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Again, we looked at what was out there with high stakes contests and realized we could give the customer something that was a lot better. Long term goal is to dominate the high stakes league segment. With a better format. With tons better payouts. And without the hassles and associated costs of traveling. Opening it up to a much wider audience with a much bigger payout to determine who really is the best FF player in the country each year.
I absolutely would not rule that out.
And have someone tell us how to do things? Doubtful. One of the great things about this company is we can make decisions extremely fast. Let’s do a Survivor Triathlon. A few emails later and it’s posted on the message boards. Same with new features, posting material, etc. Joe and I are not interested in adding levels of management to this thing. We are offering the 3 year subscription on a limited basis to generate some added cash flow to advertise more and to fund some of our acquisitions. We think that is the smarter long-term approach.And I am sure in a public company, I won't be allowed to roll out of bed and type in just my skivvies...sounds bad.
Sounds bad?
Footballguys.com is where it is at because we are passionate about football. I don’t like many of the other pro sports so the answer is probably never. I am not sure that Nascarguys.com would be successful if it was managed by people that only know about football. We still feel there are a lot more things we can do with football so that is where we are focused.
Yeah that's pretty much :X .Sounds bad?
It's not a priority. But we'd consider if and when it made sense. More specifically, if and when I found the right people to run it. Football is my thing. I couldn’t do this site for baseball or hockey or NASCAR. I’d have to find the right people that could handle the content creation. Football is a year round proposition for us now.
Not really. We’ve dealt with that issue since day 1. I have tons of respect for those sites but I do not shy away from going up against them head to head with content. We do it every day. I think for what we charge ($25.95) and what we deliver (over 30,000 pages of content) it’s the best buy in sports for the guy that is serious about Fantasy Football. There will always be guys who can get by in a league that doesn’t need anything more than a free cheatsheet. That’s not our guy.
Logically one would think they could compete with the right people, but I seriously doubt they ever will. I don’t work 9 to 5. I hammer away until things are done. Joe tracks stories down in the middle of the night to give the email update people the latest. The Blogger works a 16 hour schedule. And in the end, we are not driven by earnings statements. The big sites will also come with many managers wanting to review every little decision. They have improved, but I remain skeptical that they could even duplicate what we are doing here without at least 4 times the money we spend on it.
Surround yourself with great people and great things can happen. Bill Gates built a monster with the same principle. The staff we have at Footballguys.com is the #1 reason this site is so successful. Joe and I may guide it a bit, but the real success comes from the passion each of these people has for this hobby and to see Footballguys succeed.We will keep adding people to expand our coverage if the budget allows it.
Here's why we're successful:Staff (Alphabetical)
Oh a nice soft question....The price of releasing 30,000 pages of content has this as a negative. If all goes as planned, I will get everything done on time. But if a server hiccups, I wake up sick from no sleep, some other site issue emerges then things can get nuts. It’s not as easy as having things delegated. I already do a lot of that with Clayton Gray. He also works around the clock these days. We can’t have everyone formatting and posting things. There are certain things he and I must do to make things go.
We just never have. We do project distribution curves in the draft dominator that accounts for games that we can attempt to predict as missed. People coming off injuries are examples of this. We probably should start doing it.
We factor in some injury concerns. A perfect example would be someone like Kurt Warner. I think it’s unrealistic to think he will play all 16 games based on history. There is no doubt though the games he does play, he will likely have a very high PPG average. Most injuries can not be forecasted. Some guys do seem to get dinged up and miss more time though based on style of play, age, etc. We wouldn’t be doing our job if we ignored all of these situations. Guys like Palmer, Culpepper (coming off injuries) are super hard to predict because it all starts on when they first play. In June that is impossible to know. So we take our best guess based on the current news we hear.
All our rankings for the last few years are out there. You can’t hide in this business and it’s easy to see how we did. The Fantasy Index Experts Poll is one of the best tests for that as it takes pretty much every site and let’s them compete to see how accurate their pre season rankings were. We’ve done extremely well there.
It’s mostly a time thing. We like to go forward instead of dwelling on the past. I do study what a team did offensely over the last 3 years to help slot an offense as pass / run and objectively determine the expected carries, catches, yardage, etc. So my analysis is based much more on team concepts than individual performances. History, coaching and personnel changes all get blended into the team model. I then flush out the individual projections based on the team model. There have been a few studies showing FBG dominates other sites when it comes to both preseason and in-season projections. I suppose people could make a case that we should spend more time showing our accuracy, etc but for the most part I believe the exercise to be looking the wrong way. When I missed on Kevin Jones, did I have the team situation right? That’s what interests me. What teams did I overvalue the improvements, etc. How can I improve upon that each year.
Not for this year. We still do not believe it’s the standard for most of the leagues. From a relative side of things (ie the WR and RB lists), only a few players move around. For the best draft lists, we suggest using the Draft Dominator or VBD Apps to tailor to exactly what you have. It’s not as simple as just saying PPR as some count RB catches less, etc. League size, number of rounds to draft, defensive scoring all tweak VBD. The rankings are a very simplified look at things across many experts.
We are already doing this for the Draft Dominator. We will start publishing this to the website. We also will have an IDP Top 200 list debuting soon.
I think we did a lot more this off-season regarding Dynasty content. We had Dynasty rankings, Bloom’s content, etc. We are always adding content as demand increases. As of this time, we do not feel like a Dynasty forum is needed. Most discussions are around players and the Dynasty angle is usually covered. Splitting the threads would likely lead to worse discussions in both threads.
We have a whole series planned on how to leverage your FBG subscription. Each of these articles will cover in-depth some of the tricks and tips we have learned with these tools to help you maximize their effectiveness.We spent the last few years creating these tools. This is the year we try and catch everyone up to what we have created.
It’s possible. Many of these leagues hold their draft at a terrible time of the year for us to be traveling though. Vegas is a long trip and pretty expensive. I had a blast meeting people though. One of the things I most dislike about the web business is the lack of meeting people in real life.
The WCOFF event is very cool indeed. But it comes at a horrible time for Joe and I. People are still drafting. Plus they need week 1 info to set lineups. Some people have login problems, etc. It’s probably our toughest week of the season. Because of this, I know I will be staying home (and not attend the WCOFF event). The year I attended was chaotic and I would prefer to avoid that again. But some staff are sure to go.Like Joe I really did enjoy meeting the people at WCOFF though.
Some attention. But not too much. It’s more fun to lead and let them follow. I’ll put more attention to web trends in general. How people are using the internet and how we can deliver things to them that they haven’t considered that they need yet. That kind of stuff. It’s a fascinating medium. (Like I need to tell guys that reading a message board on Wednesday night
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Joe pays a lot of attention. Jason Wood creates a competition matrix that we study each year in the off-season. I don’t get too bogged down what others are doing. I am too busy executing the FBG vision. Overall though I think we have a good pulse on what others are doing. We would be foolish to think we are the only ones that have good ideas. But for the most part, I think we have led in areas of innovation instead of copying. <INSERT PLATINUM TICKET JOKE HERE>
Good question. I think it’s a chicken and the egg thing. No doubt that fantasy football is king because the NFL is so good. But the positive impact of fantasy football has been huge for the NFL. One of the smartest things the league did was embrace the game. Baseball still is slow to wake up. When I was a big roto baseball guy in the mid 90’s, we were frowned upon for “ruining the game” focusing on stats. The NFL was much smarter and saw the writing on the wall. With fantasy football, you have a guy in Miami that is super interested in Arizona for a change. Part of that is Anquan Boldin. But part of that is Fantasy Football.
Sure it has been a HUGE influence. The NFL does a lot of things right. They have a good game and by embracing fantasy into their broadcasts, they continue to get stronger. All other pro sports besides football (except maybe NASCAR and golf) seem to be heading in the wrong direction.
If the NFLPA gets it’s way they would only license a few companies. That would kill the grassroots innovation that has been fantasy football. Info sites (like ours) are protected by the First Amendment, but many other companies would not be.
The CBA getting nailed down was huge. I'm liking what I see.
I see no reason at all it won’t continue to grow steadily and be bigger and better than ever. Fantasy Football is directly tied to the success of the NFL and with labor peace nailed down, it’s looking good. I would have been a little worried if they hadn’t locked down the new CBA.
It feels like we are near a peak, but every year the website has more hits and more subscribers so it’s anyone’s guess. Much like poker right now, new people are replacing older veterans at a rapid clip. Even if we are at a peak, I see fantasy football remaining strong for many years to come. I see the smaller sites getting impacted before we do. Our subscriber retention rate is above 95%.
It’s a big challenge. It’s like being handcuffed sometimes with the limited face to face communication we have. But we manage. I try to do a good job of keeping all our guys on the same page and letting them know where we are. I’m admittedly bad about getting too focused on one area and forgetting that the rest of the staff is in the dark on a project wondering what I’m doing. I do a ton of email. That’s big. David and I will talk via phone often. Email is great but the phone is best. Our problem is that it’s hard for us to talk without it turning into a 3 hour conversation. We have a good system now though. I have a 30 minute commute. I call him when I get in the truck and we agree to end the call when I pull in my driveway. My kids hang up on him if I won’t get off the phone
Mostly from a communication standpoint. So much of the business is run by emails (Joe and I correspond about 10-20 times a day) that things get lost in the translation sometimes. A difference of opinion can sometimes result in long-drawn out arguments, etc over an email. To combat this, Joe and I have implemented a weekly call that we positively get done each week. It lays out the next week and has done wonders keeping things focused. To have an internet company where 90% of all dialogue is through email, you need two things. Really good people and solid leadership who will listen. We have exceptional staff. If we fail anywhere it’s because Joe and I don’t lay things out as well as we can. We try our best to listen a lot, but I am sure we could improve in that area too. We have also implemented a special staff message board that works through a lot of different issues. This also has facilitated excellent discussions like who should be on the Message Board teams to compete against us, etc.
