Wed 29 Aug 2007
Fantasy Football and Google Docs - Winning Strategies
Posted by Dave Kaufman under Blogs , Informational , Online Application , Software , Sports and Recreation
This year I happen to be a in few fantasy football leagues (not into fantasy sports, these same tools are used by my company everyday too, so keep reading.) These days most fantasy football leagues are managed online with any number of large and small websites doing the player tracking and record keeping. It makes drafting, managing and setting your lineup each week pretty easy. Last year my team won our league, no small thanks to LaDanian Tomlinson, as he smashed NFL records. Thanks LT.
Last year and again this year we used another often talked about tool, Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Most people in fantasy football prepare for the draft using a spreadsheet application like Excel. It helps sort their rankings of players based on their league’s specific scoring system, but doing it online has a few added benefits. All of which helped the 2006 Fantasy Football Champions prepare in their championship season and in this year’s title defense.
- Auto-saving - While a seemingly small feature, since the document is saved every few seconds remotely, even when we lost power (which happened) we didn’t lose a single minute when power was restored as our data was safe and up-to-date
- Revisions - A few times we realized in our prep that we had made a mistake copying and pasting a formula or row of formulas. Google Docs offers the chance to go back in time to review different saved versions of the documents along the way. This makes it easy to find the place the error was made and correct it.
- Collaboration - No longer did we have to email big files and have a check in/out process. We just both started working even on the same sheet at the same time. This made all the difference when we had conference calls and needed to show different scenarios live to each other.
Will you win your fantasy league if you use Google Docs? No. Will it help? Yes. During the course of working another added benefit was when I was out of town, I was able to access my spreadsheets with ease. Fantasy Football is constantly changing and becoming more and more competitive with more players, more time is spent working on your “lists”. Make it easier on yourself, give Google Docs a try.
Do you have a winning story about using Google Docs and Spreadsheets? Share it with us.
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September 2nd, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Can you please send a link to an example of such an online fantasy page? It sounds really interesting, but I don’t see how you use it.
September 4th, 2007 at 7:50 am
@ Guy - Here’s a link to the NFL 2007 Schedule with bye week’s highlighted and totaled. It should help any fantasy owner planning for the season.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjyHsWKvTMJ6JchQG29LoVA
I built this in Google Spreadsheets, made changes and then published it. Easy.
September 4th, 2007 at 8:10 am
We held our league’s draft on Google Spreadsheets last night too. Went pretty well. A few months ago, I used Google Spreadsheets to do our fantasy baseball draft and that went much better than normal. Plus, I used Google Apps to create a league website. Here’s some links if everyone is interested:
http://www.ballssticksstuff.com/2007/02/fantasy_basebal.html
http://www.masondixonleague.org
September 4th, 2007 at 8:20 am
@Tom…. WOW! That is really nice. I like the work you did. I have a few leagues where your ideas would make a lot of sense. Thanks very much.
Drafting via Google Docs, that is just plain smart for any fantasy league.
September 4th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Thank you for your examples, they look indeed nice and easy.
I guess that you need a more complex set of pages for each aspect of the game. Did you manage to pull it off with google docs, or do the limitations (number of tabs, navigation problems…) make google docs as only an information source for the players?
September 4th, 2007 at 9:18 am
@ Guy - First check out Tom’s links they are great examples. You can see how his whole league is using the Google Docs tools.
You raise a great question. I did about 95% in Google Docs. The missing 5% was because Google Docs is still in beta and some features such as printing with colors didn’t seem to work. I converted to PDF and printed that.
Also I have heard really complex sheets might not work as well. I haven’t imported anything like that though.
If you ever used Excel you can import your Excel docs which is nice.
September 4th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I’d imagine not being able to print colors is a limitation of the fact that Google Docs is really a bunch of fancy HTML and JavaScript than it does that it’s in Beta. Most browsers drop backgound colors when they print anything.
September 4th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
@Jake - great point. I think that Google Docs fancy AJAX, DHTML, HTML and Javascript is the culprit in some cases, but that aside, it is still an issue when you color code data.
Good catch though.
September 7th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
This year, I formalized my draft tracking (to help learn league tendencies and help project drafting runs, etc.), and created the following quickly using Google Spreadsheets. Very simple, and the graphing provides a nice illustration of this year’s patterns.
HTML Version (View Only)located via http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pucwH8F2sbJ6w3bBuS1SkGQ&gid=0
Downloadable .xls Version via http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pucwH8F2sbJ6w3bBuS1SkGQ&output=xls
I am clearly not an Excel whiz, so if anyone has suggestions on how to improve it, please feel free to comment.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:01 am
[...] Google Docs has become a regular for word processing and spreadsheets. I am constantly using it for collaboration with others. [...]
September 14th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
[...] It’s October and that comes with all the fun tricks and exciting treats. Techlife has a treat for all our readers, a little more on that later. Our first trick this month was our readers, they came out in force on the website for a few different articles. We decided to highlight our readers excitement for Fantasy Football and Multi-Player Desktop Tower Defense. [...]
September 19th, 2007 at 9:34 am
[...] I often use Google Docs for collaboration with teams who are not uber-geeks tech savvy. Examples include clients, family, fantasy football partners, and charity work. Most of these folks don’t know what RSS or an RSS Reader is at all. They would be happy to subscribe via email though to a document that was going to be important, but today Google doesn’t offer that feature. [...]
February 26th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Hey Dave, came across this older post and noticed that the links to the google docs blog are now broken (thanks to us changing the address)… You should be able to change the URLs to googledocs.blogspot.com where it used to read google-d-s.blogspot.com
sorry ’bout that…
February 26th, 2008 at 9:27 am
@JR - Thanks! I made the changes all over Techlife for all future readers. I also checked out your site and liked the article on Rokenbok toys. I will be checking those out.