If you’ve never played online fantasy football before, or if you have but haven’t done a lot of it, you might not know about all your options. Right now there are several great league hosting sites that you can play on for free and get a lot of cool features to play with. If you’ve already got a group of friends playing fantasy together, you can use the website to host your league and do all the math and other work for you. Or if you’re on your own, you can join a league in need of owners and play with them. Most online leagues are just groups of strangers who have joined in a league together.
So let’s go through the options currently available for fantasy footballers and what each one offers you.
#1. ESPN.com – Let’s start with the group that’s probably the best. In the last few years fantasy hosts have been trying to step their games up and get more users, and ESPN is leading the pack. They’ve got lots of customizing options for making your own league, a group of dedicated columnists and podcasters, and pretty nice online drafting room. This year they’ve even got “free agent acquisition budgets,” a system where owners place blind bids on free agents and the highest bidder wins. This eliminates the first come first serve waiver system that website leagues normally have to use and is a nice addition that shows online leagues are really getting to the point where they can duplicate all of the things off-line pen and paper leagues can do.
The bottom line is if you’re new to fantasy football join a standard league at ESPN. Don’t feel that you have to stop there, I’d suggest having a few teams, but definitely have one there.
#2. Yahoo! – The old fantasy sports bull, Yahoo.com. I started playing fantasy football there a decade ago. Then they had to go and start charging $30 just to own a team and I dropped them like a bad habit. But times have changed and Yahoo! is back to being completely free. They have most of the options you can get with ESPN, but their fantasy sports site isn’t nearly as nice as ESPN’s or really as helpful. Overall, still a good place to make or join a league at, nice draft room, cute little helmet logos for your team, don’t shy away if you’re interested. I have several teams there myself.
#3. CBS – Here we start to see a bit of a drop-off in quality. Home of AFC broadcasts, CBS provides a serviceable, if very basic, fantasy football experience. If you’re playing there for free (and really why would you pay?) the options are limited to a standard scoring, 12-team, snake draft league. I have a team here, but I’m the Fantasy Coach, and a lot of the people who use CBS are going to be less in the loop than those at Yahoo! or ESPN. Which can translate well for you on draft day, but serious fantasy owners are always more fun to play with. Oh, and the draft room program here is not my favorite.
#4. Fox Sports – CBS’s TV counterpart, Fox has their own fantasy football site too. They basically offer the same thing that CBS offers, but with a nicer website. A fine place to play, but again not really the full experience offered by ESPN or Yahoo!.
#5. NFL.com – The NFL’s own website offers free fantasy football, and how wrong can you go by going straight to the source? I like NFL.com a little more than Fox or CBS; it features at least basic customization for leagues, in terms of teams, playoff options and point scoring. Not top of the line, but pretty decent, with plenty of NFL news and fantasy help.
#6. Fleaflicker – The sort of odd-man out in popular league hosts. This is a smaller operation clearly, geared toward people who want to hold their league in a smaller, less jazzy space. The advantage of fleaflicker is that they offer more point scoring customization than anybody else. The downside is they don’t offer online auction drafts. And they don’t have nearly the amount of people buzzing around joining leagues. But if you are starting an online league with friends already in tow, this can be a good site for you.
Those are all your best options for online fantasy football. If you’re interested in one of them, click on their name and go check them out. If you plan on running multiple teams, feel free to spread them around and get a firsthand experience with a couple websites. Fantasy football teams are pretty easy to run, much easier than fantasy baseball teams(!), so it’s not like you’re going to get in over your head. Now get out there, and good luck!
