What Is the Best Website for Your Fantasy Football League?
With the NFL season around the corner, that means that fantasy football season is here as well. Whether you play in one league or multiple leagues, if you play season-long fantasy football in an online league, chances are your league is run through ESPN, Yahoo, or NFL.com, which are the three most popular sites for playing fantasy football.
Here’s a look at some of the pros and cons of each to help you decide which fantasy football site is the best one for your needs.
Yahoo
Yahoo was where many people played fantasy sports in the early days of the Internet, and it’s still one of the top choices today. With that said, one positive of playing on Yahoo is familiarity. If you’re in a long-running league that has always had Yahoo as the platform of choice, you’re familiar with the site and how it works.
While there have been changes and upgrades to the UI over the years, the interface is largely the same. And that includes having a clean, easy-to-use design. In the desktop version, you get a choice of how you want to manipulate your team roster, using drop-down menus in the “classic” mode or the updated “swap” mode.
If you like playing daily fantasy, Yahoo is the only site of these three that offers daily fantasy games. On the negative side, the site’s weekly point projections may not always be as accurate as they are at the competitors’ sites.
ESPN
ESPN bills itself as the Worldwide Leader in Sports, and it shows with its fantasy games. The company seems to be the one of these three that puts the most focus on its fantasy football product.
ESPN has the largest amount of fantasy-related content — written, audio, and video – of the three companies with a large team of fantasy experts led by Matthew Berry, who was one of the first fantasy football writers on the Internet.
If you have an ESPN+ (formerly ESPN Insider) subscription, there is even more fantasy content you can access to help you beat the rest of your league. On the negative side, there seems to be an increasing amount of content going behind the ESPN+ paywall, so if you’re not a paying subscriber you’ll have a disadvantage compared to your league-mates who are.
NFL.com
If you’re looking for the league’s official fantasy game, look no further than NFL.com. Since the game is on the league’s own platform, it has content, such as game highlights, that you might not be able to find on the other sites.
But being on NFL.com does have some drawbacks, as well. One major one is because the league frowns on gambling the site has the least available content for daily fantasy players. And because the site’s writers and audio/video hosts are employed by the NFL, they might not be a little more biased and less likely to give their honest opinions about the league than the content creators on the other sites.
In the end, it’s your fantasy football league
However you like playing fantasy football, the platform you use for your league(s) is ultimately up to you and your personal preference. If you’re the type of person who reads ESPN.com daily and your TV is always glued to ESPN, then ESPN’s site or app are probably best for you.
If you want to play the league’s official fantasy game, then NFL.com is for you, and if you’re a regular user of Yahoo for search, email, news, or other functions, then you may want to play Yahoo’s fantasy game. Maybe one site has a layout or feature you like better than the others. There are a number of reasons to choose which platform you use, but it’s a choice that you have to make for yourself.
