Tips for improving your fantasy league: Create memories through history
Fantasy sports are in our DNA at Yahoo, and we know it’s your passion, too. We’re always looking for ways to make our award-winning experience even better and in this case we’re getting help from one of you, our amazing legion of fantasy players, to make leagues even better.
Commissioner’s Corner is a multi-part series meant to provide tips to keep your league engaged all season long and tap even more into the fun that comes with playing fantasy. The author, Justin C. Cliburn, has been the dedicated commissioner of his Yahoo Fantasy Football league the OIL since 2006. While it’s a unique league, each and every one of your leagues is special and brings friends, families and co-workers closer together.
Part 10: Determining the GOAT
One of the main challenges for any commissioner is to make a league feel like a league rather than a collection of individual seasons with no real connection. One way to do that is to make each season and each season’s teams easily comparable to previous year. Luckily, Yahoo has had the Record Book to help on that front.
Part of what drives sports coverage (and sports fandom) is a constant desire to compare this year’s cream of the crop to years past. Would this year’s champion stand a chance against legendary teams of the past? How does this year’s MVP stack up to the GOAT? How does this coach’s resume measure up next to his or her peers?
Yahoo’s Record Book feature puts that focus on your league and can help with things like reviewing standings from past years and tracking overall records for your league. You can also create a unique URL for your league.
Yahoo has also added features to take things to the next level with their new profiles and ratings for individual players and by league. It’s a huge step forward for any gamer to understand how they stack up against other managers in all of fantasy and how competitive a league truly is compared to others.
But if you haven’t noticed by now, I like to go the extra mile. So if you’re like me, you’ll want to track even more. That’s why The OIL took the data in Yahoo’s Record Book, expanded it, and placed it in a sortable Google Spreadsheet available year-round.
The Records tab borrows from the Yahoo Record Book, keeping track of best winning percentage, most points, most and least transactions, and much, much more. The Managers tab ranks each manager based on overall career performance and is sortable by stat category. The Seasons tab ranks each individual season. Champions is a quick reference to view and compare each seasons’ champion, and the Standings tab keeps track of each season year-round. The H2H (head-to-head) tab keeps track of each active manager’s career record against every other active manager (a feature also now available on Yahoo), and there are individual tabs for each manager as well.
It’s a lot of data, so we created a blank version you can use to make it fit your league. Simply click File>Make a Copy and start inputting your league’s teams and data. Be sure to pay attention to the formula bar, as a lot of cells are auto-populating. If you have any questions, feel free to email commish@okiraqi.org for advice.
[Yahoo Fantasy Football leagues are open: Sign up now for free]
Of course, in order to make it truly representative, you need to be comparing apples to apples. That is why we recommend finding a league and scoring settings system that works and sticking with it. Constantly changing the scoring formulas will make it impossible truly compare seasons to one another. The OIL has had the same scoring system in place since 2010. But we include pre-2010 in our league history spreadsheet by dividing the average points scored for the pre-2010 season by the average points scored for 2010-2016. We then multiply each team’s points scored for 2006-2009 seasons by the result to determine how to compare those previous seasons to ones using the current scoring system.
So tap into all the great new features on Yahoo to track your fantasy rating and also feel free to take our league history spreadsheet, and make it your own. Your league mates will thank you.
More tips for improving your fantasy league:
Starting with the basics Why bylaws matter
Building franchises
Recognizing the champ
Tapping into rivalries
Fun ways to set draft order
Make your draft memorable
In-season coverage
Communication is key
