starting lineup pages are what I compare all other hosting sites to.  What’s especially intriguing about ESPN is their move to new defensive player positions, switching from DT, DE, and LB, to Interior DL, Edge Defender, and Off-Ball Linebacker.  This is a much improved identification of a defensive player’s primary schematic role, and eliminates team owners being able to game the players’ positions to their advantage, and instead forces them to stick to talent evaluation and playing opportunity, like in all other areas of the game.  Alas, ESPN is seriously lacking in their scoring options and do not even try to handle salary cap or other more complex leagues.

This past year I joined a league at RealitySportsOnline (“RSO”) for the first time.  I’ve always been intrigued by their setup, but was leery of their lack of customization.  They have expanded their scoring options, which was a long time coming, and it appears as though their efforts there will continue.  The rigidity to their salary cap structure is slightly annoying, but I became accustomed to it.  The fact that they only allow a live player auction in forming teams is a pain, and is often a deal breaker to a lot of leagues and, in my opinion, is the primary factor preventing them from being more commercially successful.  The league I joined had team owners in England and Australia, making scheduling a live auction a major headache.  But their biggest problem is their user interface.  Finding information is very difficult, and navigating their site is often times non-sensical.  Worse, their sorting of players, at least defensive players, sometimes just plain doesn’t work.  Trying to find defensive players to nominate in the live auction took a lot of time, and in such a setting when seconds count, that was a major issue.  On top of all of that, I was unable to make transactions or changes in my starting lineup using my iPhone, and somehow the security measures on my work computer blocked access to RSO even though I could access other league sites, meaning that I could only access the site on my ancient home computer.  All that being said, I’m happy I’m in that league, and am hopeful that the interface issues will improve over time.