This is the first time in many years that I’ve moved away from Yahoo! I barely remember the pre-Yahoo! days of buying a program and doing a lot by email. This year there were some new free contenders to Yahoo! that were worth checking out. ESPN should put out a quality product although their fantasy games are usually a pain to get in to. Fox Sports offered free leagues with live scoring as did AOL. AOL looked a little better so we decided to give them a try.
We’ll get Fox out of the way first. I tried to access their site last night and you couldn’t even make a team. I read the message board and people were saying they did their draft on Fox but decided to move because it was always down. Problem was it was never functioning long enough to get the rosters.
We had planned for a 9:30 draft and every one who I expected for the live draft was on time. Except of course for the draft room on AOL. It did not load at all. It should be mentioned that AOL was the only one that did not schedule drafts. Thats great since I never know when we will actually get started. However it didn’t work out so well for the servers.
A backup plan was developed to move over to ESPN. I had created a league there before I heard about AOL. We were able to get everyone signed up over there and schedule an auto-pick draft that would be done Thursday morning, plenty of time to set rosters for the opening game.
Around 10:30 AOL amazingly starts working. The draft room was incredibly slow to respond, its was really designed terribly. I had to set the absent members to auto-pick after a few minutes, it couldn’t figure out that if someone wasn’t there that they wouldn’t be picking? I guess this is possible if I had someone on the phone and I could pick for them. The auto-pick went along with the AOL rankings, which heavily favored defensive players. These teams maxed out on DL, LB, and DBs before picking any offensive players in some cases. Really, really dumb.
We are keeping the ESPN league cause, why not have 2? Plus, in that one punters and head coaches are included.
Anyway all this chatter just to annouce my roster …
I Do Sit-Ups on My Front Lawn
Pos Player, Team
QB Daunte Culpepper, MIN
QB Donovan McNabb, PHI
QB Gus Frerotte, MIA
RB Kevin Jones, DET
RB Curtis Martin, NYJ
RB Fred Taylor, JAC
WR Javon Walker, GB
WR Darrell Jackson, SEA
WR Steve Smith, CAR
WR Hines Ward, PIT
TE Alge Crumpler, ATL
TE Todd Heap, BAL
PK Jeff Wilkins, STL
PK Nate Kaeding, SD
Def Eagles, Team Defense, PHI
Def Panthers, Team Defense, CAR
Def Falcons, Team Defense, ATL
DL Adewale Ogunleye, CHI
DL Greg Spires, TB
DL Trevor Pryce, DEN
LB Steve Foley, SD
LB Kailee Wong, HOU
LB Cato June, IND
DB DeAngelo Hall, ATL
DB Robert Griffith, ARI
DB Fred Smoot, MIN
DB Tebucky S. Jones, MIA
Week 1 vs. Mufasa’s Trepidation (Evan)