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Have 2 leagues at ESPN that have been together for over 10 years now.
good heavens, NFL.com might be one of the worst sites I have ever used for a league. I would never, ever use NFL.com. That said, like you, I haven't run into any technical issues with ESPN. The android app is a bit touch and go, but it has gotten noticeably better as the season has gone on. For completely free, I can't see how you could ever do better than ESPN, personally...and I agree with your opinion, as I share it.
I like MFL but it isn't living up to the tremendous support it gets. It's unfortunate. It really could be the clear cut best out there but it is running on a platform that is a dinosaur. It was built in the "early 1990s" per the "About Us" page and it hasn't changed since. Websites should be upgraded to keep up with recent advances in technology and MFL is not.
I'm glad someone posted about Fleaflicker. I'm not sure I ever looked closely at the site, but it is incredibly clean, and the fact that they don't close up shop (or your league) is a really wonderful thing. Not only is it clean, it is incredibly easy to follow. So clean, ESPN might actually retain more information from year to year. That said, I'm interested to know more about its customizable aspects. I do like that it retains some basic information from year to year.
ESPN's web page is definitely a relic, but they updated the app this year so it's not bad. I much prefer it to Yahoo's actually. At least on iOS. The Yahoo app is missing basic features like seeing recent transactions and its hard to follow a specific (real) game play-by-play.That said, from a web browser Yahoo is far more advanced and useful than ESPN's offering.
Fleaflicker saves incredibly detailed historical data. In my oldest league, I can tell you exactly what my 30-man roster looked like in week 4 of the 2008 season, who I started (Roethlisberger, Marshawn Lynch, Chris Perry, Fitzgerald, Lee Evans, Reggie Williams, Kellen Winslow, Panthers D/ST), who was on my bench and why (Brian Westbrook was questionable with an ankle injury that week), and what the result was (I won 110.1 to 108.4). I can tell you I had the first or second highest score five times that season, and that my final record was 1.2 games worse than it should have been based on my all-play record. I can tell you exactly how many trades I've made in that league's history (23), how many waiver claims I've made (25), and how many free agents I've added (102). I can tell you the full history of every single player. For instance, the Saints defense was drafted in the initial startup in 2007, cut and added in week 1 of 2008, cut in week 1 of 2009, claimed in week 3 of 2009, cut in week 16 of 2011, added in week 1 of 2012, cut in week 3 of 2012, and added again in week 11 of 2012.
Seems like ESPN does all of this except for the part I bolded. I have no idea why something that simple, like past season's transactions, couldn't be kept active, but for some inexplicable reason, ESPN loses that data once two years have passed. So, the bolded part could be a convincing factor for me if Fleaflicker does this in a very easy to follow way and a very accessible way. I wish they showed a league story on the front page like ESPN, but I'll have to look at their sample leagues for the historical details. Thank you for posting this; I'll definitely hunt for it on Fleaflicker's sample leagues, and knowing it is a possibility, you just made me consider Fleaflicker as a very worthwhile alternative...if not for my fantasy football league, but for my fantasy basketball league. Actually, the latter is very likely to happen next season.
The bolded is easy as cake to access in Fleaflicker. Click on any player's name and you go to his season stats page. From there, there's a link that says "history" that will give you his entire ownership history dating back to the beginning of the league. Alternately, going to the "transactions" tab and type the player's name into the search field will pull up a complete list of all transactions involving that player.
Some leagues have two waiver runs (i.e. waivers run Wednesday morning, and then a second time Friday morning). If the second waiver run happens after the Thursday night game, then you can actually bid for players that played on Thursday and win them. So, let's say that Marvin Jones had his 4-TD game this Thursday instead of on Sunday. In that case, an owner who knew about the loophole could have just bid $1 for him in the second waiver run and hoped that everyone else assumed he was locked for the week because he'd already played. If so, then that owner would have just won Marvin Jones for $1.
Ding Ding Ding...Show him what he won Johnny!
Ok. So its a pain for leagues with pointless rules. I will never understand the reason for a second waiver period.
Yeah, most of the "issues" posted here can all be pinned on the Commish of the league. The "issues" are definitely not MFL related.
Oh, you're right - I didn't come back here to thank you, but meant to. I did go back to Fleaflicker, looked at a sample league and really looked around. The historical data for players (at least their transactions) is extremely easy to find and look at. If I could wish for anything else (though this is a lot), I'd wish that they could also show the history of stats of when the player was used as active and was left on the bench. But hey, you get what you pay for, and the history of transactions is probably more important for the enjoyment of historical data.
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No to both, but I'm not the guy to ask. Most of the leagues I commish all involve the same group of guys I've been playing with for over a decade. We started off on an off-site message board running all of the leagues by hand. After a year or two, we signed up on CBS. When CBS got expensive, I looked around and decided to give Fleaflicker a try, because at the time it was the only free site that offered live scoring (NFL and Yahoo were both free, but charged extra for access to live scoring).
If all else fails, I'll start up a new fleaflicker league next year for guys who have never tried it. I'd be interested in trying out a bunch of the functionality I've never tested before, such as the message board and drafting software.
Unfortunately, I felt the same way this summer with MFL, when trying to set up a potential league site for my league to switch to. I was really impressed by the features and the nominal price for those features, but I was also unimpressed with the Geocities feel. And like you, I felt like I was wasting a lot of time. Probably not a big deal to the majority of people as mere owners, but instead for people who run leagues.
Same here; I've actually been looking for another league to join in addition to league I run, probably on ESPN or Fleaflicker now. But I definitely will.
