Anyone Can Be an Expert!!!

Well at least in fantasy football…

So a couple weeks ago, I announced our Facebook Experts League field…

Matt Berry, Nate Ravitz from ESPN
Andy Behrens, Brandon Funston from Yahoo
Jay Clemons, SI.com, FSTA Fantasy Football Writer of the Year
William Del Pilar, founder of KFFL
Ryan Houston, founder of Fanball
Chris Liss, Jeff Erickson from Rotowire
John Hansen, fantasyguru.com

and one qualifying member from our Facebook app.

In order to be a qualifying member you need to have created at least two leagues on our fantasy football app on Facebook that have at least 10 players in them…

If you qualify and are interested in beating the experts send me a note on Facebook by midnight EST tonight…

Draft is tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7 PM EST/4 PM PST.

Fantasy Football Goes Mobile

So as I mentioned I’ve been playing fantasy football since before the Internet. We used to keep score via spreadsheets and each week had to wait or the USA Today to publish their weekly stats. If the commissioner of the league was out of contention, often the stats wouldn’t get done for weeks at a time and the league became a mess.

Enter the Internet and web based commissioner services. And once what was a bunch of nerd huddled around a spreadsheet became an industry that every major media entity is trying to get a piece of. Technology in the late 90′s and early 2000′s totally revolutionized the world of fantasy sports.

Now mobile has the chance to repeat history.

At Citizen Sports, we have always aimed to bring fantasy sports to users where they are already spending time. We were the first company to launch a full fledged fantasy football commissioner product on Facebook last season and this season we’ve extended that functionality to the iPhone.

Our iPhone application now available for free in the iPhone store. For those of you in leagues on our Fantasy app on Facebook, you will be able to manage your roster, view live scoring and track all your player news on your iPhone via our app.




For those of you who aren’t in a league in our Facebook league you can still enter your players from any league you are in, on any service. You can then track the scoring and news of those players real-time.

Probably the coolest feature on the application is the way we have used the iPhone’s push notification system. Once you have set up the application you will receive push notifications on any new news on your players or any scoring updates on your players. Imagine Sunday morning, tied up at church or shopping with the girlfriend. A push notification shows up on your phone with news that Adrian Peterson has been scratched due to an accident slipping on a banana peel in the locker room. You open the app, go into your roster and sub Chester Taylor in for him in your starting lineup. Then go back to saying Our Father or telling your girlfriend how nice her new dress looks on her without missing a beat.

Just download the app, so your reason for losing this year isn’t your commitment to God or your girlfriend.

Four Points or Six Points… That is the question…

So I’m in this sort of strange league. It’s with fraternity brothers (yes MIT has fraternities and they are very popular) and I’ve been in the league for 18 years. We’ve been playing fantasy football since you had to manually calculate points using the newspaper box scores.

Anyways, this league has some, let’s just call them, eclectic rules. Over the years we’ve tried hard to make QB’s as valuable in fantasy as they are in the real world and after 18 years we have definitely accomplished that.

How, you ask?

Well, first off our thresholds for scoring are a joke. A QB receives zero yardage points until he gets to 150 yards and doesn’t get significant bonuses until he goes over 200 yards at which points his points can go through the roof. We award six points per each TD pass and the clincher is we are forced to start two QB’s. Take a look at the marginal difference between the number two QB and the number 20 QB (10 teams in the league) and you will understand how we have finally accomplished this.

We actually do an auction format where everyone has $20 total to spend on their team and the minimum a player can go for is $.05. For the first time, this year the two most expensive players were QBs – Tom Brady for $7.35 and Drew Brees for $6.55.

At first I thought that this scoring system was stupid but the more I’ve been involved with it (this will the third season), I think it might actually be better than standard scoring because of the great value it gives the QB (arguably the most important position in real football)…

Anyways, the point of this babbling was to get some feedback from you guys on what you think the best fantasy scoring system is, starting with the simple question… four points or six points… what is the right number for TD passes?

Play Fantasy Against the “Experts”

In the old days, experts leagues were easy. I mean there weren’t very many so-called fantasy experts and all of them knew each other so they’d always help each other out by being in their company’s expert league. I remember my first ever expert’s league was shortly after we founded PROTRADE at an FSTA show.

I had played fantasy for 14 some odd years at that point but believe it or not had never done a draft – always having played in auction leagues (don’t get me started about how much better those are). Anyways, to make a long story short, my draft was far from pretty. We’ll call it the Mike Anderson fiasco and that league was against the likes of a pre-ESPN Matt Berry, a pre-ESPN Nate Ravitz, Yahoo’s Brandon Funston, etc, etc, etc.

Anyways, regardless of the result, the experience of getting to compete in a league with these so-called experts was a blast and something that not many people get to do. Over the years many of them have become my friends and I enjoy being in fantasy leagues with them. The reality of it though is that as much as these self-proclaimed experts know there are plenty of you guys out there that know as much and probably win as much in fantasy football as these guys do.

One of our goals at Citizen Sports has always been to make the fantasy experience all about the fan so again this year we are opening up the opportunity for one fan to compete against the experts. I’ve lined up a killer field this year again… from the guys you see on TV, Berry and Ravitz to the guys you hear on the radio John Hanson and Chris Liss, to the guys you read online like Brandon Funston, Andy Behrens and Jeff Erickson. We even have the reigning FSTA Fantasy Football Writer of the year Jay Clemons from SI.com.

All you have to do to be eligible is create at least two leagues on our fantasy app with at least 10 people in each league. We’ll draw a random fan from all of those that qualify and invite you in to the draft.

Until then happy drafting.