September 3rd, 2010

FSB Daily 9/3: Yahoo!, Sports Grumblings, Tight Ends, Papa John’s

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

- The Yahoo! fantasy football app for Android has arrived and is available for free.

- Starting Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern, Sports Grumblings will be joining the Sirius XM Fantasy Sports Radio lineup. The show will air for three hours and, according to its creators, “be a high-energy mix of fantasy sports talk and humor that is sure to get people talking.”

- Washington tight end Chris Cooley, an experienced fantasy player, says teammate Clinton Portis is “a steal” in Round 4, new quarterback Donovan McNabb is a “good pick” in Round 5 or 6 and Larry Johnson is his team’s “fantasy sleeper.” Good to see Cooley puts his biases aside when he plays fantasy. Then again, if you’re a teammate of Cooley’s, you have to love this type of homerism.

- As part of diving fully into its commercial alignment with the NFL, Papa John’s appears to be going hard after the fantasy player. One new campaign from the pizza chain will be asking fantasy leaguers all season to tell what makes theirs the best, with the winning group heading to next year’s NFL Draft. There will also be a contest to get free pizza delivered next Thursday (opening night) by NFL great Cris Carter, as well as fantasy football-themed Facebook badges available via the Papa John’s fan page. This writeup mentions the Papa campaign, as well as efforts by Buffalo Wild Wings, Hooters, Ruby Tuesday’s and T.G.I.Friday’s to reach out to fantasy players.

- Philadelphia tight end Brent Celek obviously ran a bit short on time and motivation in filling out the fantasy football league he opened to fans. The final three openings were filled on Tuesday, going to the first response with the Eagles’ final exhibition opponent, the first to correctly answer where the franchise played its first game back in 1933 (Baker Bowl) and — to ensure Celek will get targeted plenty — the first with a photo of quarterback Kevin Kolb’s jersey. You may all now continue on with your NFL season preparations.

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‘Expert’ Evaluators Land USA Today Gig

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

We introduced you back in July to the joint efforts of FFSpin.com and FantasyFootballCrystalBall.com to gauge the accuracy of weekly fantasy rankings. Now that gauge has found an in-season home via USAToday.com.

On Wednesday, USA Today’s Fantasy Joe site carried the introductory post for this “Rank the Rankings” process.

“The difference between victory and defeat can be as slim as inserting an upstart tight end in place of an established veteran facing a difficult match up and the start/sit advice of a preferred site can catapult or cripple a team,” FF Spin co-founder Scott Pashley wrote. “Finally there is a way to know how your favorite fantasy football sites are performing relative to the rest of the experts promising winning prognostications.”

Each Wednesday throughout the season, the two sites will announce via this outlet which “experts” were most accurate with their rankings for the previous week, taking a look at each position and overall performance. This coming Wednesday — the day before the NFL opener — they promise to reveal the top-performing weekly rankers for all of 2009.

Despite small potential pitfalls such as accounting for different scoring formats and the effects of injuries, FSB.com encourages these kinds of efforts as a nice method for at least helping the consumer sort through the multitude of fantasy-content options existing today.

This weekly model probably provides even greater accuracy for a few reasons. Long-term injuries won’t impact the measures as much as they can with pre-season rankings, and week-to-week recommendations rely more heavily on actual performance and matchups. It also gets rid of the effect of draft strategy in initial rankings, whereby a backup behind an injury-prone starting running back might often sit higher than his actual expected points would otherwise dictate.

We’ll be checking Fantasy Joe on Wednesday to see the 2009 results and keeping an eye on the 2010 reports.

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