When I was at ESPN.com, the top item on my wish list for things ESPN.com should’ve been doing was opening up the Fantasy engine with good APIs. My reasoning was twofold. First, there were lots of features people wanted that simply weren’t popular enough for a site like ESPN, where audience is measured in millions. Second, the team is small and couldn’t (and wouldn’t) build everything in house. It doesn’t make sense.

So, the idea is that a clean API that exposed just enough of the game engine for external tools to integrate in and then independent developers could build (and charge for, if they wanted) all the little niche features that are out there. FAAB free agency and auction drafts were the biggest features I thought were missing (though ESPN did roll out limited auction drafts this year).

Another thing to consider: Facebook was just “eh, Facebook” until the developer API came out. Then, they became a darling, started growing audience a bit more quickly, and now even Friendster has a developer API. There are positive business effects for concentrating on the core platform and turning your game into a service.

You have no idea how much I wanted to do this. Had I stayed at ESPN, I would’ve pushed for that as a new architecture. I had it documented out, plans on how to implement it, and was lining up the ducks to turn the sports group at ESPN.com into a stealth data provider. I was really considering this to be the next startup idea for someday in the future after we turn Fanzter into a media giant.

Now, it seems I won’t have to do it. TechCrunch just wrote up a new company called OPEN Sports Network. While the company web site talks more about the social piece (perhaps they integrate into social networks?), the TechCrunch post suggests that their game platform will have open APIs.

I’m making a prediction now: if this is executed well (and there’s reason to hope because this guy ran SportsLine), this will become the fantasy platform of choice for serious gamers quickly, with casual games following as soon as enough third party features extend the game.

The only thing I don’t understand is launching the platform in August. That gives 0 time to developers to extend the game before the NFL kickoff. I’m sure I’m just missing something, or they’re going out cautiously in year 1.

In the case of tonight’s Monday Night Football game, they are, in order, family and the Philadelphia Eagles. I need a huge night from Terrell Owens to win my fantasy game but really, I have to stand with the wife’s fam in Buffalo and hope for an upset. Keeping the Dallas Cowboys from widening their lead over the Philadelphia Eagles makes a nice side benefit.

So, to the clan back in Buffalo, Go Bills!

Update: That was one hell of a game, but ultimately I ended up with the Bills losing along with my fantasy team. The Bills played inspired football. Irony of ironies, I drafted J.P. Losman as my bye week QB, looking at this matchup this week as a favorable one for Buffalo. After his poor play, I dropped him. In our league, we actually draft Team QBs, which means we get the backups, too. Thought it wasn’t a high scoring night (1pt), it still beat my choice this week, the Falcons TQB, which netted me a fancy -2. Ugh. Anyway, good luck to the Bills, but we return to our all Eagles, all the time NFL fandom next week.

I didn’t do so well this year. After the draft last year, I felt like I had mastered the format and figured out a good system for evaluating draft value. This year, I was just shocked at how out of whack my sheet was compared to what people were paying. Looking back at my prep, I realized at least one critical mistake in building out my sheet, but I still am surprised that some of these players went for the point prices they fetched. 150 point cap, and Laurence Maroney went for 50, Willis McGahee for 50, Peyton Manning for 51. Those are higher than last years by a few points a piece at each position.

Ultimately, I forgot to factor in keeper inflation, the bump that comes with the extra money saved by having a cheaper keeper. There were some excellent bargains on the keeper list this year, and that pushed up spending by 5 points or so for the top players, especially running backs not in RBBC situations. That miscalculation kept me from keeping up with bids, and I missed out on the entire first round of players. I got no one out of the first 12 on the board. That’s unlike me.

Also, an in person auction draft is a lot like playing poker… you want to vary your bids, stay in on players you don’t want sometimes, so that people don’t have a clear read on what your intentions are. After all, if they know you want a player, they know they can push you to bid a few extra points on them. This year, I stayed out of players that I wasn’t interested in. I don’t think I bid on one player that I didn’t want. Contrast that to last year, where I was basically happily playing chicken with other owners trying to bid up their players even though I had no interest in them. This year, I got played instead because I was easier to read.

Finally, I definitely wasn’t as prepared. One nice thing about working at ESPN was having the TV on in the background at my desk. I picked up a lot of football passively by listening to NFL Live most days. This year, I have been busy with the startups and haven’t had a chance to do the kind of reading I do most years. There was a point at about the 9th round today that I realized I didn’t know who I would put up for the rest of the draft. That’s how I ended up with Muhsin Muhammad.

I still like my team, even though it didn’t fit the plan I had going in. It’s not as strong as my team last year, nor is it as balanced, but overall I think I recovered well.

As for everyone else’s draft, the best drafted team was the Nukes followed closely by the Pirates. You can take a look at our league at ESPN FFL or our points spreadsheet at Google Docs. Happy to hear what others think. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Today was draft day for the main Fantasy Football league I play in. Unlike most leagues, we do an in-person auction draft with a salary cap to fill rosters rather than the traditional snake draft. This format is great, but the downside is that it eliminates a lot of software out there to help on draft day. Granted, there are commercial packages out there that can help you out, but this year we found a simple, free solution that gets even better if you have an Internet connection and multiple computers where you draft.

One of the owners in the league created a simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing all the teams with all of their roster slots along with a simple set of formulas to record total cap spent and remaining. This way, he just needed to record it as the draft went on and it could be emailed out.

That worked well, but put a lot of pressure on him. Most years, I also ran the big draft board with stickers, which at least meant two people aside from the commish were logging all the picks and points. With my recent departure from ESPN, though, I didn’t have a free source for the board and forgot to order it. My bad! So, to help out this year, I tried taking the spreadsheet and sharing it with Google Docs. Since we had Internet access at the draft location, and three people with laptops, plus 1 remote user, we were able to collaboratively share entry responsibilities among two of us with another 2 verifying the data as we entered it.

This solution worked amazingly well. The other folks that had the spreadsheet open would see the changes as I typed them, within a second or two, and we were able to even invite “spectators” into our draft to watch along. The spectators only had read-only access, which I was able to control as I invited people into the document.

Couple of thoughts: This is literally how simple a day-of-draft tool needs to be. No fancy analysis, no extra features. Just tally up the spending, record the picks, and know the teams and roster layouts. All it needed was a list of players with autocomplete and that would be it. Oh, and did I mention that Google Docs can import Excel and Word documents along with a number of other formats. It also exports the same for those folks who would rather have an offline copy.

You can check out our draft spreadsheet on Google Docs, and see if you can make one for your league.

And a note to the peeps back at ESPN: This is the easiest way to build this! No need for anything fancy, and combined with Google Gears, you’d have a simple offline/online application with just the browser.

I don’t really like Matt Berry, but then again I hate the columns he (doesn’t actually) write. The information is decent though. Worth a watch. I may add a permanent video spot for the SportsCenter Minute on FM’s front page.