Ramblings of a Geek

I am an avid Fantasy Football player and have been since I was a kid.  I started back in the days when you used to have to wait for the paper the next day to tally your scores by hand.  No fractional points, no crazy scoring, just basic fairly easy to tally (and hard to dispute) scoring.  It was actually a decent use of basic math, and I normally had my team’s scores tallied up before I finished my cereal in on Monday morning before heading out to school.  Clearly, times have changed in fantasy football, and it’s mostly for the better.

The last couple of years I’ve played primarily on ESPN Leagues and found their live scoring on the web to be decent, and their mobile website live scoring was also done well.  My primary reason for liking the ESPN way of doing things was that they had free live scoring when others charged for live stats.

This year ESPN released an iPhone/iPod Touch application on Apple’s App Store so I thought I’d give it a spin.  The first thing to notice is that the price of the application was pretty steep: $4.99 for something you can get basically for free by using their mobile website.  I figured it was probably worth it so I plunked down my $5 and downloaded it.  After entering my ESPN username and password it brought up my teams as expected (One thing to note is that you must use your ESPN username and password – don’t use your email address as it won’t work).  The interface was pretty intuitive and easy to navigate.  On the home screen in addition to viewing your teams you also have the options of myFantasyCast, NFL Scores and Fantasy News.  The best option here if it’s gametime is to use the myFantasyCast as you can quickly cycle between your teams which is a pretty handy feature.  The NFL Scores is exactly what you’d expect and looks pretty similar to the ESPN ScoreCenter App.  The Fantasy News section is basically an aggregate of the news stories relating to Fantasy Football from ESPN.

Managing Your Team(s)

In contrast to the mobile website managing your rosters in the app is definitely smoother.  You can also view the breaking fantasy news and player cards very quickly and easily.  Overall, managing your team vs the mobile website definitely goes to the app.

Scoreboard/Standings/Players/Schedule

This is another easy win for the App – it’s just more refined than the website though provides the same basic information.

Message Board/League Settings

These are features not even provided on the mobile website.  If your league uses the message board with any frequency this would be a feature that is handy to have.  Also, the ability to see the rules of the league on your device might also prove useful.

Activity Feed

This is a cool feature that you can view Player Updates, Transactions and League Manager actions.  I find that I check this at least a couple of times per week to see quickly what’s going on in my leagues.

The Ads

BY FAR THE WORST THING about the ESPN Fantasy Football app is in addition to the $4.99 they present you with ads in the software. The accepted convention for ads in iPhone software is that if the app is free ads are just fine.  When you charge for the app the ads should go away.  Apparently, ESPN didn’t get the memo. The ads are pretty annoying – they appear in the upper right hand corner with a 1″x1″ square when there isn’t data up there (for example on the front page) and then in the screens like the roster, scoreboard, etc it’s a small banner on the bottom of the screen just above their bottom line crawl.  It’s really REALLY stupid that they have ads at all, it’s the sort of double-dip that you would not expect from the Worldwide Leader.  I hope they fix that soon, but there is no indication that they’ll be removed at this time.  Emails to ESPN’s customer service have gone unreturned and through an exchange via Twitter they were non-commital at best.

The Service

When I tried to check my scores on opening Sunday the service was down on and off for the entire first game.  They were pretty responsive to tweets as far as the status when I asked what was going on.  Once the service returned it worked very well and was a good couch companion. We’ll have to see how week two goes as if it continues to go down when the program is actually most useful it will easily be a deal breaker.

Notifications

While the program has “push” notifications it isn’t really timely – it just updates you hourly based on scores, Injury updates and Start/Bench alerts which pretty  much just tells you if your opponent changed their lineup.  The feature isn’t all that useful to be honest.

Features That Need to be Added

I would love to see detailed stats for players in the scoreboard as it just gives you the total number of points for each player.  Having those stats available even if you just clicked on any specific player would be quite helpful.  As it stands, you have to go to the NFL scores section and into each game to check on the actual stats.

The other thing to add would be a push notification to notify you when your players (and possibly your opponent’s players) do something significant (scores, fumbles, or other noteworthy actions during the game).

Conclusion

The application is pretty useful if you are a ESPN Fantasy Football user – even with the $4.99 + ads.  Either the ads should go away or the cost of the application should be free.  It also seems like they’re going to charge you a yearly fee for this application which seems a bit unreasonable, but that is very much subject to change so we’ll have to wait and see.  I’d also pay attention to see if the service goes down again on Sunday – the service needs to work through the whole weekend without outages.

My suggestion is to check and see if the mobile website gets you the information you want before, during and after the games.  If you find yourself wanting more I’d check out the ESPN app.  Also, if you’re a Yahoo! fantasy football player their app is free and apparently excellent.  Perhaps I’ll go sign up for a Yahoo! fantasy football account and see how that app compares.  Maybe this is the year Yahoo! catches and passes ESPN…