We're Getting Ready For The 2018 NFFC Season

[Greg Ambrosius]

I know that everyone is knee deep in our NFFC playoffs and trying to win our big grand prizes. Best of luck to everyone battling for these great prizes.

We are working very hard to make sure we get your prize money to you as fast as possible this year. Look for regular season payments to be deposited into your new Player Accounts next week. If you Claim your Prizes right away and Withdraw Funds quickly, we'll get a check out to you quickly. And the playoff winnings will be deposited during the week of Jan. 2nd and checks will go out shortly after that once you've requested an amount from Withdraw Funds.

So all of that is moving along well and we like the new payout format. Now let's get you caught up with everything else we're working on for 2018 because we are VERY excited about the future.

Before we talk about that, our final NFFC contest on the STATS site will be the NFFC Post-Season Contest. You will still Register for that contest the same way that you did for contests this year and we'll use the same software we've always used for this post-season contest. I love the way STATS has set this up and with a $100,000 grand prize this year we believe this contest will be bigger and better than ever. Secure your teams when you have time and enjoy.

The NFFC will move to the SportsHub Technologies platform starting in 2018. The good news for NFFC owners is that every facet of the new site will be fully tested and updated through the baseball season. The NFBC is already hosting online drafts on the new SportsHub platform and our new FAAB setup will debut there along with everything else. You'll see and hear about what is coming in the NFFC from your NFBC friends and fellow drafters. So that's good.

As I stated on the NFBC Message Boards in October, Tom and I have been working closely with the programmers and we couldn't be happier with everything. When we met in October, almost every single request was met with a "YES THAT WILL BE DONE." Most are done already, but it was great to see this type of enthusiasm from the programmers, who want this to be the best site in the industry as much as you do. That's refreshing.

First the good news and then some details: We have a team of programmers who are assigned solely to our high-stakes contests and to the CDM contests. Nothing against STATS, but over the last couple of years we didn't have anyone assigned just to programming our contests. We do now and we have multiple programmers working on the NFBC and NFFC sites right now. They will be at the ready if we need any quick changes. The programmers are also fantasy players who understand what our players need to more easily run their teams. You're going to like the changes, I promise you.

Okay, let's start with some of them:

My Teams: Your 2018 teams for all sports will show here similar to what you are seeing now. We do have some slight changes. You will be able to arrange the order of your teams on your My Teams page by drag 'n drop software, and you will be able to hide past teams like you did on the STATS site. We can create a button on that page as well that shows you the Status of your Drafts, which is ideal for Draft Champions leagues. However, one thing we know is that it's going to take a while to load all of our past teams. We have 14 years of data and we don't have the data from NFFC 2017 yet, so this will take time to get all past teams loaded onto your team page. We know that everyone wants to see this year's results this off-season, but it likely won't be there right away. We don't know how long the STATS site will remain open, but hopefully you can see them on the old site for a little while longer. Just realize that those past teams might not be there right away.

My Account: This will be activated next week and you will be able to Claim Prizes and Withdraw Funds there starting next week. You will also have the ability to leave prize winnings on your Player Account and use that for future signups. You will also have the ability to change your contact information and change your credit card information there.

The New Draft Room: The new online draft was first completed for CDM football, was included for our NFFC Daily Drafts and is being used now in the NFBC. You can see it by entering any NFBC Draft Champions league now ($50 or $150). A few things about the new Draft Room:

** There are five windows in the draft room: Player Default list, Que, History, Roster and Chat. Pretty similar to the STATS HTML draft room. However, all of the windows except Player Default are expandable, so you can increase or shrink any of the windows. If you want a larger Que, you can expand that. If you want the Chat bigger, you can expand that. In the Chat, it has an icon that shows you who is Online, it has an icon that allows you to see just the Chat Log or the Draft Log and Chat Log, and it has an icon that allows you to pop out the Chat to a separate window. The History allows you to pop out the Draft Board to a separate window and to select any round to look over. Loading the Que is easy by clicking on the Star of any player, and we have drag 'n drop technology to move the players up or down in the Que. Roster shows your Roster and there is a pop out for the Roster Grid.

The goal is to get NFFC online drafts going well before the NFL Draft, likely in March. Stay tuned. We will start all NFFC drafts with a Player Default list that we originate, but after we finish 5 or more drafts it will then populate with the overall ADP list to keep the list current. We hope that drafts speed up with a more current default list. While it may help some drafters, it more importantly will have players in an order that will reduce the number of Player Searches everyone has to make. We can still manipulate the player default list if someone suddenly is out for the year (drop that player to the bottom), but for the most part it will be updated daily from the ADP.

The Player Default list will also have a Custom Ranks List that will allow you to create your own ranking list and load them into any draft you want. You actually can create separate lists for let's say 10-team Cutline drafts and 12-team Draft Champions leagues. Just name them differently and import them into your draft room before it fills. There also is an icon that allows you to sort by any statistical category during the draft, and of course, a Search Player box. You can also sort by position and every player box will have a photo and statistical data along with his ADP.

The Draft Room also shrinks according to your device, so the same Draft Room that you have for your desktop computer shrinks to your laptop size and then to your iPad size. And finally it shrinks to your phone size. You will be able to make picks from all devices, including your phone. There won't be an app for your phone to draft; it will just be your same Draft Room link from the site. We are working through some Samsung bugs now in the NFBC, but certainly hope to have a much better process for making draft selections from the phone.

I think that covers it for the Draft Room. We look forward to unveiling it in the NFFC soon.

FAAB: I will create a separate thread for FAAB, but the good news is that we'll have a simple process for finding free agents that are or are not available in all of your leagues. This will be a one-click process on the player's name in the FAAB listing and you'll know quickly which leagues you'll be able to bid for him in. Look for a followup post shortly on FAAB. But trust us: We know how important improving FAAB is to your enjoyment and participation in the NFFC. We've made it too difficult to manage multiple teams in the NFFC. We will alleviate that pain with the new FAAB software, I promise. And our baseball guys will help us improve it even more after launch, meaning we'll have it perfect in time for the football season. Help us tweak it even further once we get rolling with everything.

ADPs: We'll break these down by 10-team, 12-team, 14-team and a separate Draft Champions listing, while also having one overall ADP. We'll also allow you to see ADPs over separate time periods that you'll designate. We're still working on that last part, but we'll get it down. We will improve the time sortings for you this year.

Live Scoring: We believe that speed won't be an issue here as we're already showing Live Scoring quickly in the football DFS games. We will have Live Overall Standings for all of the national contests and those will update similar to how they did on the STATS site. With thousands of teams in those overall standings, there is a 5-minute delay in some cases, but that's still very quick.

New Countdown Lobby: You saw how this worked last football season as some folks said it was ADDICTING. It was a great way to see the latest openings and we added a Live Chat Roll that provides instant feedback. This will be back. The Countdown Lobby will be fantastic for selling out leagues every night and this year we can just Pause a draft that still needs another team or two to fill and just unpause it once the league is full. No more cancelling online leagues because we were one team short 15 minutes before the start of a draft.

Draft Champions Leagues: We have instituted this change in baseball and it's already a big hit. All DC leagues now have a 4-Hour clock and we do Pause the draft at night from 1 am ET to 9 am ET. The same format is coming to football. You can still make picks during the Pause, but drafts are definitely moving more quickly in the NFBC. We also start DCs one hour after the league fills and we set draft picks 15 minutes after it fills. If a league fills after 10 pm ET, it starts the next day at 9 am ET. But otherwise drafts are starting throughout the day and filling faster. I like that combination.

Online Auctions: Our online auction software will debut in baseball, which means we definitely will have it for football. That's a nice new addition to our contests. Look for more online auctions being offered by the NFFC.

I'm sure there's more to talk about, but I just wanted to get this out there now so that folks can plan accordingly. Enjoy the 2017 NFFC money rounds and be ready for the next drafting season.We're working hard on it right now. It will be coming up shortly and even faster in future years and future sports. We're excited about the new technology and we will make it easier for you to draft and manage multiple teams going forward. That we can guarantee.

Good luck all and enjoy.

[Sandman62]

Great to see so many improvements coming along guys. Great job! Thank you.

Some other suggestions:
These are just based on my personal process, which I'm sure some people would find overkill. But I'd bet there are some others who'd also like them.

1. Real-time Scoring Summary of All My Leagues:
Similar to how the FFPC does theirs maybe, where it shows your Record, Total Points, Place, current week's opponent (in non-DCs), and your Current Week's Score and your opponent's score (non-DCs). This would save us having to go into each league to see our current match-up status throughout the weekend, as we probably don't need to see the player scoring breakdown as often.

2. Quick-swap Lineup Feature (not across all leagues, just within each):
(Again, similar to the FFPC's, though they certainly don't own any proprietary rights to the idea )
Instead of always having to use pull-downs next to two players to make a swap, have each pull-down offer Bench, as well as all the other players that are available for that lineup spot.

3. Multi-week Roster View: (See screenshot at bottom of this post.)
I have a spreadsheet (yes, I know, big surprise there, huh? ) in which I maintain each of my teams' rosters on their own tab. On each tab, I use formulas to lookup and display all weekly opponents for all sixteen weeks of the season, with each week's opponent defensive strength (red text for opponents in top 1/3, green for those in bottom 1/3). Up until this year, I used NFL.com rushing/receiving yards allowed; but this year I switched to Football Outsiders' rankings, as they take opponent strength into consideration.

The reasons that I show the entire season of opponents instead of just the current week:
(a) When I know that a player is injured/suspended and going to be out multiple weeks, I can indicate (highlight in pink) the weeks he'll be out. Maybe you could either do the same automatically (i.e. when it's well-known and definite, like a suspension), or at least provide a way for us to mark weeks that we think/know a player will be out (and the reason, i.e. injured, suspended).

(b) I can get a head-start thinking about potential upcoming week lineup trouble due to byes and players I know will still be out injured/suspended. If I see that this week I have no real big bye week issues, but next week I'll have two WRs on bye in addition to the two I know will still be out due to injury, then maybe I'll try to acquire another WR this week instead of waiting (obviously, assuming I have a player I'm willing to drop a week early). While I know that I can look ahead to future weeks using the current software, I have to click to the next week and wait for the page to load.

(c) I also like to be able to see past weeks' opponents (and their defensive strength). That way, when I'm considering starting a player this week and his opponent's run D is ranked 5th, I can go back and see what other tough/easy defenses he's faced. That's why I also gray-shade prior weeks that a different player occupied that spot on my roster.

What I never built into my spreadsheet that would also be helpful is to actually show what each player scored in prior weeks. Of course, I can see this on your site by clicking on the player's name in my Set Lineup. But if you were able to build this Multi-week Roster View, then you could basically merge what you already have with what I'm suggesting - providing the best of both worlds. So in addition to what you see in my spreadsheet sample below, next to each player would also be his season Average Points and Last Week points (as your Set Lineup page currently shows).

Comments/Notes:
Next to each player, I also have a column in which to jot notes (i.e. "see if his QB plays this week", or "if he's out, play this other player instead"). That way, I don't have to make all those decisions on Sunday and remember everything I read or thought about each player throughout the week. As I read, listen to podcasts and watch TV all week, I use two cells per player for notes: one I usually use to capture notes just about that player, i.e. "game-time decision" or "see if his QB is out"; the other cell I use to indicate the impact of that player to that specific league, i.e. "start player x alternatively". Though your software could simply capture all of this in just one Comment/Notes field, that would require us to then copy/paste the non-league-impact notes to all the other leagues in which we have that player. If you separate it into Player Notes and League Impact of Player Notes, then as we move from league to league, the generic ones would carry over, saving us a lot of time. Then we'd just have to specify our League Impact of Player Notes for that player in each of the leagues in which we own him.

This Notes concept could even be offered on our FAAB page so we could capture our thoughts about players before we acquire them. Maybe on Monday or Tuesday I put in some claims for players, but throughout the week, I want to delete some as news comes out that makes me reconsider. So for example, I put in a claim for Joe Shmo, and jot down a note to "Cancel if his team's normal RB2 practices by Wed".

Lastly, on this Multi-week Roster View... as the season progresses, I like to move my players up or down, so I have them in the order I feel they rank. Maybe if you could offer a drag-n-drop feature to allow us to do this? I find it more helpful than a default alphabetic sort.

So there are a few ideas, none of which am I suggesting should be mandatory for everyone to use. Again, thanks for the changes you've already prepared and for always listening to your customers for more.

-Mike

This direct image link gets its Comments a bit truncated on the right, probably due to some settings of this message board. So below it, I've also provided the download link, if you want to see the whole image.

Download full image: https://od.lk/d/OThfNzYyOTI4OV8/Multi-w ... 20View.JPG

[boutrous11]

you had me at online auctions.