Mar 15 2010

Fantasy Football Tools

Tag: Fantasy Football — admin @ 5:13 am

This is a collection of American-rules Fantasy Football software tools that are either open source or free.  One of the tricks with Fantasy Football tools is that a lot of the software tends to stop working if it isn’t actively maintained.  So I will be updating the list as the season approaches with indications of which tools seem to still be working.

Note also, that there are many tools that I have not included here that you have to buy or that give you time limited free trials.  Please let me know if there are other legitimately free tools that I’m missing.  You can leave a comment below or send me an email at info[at]openfantasyfootball.com.

Draft Tools

  1. Fantasy Football Drafty – An open source draft analyzer software tool to help you get the best overall team on draft day.  Includes player rankings from various sites around the web, though you can also enter your own rankings.  This tool is fairly simple at the moment, but seems useful even in its current form.
  2. Fantasy Football Nerd Draft Buddy - The Draft Buddy is designed to aid you during drafting. It’s an independent tool for those who want to use the Nerd’s draft rankings during their draft instead of or in addition to the default rankings provided by your league management program.
  3. Redd5 - a tool for conducting offline drafts. It currently supports up to 20 customizable teams and allows you to save, print or export the results.

Lineup Analyzers

  1. Fantasy Football Analyst -  A program that allows you to see information on your fantasy football team aggregated from various websites. Allows you to get a decent idea as to which players to sit and which to start for the week.  This program seems to be Windows only and requires the .NET framework to run.
  2. Fantasy Football Nerd Lineup Analyzer – A web-based lineup analyzer that allows users to add their teams regardless of their league platform and FantasyFootballNerd.com will analyze that team to provide a suggested lineup based upon the site’s consensus rankings. Users can designate between standard and PPR (point per reception) scoring formats for help in determining their optimal lineup.

League Managers

  1. phpFFL - a free and fully customizable online Fantasy Football League Manager with a live(ajax) draft module. phpFFL is a web based application which uses php & MySQL. League Admin & Individual Team Admin is all handled through the phpFFL web interface.
  2. OFFL - a web application for hosting American-rules fantasy football leagues.  This seems to be mostly abandoned.  However, the code still seems to run OK.  Probably needs some work to write a scraper to get the content from one of the big online sites.
  3. NFL.com (and CBS Sportsline) – The biggest and most well known site for free fantasy football league hosting. Includes free real time scoring.
  4. Yahoo Sports – The other big player in fantasy football league hosting.  Also now includes free live scoring.

Stat Trackers

  1. StatFink – Stat tracker and live scoring program written in PHP. Statfink works best with Yahoo fantasy football leagues.  One player installs statfink on a server and the rest of the league can view a webpage to get free live scoring.  This might be less relevant now that Yahoo has free live scoring.