Thread

Sup fellow igniters. Is anybody else here addicted to fantasy football? I love it. Most of the sites I know of though are quite poor when it comes to the user experience. ESPN get is by far though. Yahoo too, but CBS is weak in my opinion. There are other smaller companies who have great concepts but just poorly designed websites. Has anyone ever thought of creating a better fantasy site/experience?

I so believe you will find someone on here who has created one in CI… I just cannot remember who it is.

My apologies to the person who built it as I am sure I am supposed to know these things.

-Lee

I used to play FantasyFootball for AFL which is australian football. It was good until all my players kept on getting injured lol.

nice, i did a search to try and find maybe the original post, no luck. I wanna check it out. Injuries blow, I’ve been lucky this year, except for my boy Andre Johnson. He was crushing the first two games, hasn’t played since. I bet AFL players get hurt much more often :p…

I love it and I would love to sit down and do an application for it, but it is just a matter of the backend data and what costs there are associated with obtaining and licensing that data.

I have thought about it, but the licensing and stats aggregation (http://www.stats.com/) fees can become prohibitive and are necessary if you wanted to create a traditional fantasy sports application.  However, there are alternative approaches to fantasy sports and games in general.  Techcrunch recently featured http://www.draftmix.com/ which is a new take on fantasy sports.  I haven’t checked it out fully, but is interesting.  The core service amounts to gambling, so, assuming it isn’t already, it will probably be blocked in the US.

Have you looked into the fees associated with stats.com

I decided to give ole STATS an email inquiring about their services. The respose…

Thank you for inquiring with STATS, the global leader in “real-time” sports content.

We serve countless clients in the Fantasy Games space in 2 specific ways:

1)    We have clients who have us provide customized XML data feeds that consist of various data points covering the sports which they are offering games for.  We offer everything from Play-by-Play, to Real-time Player Stats, Schedules, Standings, Injuries, Player Biographies, Historical Stats, Career Stats, Standings, Injuries, Editorial/Photos (courtesy of the Associated Press), etc…..  We work with our clients to establish what sports and data they require for their games along with the timeliness they require it, and we build the feed and provide the information.  We can accommodate just about any delivery method you’d like, but most of our clients receive our XML feeds via FTP.  We serve both large and small companies in the Fantasy space including Yahoo, FOX Sports, ESPN, CBS Sports, and a bunch more.

2)    We build and host custom “white-label” Fantasy Games.  We have a dedicated team of developers that can build a game to meet your specifications.  We then work with your web developers to skin the game around your site working with your style sheets, fonts, colors, etc…. to create the very look and feel that you are looking to provide your users.  We handle everything including registration, live scoring, live drafting, customer support, “set lineup” reminders, etc….  You can feel free to check out SI.com, EA Sports, and the National Fantasy Football Championship (NFFC) to see some of our games

Costs are determined once I have a full understanding of the data/content or type of game you are looking for us to provide.  If you’d like to have a discussion and provide me with more details on your initiative, I’d be happy to give you all the information you need to have about STATS.

I so believe you will find someone on here who has created one in CI… I just cannot remember who it is.

My apologies to the person who built it as I am sure I am supposed to know these things.

I know there was a company browsing around for freelancers to develop a fantasy sports site. I can’t remember if I had bid on the project or not…

Hey jvittetoe…

I am brand spanking new to CI…but it looks to be a great framework.

I have been running my own leagues since the 80’s and my own sites since the web took over the bulletin boards of the past.  Seriously, I had to pay like $80 to get my first domain from Network Solutions before that monopoly was broken up.

Walk away from STATS…I went that route before.  After you actually inquire, you will find that real time stats feeds (via whatever method…csv, xml, etc) will cost in the thousands of dollars per year.  When I last checked, it was over $5000.  They said they need to keep the price high because I could resell the stats.  Bunch of garbage.

Soooo, I get my own stats using…php scripts.  Surprisingly easy.  I run it on my sites to provide real time updates.  The league loves it.

We run a radically different league that has evolved over the last 15 years or so.  A different concept from the usual that you find at the “Big Boys”.

I came here to CI looking for the perfect framework to build the next generation of FF sites with…something that could be branded and franchised out to places that want “their leagues”.  I think I found it (hats off to CI!).

If you’d like more details, please shoot me a PM.

Go Browns!

So I’m guessing these php scripts go to other sites like yahoo or cbs and screen scrape the stats from there?  If so I had looked in to that, but I thought that may have been constituted as stealing.

What they don’t know can’t hurt them.

Look into Ruby/Hpricot - easiest screen-scraping you will ever come across.

What they don’t know can’t hurt them.

Look into Ruby/Hpricot - easiest screen-scraping you will ever come across.

Hah.  I agree, but if I were to do something like this I would do it as a business.  I wouldn’t put myself in jeopardy by doing it illegally.  Mind you I’m not judging anyone.  I could care less what ppl do.  Infact I do enough of the sneaky tactics right now as is.  I just know that something like that wouldn’t be somethin I personally would do.

I thought about that too.  Here are my thoughts:

1 - First and foremost, the information is not sold, and my league does not skim from the prize pool, so I am not profiting in any way from it.

2 - The information is in an area of my site that is not visible or available to the public.

3 - The actual stats themselves are not available…only summary data and derived scores are presented on the site.

So really except for automation and timing, there isn’t a ton of difference between this, and hand entering box scores from the next days paper into a spreadsheet for calculation.  I am interested in thoughts on this….

Heh.  I agree, if I were doing this as a for profit business, I’d have to do it legit.

For a friends and family league…I sleep just fine at night.