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.

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.

At least I had one prediction on FatMixx that turned out right. The scoring on the crazy McNabb/Brown/Buckhalter TD was corrected to reflect a tipped ball and completion to Buckhalter. Here’s the full impact of the scoring change:

OFF Phi +35.0 Passing Yards for Donovan McNabb
OFF Phi +1.0 Passing Touchdowns for Donovan McNabb
OFF Phi +1.0 Receptions for Correll Buckhalter
OFF Phi +55.0 Receiving Yards for Correll Buckhalter
OFF Phi +1.0 Receiving Touchdowns for Correll Buckhalter
OFF Phi -1.0 Receptions for Reggie Brown
OFF Phi -20.0 Receiving Yards for Reggie Brown
OFF Phi -1.0 Fumbles for Reggie Brown
RET Phi -1.0 Fumbles Recovered (Own Team) for Correll Buckhalter
RET Phi -37.0 Fumble Recovery Yds (Own Team) for Correll Buckhalter
RET Phi -1.0 Misc Fumbles Recovered for Correll Buckhalter
RET Phi -37.0 Misc Fumble Recovery Yards for Correll Buckhalter
RET Phi -1.0 Fumble Return TDs for Correll Buckhalter

Told ya so.

NFL.com has the updated GameBook if you’re interested.

I was in Boston all day yesterday for my fantasy league’s draft. We do an in person auction draft using a point system and salary cap. Makes for a different sort of challenge than the traditional snake draft most online sites use.

In any case, the first set of analysis by our commissioners alter ego, Kimmelitis, came out today in the form of preseason power rankings. My team is the West Hartford Trees, and you’ll find me near the bottom at 10th place. Now, I didn’t have as strong a draft as I did last year, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have one of the worst drafts.

I finished in second place, arguably could’ve easily won the championship if it weren’t week 17, and believed that I had the best starters on draft day. So where did the Power Rankings have me? In 9th place. I’m taking this year’s ranking, then, as a compliment.

In all fairness to the commish, the Kimmelitis features are one of the best things about being in NERFL. Nothing beats having an active commissioner who really enjoys making the game better for all the players.

I’ll be doing some more in depth analysis over the coming week on the league’s draft. Auction drafts aren’t covered as much as the more widely available online draft formats, so it’s hard to get a lot of insight into them online. The NERFL draft, while pretty unique, should offer some good insights into good auction strategy. After a third year in the league, I’m starting to see patterns emerge around the typical draft day questions: better to pay for 1 or 2 RB studs early or hold out for more mid-tier players and how to rate players’ draft day value.

The Fantasy Games team at ESPN.com rolled out a pretty cool feature this year that allows users to run mock drafts using the actual draft application used in ESPN’s Fantasy Football game. The link is on the fantasy front page and it’s called “Mock Draft Lobby.”

The Mock Draft Lobby allows you to simulate an entire draft without having to do it with your actual league. After all, you don’t really want to draft with your actual league because you don’t want to give away any secrets. The Mock Draft Lobby allows you to start a mock draft within 10 minutes. You can draft with anywhere from 1 to 12 players, so you don’t even need a full room. The missing players will autopick using ESPN.com’s default player list. Of course, we’ve had pretty decent usage of the application, so many of the drafts during the day are full.

When you’re done the draft, the system even emails you with the result of the draft. Try it with a number of different people and you can get an idea of how people are valuing different positions.

It’s also a nice way to preview ESPN.com’s very slick live draft client. If you’re looking for a place to try out draft strategy, this might be the best way to do it.

Click on the image to see a full size screen grab.

(Note: Standard disclaimer applies)

Via Josh, here’s a good little explanation of how fantasy football works.

the system I’m envisioning would look like so:

Team A, B, and C are interested in player X.
A has 12 cap points remaining
B has 10 cap points remaining
C has 50 cap points remaining

Let’s say that player X is Samkin Gado this past week and all three teams bid “max points” in the style of free agency I proposed. The way this would work is that Gado would go to team C for 13 points. Everyone bids as much as they can until they run out or win. Very simple, right?

Let’s say player X is Wilford and A and C bid 10 points and B bids 7 points, the tie between A and C is resolved using the waiver order.

That’s pretty much the entirety of how complex this proposal is. Let’s take an example sent in an email to me (interpreting what “a max bid up to 22″ means under the current rules):

Side note: In regards to Paul’s statement… yes, he is bidding 22 points regardless of how he writes his statement… the 22 is the bid.Depending on who else bids… if no one does, he pays 1 point… if another person with a lower priority number bids 10, he pays 22…. if a person with a higher priority number bids 10, he pays 11…. as it is stipulated in the rules….. it does not mean “+1″ up to 22 points.

That’s pretty complicated, IMHO, and too complicated. Why is it +1 in some cases and the full bid in other cases? It should either be blind bid or always +1, that’s what I was proposing.

So, in all cases, if the owner with the second place bid offers 10, the winner gets it for 11. The phrase max bid would always mean the maximum I can bid before I run out or I win.

If you’ve ever bid on ebay, you know how they do their blind bids. You bid a number, but only pay what it takes to actually win the player.

To process the free agent requests, you simply take all the bids on a particular player, order by bid (ties resolved by waiver order) and then take the bid in second place and charge the winning owner that bid +1.

We’ve been having discussions in our fantasy football league about how to do free agency in our league. To understand the background of the debate, you need to know a few things about our league. We play fantasy football with a salary cap system that uses an auction draft to determine initial market values and a nightly blind auction system for free agency. The rules for this free agency system are specified as so in our rulebook:

B) Free agents may be acquired between 9:00am Tuesday and 8:00pm on Friday. The Waiver period ends each day at 8:00pm.

C) Dead Weight Cap Hit. When a player is dropped from a roster 25% of their value (drop the decimal point) and carried as cap value. Dead cap space will be halved each week (drop the decimal point). Dead cap space means you have you have that many points less then 150 to spend on any other player.

D) There is no Dead Weight Cap Hit for any NFL player placed on IR and lost for the season.

E) Waiver System. Teams will be given a waiver number from 1 to 12, 1 being the best and 12 being the worst. Original numbers are assigned after the first week of play. The team with the lowest point total will be assigned the first number and the team with the most points will be assigned the twelfth number. Owners can call or email the Commissioner and state which free agents they are interested in acquiring. Along with that request, owners will submit a maximum point bid for the player they want to select. The owner must state the name of the free agent, maximum amount they are willing to spend on the player, and the player being released from the roster. All information must be supplied or the bid will be considered invalid. The owner with the lowest number (closest to one) would have first crack at the player but if an owner with a higher waiver priority number has a higher maximum bid for the player, that owner would jump over the owner with the lower waiver priority number and have to spend their maximum bid on the NFL player. The owner with the lowest waiver priority number (closest to one) will only be charged one point over the next highest bidder for the player if they supply the highest bid. If only one owner bids on an NFL player, the cost of the NFL player will be one point. Once a player has been selected, the owner will move to the number twelve on the waiver priority list.

F) The Free Agent Period ends the Friday night before Week 14.

I’m proposing a rule change to the section E, specifically pertaining to the part I’ve bolded above. In particular, I’m asking to change the bidding system to one where instead of the winning bidder getting charged their max bid for a player, they will only get charged the second-highest bid plus 1 point. I just sent a mail to the list that explained my logic thusly:

So… the question will come down to whether we like this type of Free Agency or not. I was going to propose this in the offseason as a rule change/clarification, but here it is now.

I’m clearly in favor of what I’m calling the “Ebay style” free agency, where the winning bid is the second-highest bid plus 1 point (or in the case of ties, the high bid with the highest waiver priority).

The system we have now I’ve dubbed “Rosenhaus” Free Agency, where the free agency process simulates closely what happens in the real NFL where agents are (supposed to be) the only ones that know the competing bids coming up for their player.

I prefer the Ebay style for two reasons:

1. it’s the most beneficial to the owners both in terms of time and also cap space (lowers the research demands, makes it easier to get a keeper bargain)
2. We’re not dealing with real players and agents. The goal is to make a competitive game. If you’ve managed your cap space effectively, we should do the most we can to allow you to use it. You shouldn’t miss out on a player because there’s no agent saying, “I just got a better offer, do you want to counter?” for one or two points.

I have several other reasons, but those are the two most important ones to me.

I know there are former NERFL players that read this along with some pretty avid fantasy players, so I thought I would open up the discussion to the wider audience. Feel free to leave comments, disagreements, rants, whatever on this topic. I’m curious what folks will say.

I’d also like to mention that this is probably the easiest unofficial way to get ideas or feature suggestions to the ESPN.com League Manager team. While this site is independent of ESPN.com, some of those aforementioned readers are on the LM team.

One of the problems with working past 3AM for 2 of the past 3 nights is that your sleep cycle gets completely jacked up. I went to bed early tonight then got woken up by my pager going off. Now, I’m wide awake and can’t sleep.

The cause of all of this lost sleep was the testing and preparation for this Sunday’s relaunch of FantasyCast for ESPN.com’s Fantasy Football. If you upgrade your team or league you can get access to this app which provides you a quick overview of the NFL games and your fantasy league all in a nice, compact space. Here’s a screenshot of the post-game appearance of the app:

Click on the image to enlarge.

I’d also encourage you to leave feedback for the application using the “Submit FantasyCast Feedback” link at the bottom of the window there. I can assure you that our fantasy games folks are definitely reading the feedback. Obviously, we can’t promise we can do everything people suggest, but your feedback is important to us.

You’ll be seeing more of these applications as we build out our RealTime technology stack and even some surprise apps coming soon.

Don’t have a ton of time tonight to do the full recap, so let me just focus on a couple of items. First, the Vikings look terrible. I’m glad I didn’t get their defense in my fantasy draft because I, too, bought into the hype of the upgraded defense. Perhaps they are actually good, but so far they’ve looked downright awful. Even worse for Viking fans, Daunte Culpepper is well on his way to be this year’s Ahman Green. I wonder how many people drafted him first or second in the draft? How many of those are gnashing their teeth right now?

Eagles game? Jets/Dolphins game? Yawn…

By the way, Carnell Williams? Wow.

My last thought for the evening: Brian Billick, genius coach or lucky jerk? Discuss.

One of my pet peeves is coaches who can’t get the most out of their players. For example, Rich Kotite trying to implement the West Coast offense with a QB whose fastball passes might decapitate a WR closer than 10 yards away. (That still makes me sad.) Game planning seems to separate the Reids and the Belicheks from the rest. It gives them consistency. Personnel matters, of course, but the good coaches change things up depending on who they’re going to face. The bad ones bring out the same defense, the same playbook, and the same offense each game, over and over, win or lose, whether they’re playing the Ravens or playing the Colts.

My candidates for the bad list: Billick, Tice, Holmgren (maybe), Cowher (!), Martz (!), Shanahan.

One of the bits of information that goes into drafting that perfect fantasy team is interest in players when they hit the free agent market. You look at the contracts of folks like Shaun Alexander and Edgerrin James and look at how teams are evaluating their talent and durability. Today, though, John Clayton writes about the difficulties that running backs are facing when looking for contracts after reaching 27 or 28 years old. The length of the deal, it seems, often reduces the yearly contract values even though the running back may be a great draft pick for the next year or two.