Fantasy Sports 411

Fantasy sports gamers understand the value of gathering all the information they can on the players they own before setting their lineups.  For that reason, it is important to be informed about the quality of the fantasy sports web sites and the information they present.  In the first installment of my weekly article critiquing fantasy sports websites I am going to look at Yahoo! and their fantasy sports section.  Yahoo! fantasy sports is one of the most populated fantasy sports league web sites on the internet.  Yahoo! is well known for their free fantasy sports leagues, an idea that other sites such as ESPN have started to follow in recent years.  In all of Yahoo's fantasy sports leagues, it is quite easy to set rosters, find tabs for viewing free agents, proposing trades and other common actions fantasy owners make.  Yahoo! has also added a new "drag and drop" options for setting rosters, while still offering the classic drop tab next to each player.  Yahoo! has also beefed up the amount and ease of accessing statistics of players, and other such important information as pitching matchups for hitters in fantasy baseball for example.  Yahoo! offers a variety of pay-for information and stat computing services such as their Stat Tracker service and pre-draft ranking service.  As well as the layout of Yahoo's fantasy sports leagues pages being quite practical, they also are relatively solid in appearance.  The pages in fantasy baseball feature a baseball diamond in the top banner of the site, and in fantasy football the top banner features the fifty yard line on the football field.  Yahoo! also features ads in the upper right hand corner of the league page and the lower right hand corner of the team roster page.  Yahoo! also creatively inserts advertisements for other fantasy sport leagues they offer on both the league page and roster page.  This year in fantasy football, Yahoo! has a variety of sponsors including Toyota, Coca-Cola, Heineken and Sprint.  Even with these advertisers, Yahoo! has not cluttered the pages making it difficult for users to navigate the pages or set rosters.  For those fantasy sports participants who don't care to use Yahoo's standard scoring, league commissioners can adjust scoring options in a large variety of ways to cater to that individual league's needs.  Finally, as well as offering one of the best sites for participating in fantasy sports leagues, Yahoo! also offers a great variety of "expert" fantasy advice both in article format, written by writers such as Brandon Funston, Andy Behrens and Brad Evans, as well as through video and online fantasy sports programs such as Sunday's fantasy football program, Fantasy Football Live, that airs from noon ET to 1 PM ET.  The ease of navigating Yahoo's fantasy sports pages, the variety of options in scoring available to leagues, and the amount of fantasy sports content available, makes Yahoo! one of the best fantasy sports sites on the internet.  For those interested in viewing Yahoo's fantasy sports page, a link can be found at the bottom of this article.

http://sports.yahoo.com/fantasy