Review of the Yahoo Fantasy Football website

This is my second year of fantasy football. After having to keep track of my team on paper and scour NFL.com for point updates last season, I was glad when the league I am in decided to use Yahoo to track our stats this year. I am no expert at fantasy sports and Yahoo seemed to provide a straighforward and accessible template that even I could utilize. So throughout the preseason and into the opening week of NFL games, the website was an invaluable resource. It projected scoring for each of my players based on the point system the leauge was using and, I assume, previous performance and rank of the opposing team. I could slide my players around into the open starting roster spots and see how my team stacked up to the teams I would be playing each week of the season. Yahoo gave me near-immediate updates on all my players and let me track free agents to see if they were worth picking up. The website was concise, organized, informative, and easy to use.

Yahoo also let me keep in contact with the other "managers" in my league. Through leaving notes on the league board or "talking smack" directly on my team's page, I could insult and joke with my rivals. I was also updated on any transactions the other managers made which kept me aware of which players had been picked up or traded. Overall, Yahoo Sports seemed like the perfect forum for our league to interact and stay updated from the comfort of our homes.

The aspect of the website I appreciated most, however, was the timely point updating system. Since I don't have some amazing cable package, I only get to see a few football games a week. However, Yahoo would update my weekly score each time one of my players would get points. Literally within seconds of a player scoring a touchdown, kicking a field goal, or sacking a quarterback, Yahoo would post how many points that player had gained for me, according to our league settings. This way I was able to stay on top of my team's performance without having to do endless research to find updates on games that I couldn't watch. All I had to do was click the refresh button and I would instantly know how many points each of my players had scored and whether I was winning or losing my game. I could also check on match-ups between other teams to see who was winning in the league.

Then, this week, the second week of football, the greatest feature on the Yahoo Fantasy Football website became unavailable to me. Yahoo no longer calculates my points throughout the day. Neither does it calculate the points of my opposition, or anyone else in the league. Apparently that feature, which gave me immediate access to all my players' performance, costs $9.99 for the rest of the season.

I'm not sure why I had this access to, what Yahoo Sports calls, StatTracker for only the first week of fantasy football unless it was to enamor me with its convenience in an attempt to hook me into shelling out ten bucks for the continued luxury. In any case, I am moderately appalled that Yahoo would actually charge for this feature. I know a lot of people probably pay for it since it seems pretty necessary, but without it the Yahoo Fantasy Football website is basically a glorified message board. I could easily call in my lineup, or, as I did last year, post them on Myspace. I could also check out the plethora of football and fantasy football websites to stay updated on my players and I could probably, without doing any paperwork, decide who to start on intuition alone. If Yahoo Sports isn't even going to tell me whether I'm winning a game, it is pretty useless to me.

So far I have spent this week of football figuring out my points the way I did last year: by adding up on paper the points I had calculated according to our league settings and information I obtained from NFL.com. I also called my boyfriend, who paid the $9.99 for StatTracker.

I still don't know if I've won my game this week. Everyone on every team, according to Yahoo, has still scored zero points. At least we're all tied.

The Yahoo Fantasy Football website may look nice and provide an internet-based list of your players, as opposed to one written in a notebook, but beyond that, it really doesn't do much. Making trades, keeping track of teams, and insulting opponents are quicker and potentially easier processes, but the website doesn't really offer me anything that would be useful on a daily basis. At this rate I'm just going to visit once a week to see if I won the past week's match-up and enter my new roster. Not being continually updated on my team's progress takes a lot of the excitement out of fantasy football. I don't want to have to pay $10 to make something that I already paid $50 for more engaging. Thanks, Yahoo, for taking all the fun out of my season.