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Ranking the best fantasy football leagues
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For everyone who would like to believe our economy is going to hell in a handbasket, I offer the definitive proof otherwise: Fantasy Football.
It's the great American success story -- an extraordinarily popular product that remains affordable to everyone because of competition.
And it keeps getting better and better.
Just when ESPN's visually appealing product catches your attention, Yahoo! comes along and steals some of the rival's top fantasy-analyzing talent.
And just when you think Yahoo! is the place to be, CBS Sportsline fine-tunes its game to create a more enjoyable experience.
And just when ... well, you get the message.
There's a reason these and many other on-line fantasy football leagues look alike. It's because the core model is outstanding.
Alas, it's still not as good as it gets.
Fantasy football was created in a hotel room. With live bodies. With face-to-face debate.
Forty-some-odd years later, the game is at its best in live settings. Bars. Fraternities. Offices. Even living rooms.
When I set out to determine the Best Fantasy Football League, it struck me: Some look snazzier and some offer more toys, but the original league -- the Greater Oakland Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPL) -- still does it best.
Drafts where one rival can touch (or push or even punch) another. Sundays where almost every televised matchup gets the blood boiling between six-day-a-week friends hotter than a Jets jersey at a Giants game. And Mondays where the trash talking would make Deion Sanders proud.
No live scoring, but who needs it? The way TV caters to its fantasy audience these days, every telecast is a fantasy scoreboard unto itself. With just your roster and your opponent's to calculate, who needs a Web site?
And how did Ronnie Brown's five-touchdown game compare with other memorable feats in your league's history? You're not going to find that on NFL.com. But it's at your fingertips in the GOPPL record book.
Bottom line: Joining a private league goes against the flow, but so did drafting a quarterback instead of a running back in Round 1 of your fantasy draft this season. And last I looked, quarterbacks were dominating most leagues' scoring.
Rightfully so. Quarterback is the foundation position of a football team. And private leagues among friends and/or collegues have always been the foundation of fantasy football.
It's clear where the Internet is considered, the "Which is the Best?" debate comes down to ESPN and Yahoo. So which is the best? I say: Neither. GOPPL is the best, and it's quite possible your private league rates right behind.
OK, OK. We started out presuming this was going to come down to a debate between ESPN and Yahoo, so let's have it. As good as the CBS, Fox, Sporting News and NFL.com games are, there are still only two ways to go when playing fantasy football on-line.
Here's how I'd compare them:
ESPN
What I like about it: If you're a sports fan, there's something special about being associated with ESPN. When one of ESPN's analysts comes onto SportsCenter and starts talking fantasy, it makes you feel special, like he/she is talking about you. Also, while ESPN wasn't the birthplace of fantasy football, but it was the first big-time Web entity to run with it.
When you click onto "Fantasy" at espn.com, you're treated like a valued customer. You get access to almost everything for free, which makes it fun to browse around and "chat" with your high-profile friends.
What I don't like about it: While ESPN was early to jump on the fantasy bandwagon, it never took the game too seriously. And in some ways, it's still in that frame of mind. ESPN pretty much believes the game should be played one way and all decisions should be consistent with its analysts, rather than allowing you to play by your own preferred set of rules and dial up your own stats in order to make your own decisions.
Yahoo!
What I like about it: Yahoo! clearly used ESPN as a model for its fantasy construction, then tried to take the potential client to the next level in every possible way. It has resulted in a far more detailed product than ESPN, one that caters to experienced players more than beginners.
A click of a button takes you pretty much anywhere in the vast Yahoo fantasy world, and while that can get you lost at times, it also allows you to fairly easily find everything you'd possibly want to know. And where ESPN offers quantity when it comes to experts' information and opinions, Yahoo has concentrated on quality, recognizing at this level of fantasy competition, everyone is searching for his/her own general manager.
What I don't like about it: Yahoo! knows it has a good product, and it's not going to let you forget it. You have to pay for its "Stat Tracker," which is a must when playing on-line. After all, without live stats, you've taken away the No. 1 reason to play fantasy football on-line. Most hosts recognize this and offer it for free. Yahoo is too good for that, and it charges you for it.
My choice
Must say I hate getting charged for my instantaneous stats, but I guess you have to pay to swim with the big fish. I can't look at ESPN's fantasy site without seeing its embarrassingly bad "Hector the Projector & Victor the Predictor" feature that mocked the fantasy game for years. Thank goodness Yahoo! -- and many others -- came along and took this great game more seriously.
I'd go with Yahoo!.
