During my time at CBSSports.com, I became friends with several of the product managers there, and I’d often suggest cool Fantasy Football tools or interesting tweaks the company could implement to the league service to make life better for owners. Invariably, I’d get shot down, with the explanation that it would take too much time/resources for such a tool, or it just wasn’t practical.
One product manager in particular, we’ll call him, “Ned,” would say “No” before I even got to the verb in my sentence. I’m not sure if it was because he didn’t think the Fantasy Football tools would be practical or just that he over-toasted his Pop-Tart that morning.
I imagine the people that came up with the Top 13 FREE Fantasy Football Draft Tools You Must Use never had a burnt Pop-Tart.
I get that the tools below are all insignificant in the grand scheme of a Fantasy Football tools, but most of them are just fun. But realize that it takes forever for a product to get a green-light for a new tool.
Let me put it this way – it took me complaining for THREE YEARS until we finally got a rankings tool. They had no rankings until 2006! The only rankings they did have was done by a writer inside an article, manually. NOT FUN! It took another couple years before they finally added “Targets” into the players’ stats!
OK, I’m done ranting. Here are some Fantasy Football tools that I think would be fun and/or helpful, and would give the product guys headaches for months! (Some of these tools might already be implemented on sites that I’m just unaware of.)
Something that tells you which players are overvalued and undervalued in the rankings of the draft service you are using, compared to your own rankings or user mock drafts. This tells you who your opponents are more likely to draft.
In other words, if you’re drafting on ESPN, it could tell you which players are being drafted here higher than where they are being drafted in user mock drafts. This is usually because some owners automatically give a little higher value to players near the top of the draft room, which of course, are ranked in order of the experts’ choosing. When an owner panics because the timer is about to go off, they usually lean toward drafting the highest-ranking players.
After you choose a player at a position, the rest of the players in that position that have the same bye week are shaded just a tad. This is a no-brainer that should be very easy to integrate. Make it happen. (Stay tuned for its arrival in the summer of 2018!)
There is a website called, Draftologist.com, that allows you to upload your league’s draft results over the past three seasons and it can give you some of this highly valuable information … FOR FREE! It’s outdated now, though, but you can still use it I believe.
Mainstream Fantasy Football league services all get NFL injury reports every week. It would be nice to see the injury percentages of each player over the course of their career. For instance:
Then an overall injury risk number can be associated to each player, using a formula that brings in all of those numbers.
Some teams pick up Fantasy Defense/Special Teams each week in hopes to capitalize on a weak opposing offenses. It would be cool if there was a scout tool that looked ahead to a week of your choosing to see the highest scoring Fantasy DSTs that are facing the worst scoring offenses. This could also work the other way, showing you the highest scoring free agent players that are coming up against the weakest defenses in a specific upcoming week.
On Tuesdays, nearly every Fantasy Football site posts their “Waiver Wire Pickups” suggestions on which players are good pickups and which ones are fool’s gold. There should be a symbol next to the player’s names in the add/drop menu that the Fantasy expert does/doesn’t suggest grabbing him.
I think we should add some fun to the Fantasy Football draft. It’s such a high-intensity event, with our futures determined by hours and hours of research. Let’s add a little more evil by impementing these things:
One idea I had a few years ago was to have a set number of phrases and stat marks that could be combined to create an awesome newsletter each week for the league. The league’s commissioner would have the ability to set the tone of the newsletter, ranging from, “Happy Fun-Time, to Just News, to Trash-Talk Central.”
Many sites, including CBSSports.com, now have league histories available to show stuff like past year’s draft results, previous year’s standings, and league records like Most Points Scored in a Season, and Longest Winning Streak.
But what I’d like to see is everyone’s Average Draft Position, along with their records at each draft spot. Or number of transactions per year for each team. Which owner makes the most trades every season, and which ones never trade? Stuff like that.
Sometimes it would be nice to make a quick note and tag it to a player you drafted (or a player someone else drafted), like:
After each round, it would be cool to see an “Instant Rankings” pop-up that showed what the league service projects for the final rankings. While this is more of a conversation piece, it would be nice to rattle some of the inexperienced owners by chiding them for being in 11th place after five rounds, tricking them into drafting a second QB in Round 6.
Do some of these Fantasy Football tools exist somewhere? If so, post a link in the comments below and tell us where they are!
I hope you enjoyed this Wish List for Fantasy Football Tools and hopefully it inspired you to think of some yourself! Feel free to post them here – and hopefully, we can get the Neds of the world to say “Yes” once in a while!
The first couple years of Topps cards were pretty great, but the 1954 Topps Baseball…
These 2024 Topps Update boxes are so hot, it forced me to create this post,…
Looking for the best Topps baseball cards from each set, each year? It's a common…
Grabbing the best 2024 Topps Update rookie cards is always a good idea, since the…
Earlier this week, Topps made 2024 Update Series baseball boxes available on its website for…
Knowing the best basketball rookie cards to get from each NBA season gives you a…
This website uses cookies.
View Comments
Auction replay: I'd love to be able to see how the bidding played out in last year's auction, not just the final price.
EXCELLENT idea! A runback to see who bid on whom -- and just how close you were to taking home the really big sleepers.
CBS had this during our live auction, linked from each player page. But now I cannot find it archived anywhere. Seems completely backwards why you would want it during and not after. But that seems to be CBS' M.O..
1. Isn't that sort of implemented already? I thought both sites' draft software allowed you to sort via expert ranking or ADP (both are visible I believe).
5. If you are on ESPN, go to the fantasy football page and under "More," select points against. I use that every week to select my defense. I think this sort of gets at what you are looking for.
Good to know about No. 5!
As far as No. 1, I mean, I don't want to have it adjusted in the draft room, showing by a symbol or something, that this player is rated so-and-so spots higher than my rankings.
And about No. 5 -- that's just a Fantasy DST's points against -- I want to see their upcoming schedule of bad offenses in any given week, ranked along with their points against. Something everyone does on the side, but i want it proactively looking to upcoming weeks and sorting for us, making it 10x easier.
12. Yahoo has this I believe, after the draft you can see who drafted the team with the most projected points. Be that as it may, it's still Yahoo's projections so who really knows.
Oh nvm I see now, you mean during the draft! Didn't read close enough. That would be a way to get less steady minds off their game lol
No problem, thanks for the comment. That is a cool feature of Yahoo!'s that I didn't know about. It would definitely be a nice way of gauging your weaknesses (according to Yahoo! at least). I also like FootballGuys' Rate My Team tool.
To expand on that and not tooting my own horn. But after our leagues yahoo draft last season my team was determined as the best drafted team and then end of season results came out with me as Champion.
So I would say yahoo was pretty correct.
12. Instant Rankings - the draft software at insiderfootball.com has this feature. Also the projected weekly outcome of every week during the season....makes for a good huddle after the draft.
Very nice, thank you! I will check these out.
Great list!
#3 with analyzing owner trends from previous drafts or auctions would be great. I tend to do a little bit manually but it is a pain in the butt. In an auction league, I also like to know how many players at a position were bought above or below a certain value. Also if there are price trends based on the order someone was nominated. You know, all the geeky stuff!
Well said, all good tweaks to our imaginary tool! I like it!
David,
It sounds like you really need to check out http://www.myfantasyleague.com if you haven't done so already. I am one of 40 teams in that league (4 conferences) and have been a part of it from the start back in 2009. We went with MFL because at the time it was the only platform that allowed for "divisions" so we could accommodate an infinite amount of teams (the league I'm in is for members of our Fraternity's Santa Barbara chapter and has ages 21-50+ with teams). MFL also provides the most comprehensive data and analytics I've seen compared with the popular options like yahoo and ESPN. My biggest complaint about the service is that it lacked partnerships with other Fantasy Football tools, apps, sites, etc and so for the first couple years we were limited to what was available to us there. Now however, the biggest names in FF integrate with MFL (Rotoworld and Fantasy Sharks are the ones I use most often).
I also use a site called FF Toolbox (www.fftoolbox.com). This site has a great scouting report for all positions (to answer your #5) which accurately accounts for strength of schedules.
The only thing you didn't list, and something that I am working on on a private level is a way to manipulate your leagues scoring outside of the standard possible ways to score. The rise of FanDuel and these weekly fantasy platforms offer something along the lines of what I'm talking about, but not exactly. FanDuel if you haven't heard allows you to bet on all sorts of random elements that occur within the game. It's an over-under option bet on PED's!
Good luck to you.
Cheers,
Erik
Saint Angeles Athletic Club, 2013
MyFantasyLeague #21418
10-Team, 14-Spot Roster, Custom PPR
QB A. Luck
RB A. Foster
RB D. Wilson
RB L. Miller
RB B. Tate
WR D. Thomas
WR R. Cobb
WR J. Gordon
WR D. Heyward-Bay
WR J. Blackmon
TE Z. Sudfeld
K J. Tucker
DEF Steelers