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| I've been trying to get this newsletter out for almost two weeks now, but tasks keep coming my way. As a result there is a lot of information in this newsletter. I'll start things off with the flurry of games available to join right now. There are five games currently running or about to start on Yahoo! which are available to join, the password with each group ID is 123456. Fantasy Premier League, ID = 3865. FPL is run through Yahoo! Eurosport. College Football Pickem, ID = 361. NFL Pickem, ID = 575. NFL Survivor Pickem, ID = 263. Salary Cap Football, ID = 293. Fantasy Premier League's season began two weekends ago and will forge on for another 8.5 months. Please join the game as soon as possible. College Football Pickem begins this weekend with your first entry due by 11:55 AM EST this Saturday. If you don't join until after the deadline, don't worry, you're allowed to drop your low week from your total score for the season. NFL Pickem, NFL Survivor Pickem & Salary Cap Football begin next Thursday with the start of the NFL season. On top of those games there are two message board-based games available, NFL Standings Pickem available via this thread on the message board. & NHL Standings Pickem available via this thread on the message board. With the new batch of games comes new and improved overall standings pages. Here are some links which can also be found via the front page of the website or navigating through the "Standings" section. Fantasy Premier League College Football Pickem NFL Pickem NFL Survivor Pickem Salary Cap Football Remember that every fantasy game involves more than one ASFL2 group on Yahoo!, your rank in your individual group isn't your rank for ASFL2 purposes. You'll need to check the standings page on the website to determine where you are overall and whether or not you've earned yourself a week win. If you aren't presently on a standings page and the game hasn't started yet, your team will be accounted for once the season starts. On top of those advanced standings pages, I'm in the process of setting up the overall Fantasy Football standings page (http://www.theasfl.com/asfl2/Standings/2009-2010/Football/index.php). It should be updated close to weekly with each league's standings and point totals as well as the end-of-season metrics calculated throughout the season. If all goes according to plan, you'll be able to determine how many ASFL2 championship standings points you would earn if the Fantasy Football season were to end when you were viewing the page. I'm still in the midst of setting up the metric pages while working on the Keeper Leagues & ASASFL Drafts, forgive me for the broken links for now. The point totals that are showing on the page are test numbers so I can make sure things are working properly. That's all for current games, so now I'll move on to Fantasy Hockey, which opened up just 48 hours ago. I've used the same number of leagues as I did last year (7) to stay on the conservative side even though I believe there should be enough to fill 8 leagues. Should there be enough draft time preferences early enough I will open up an 8th league to draft between September 27th and September 30th or to be drafted via autopick. Here are the available draft times: Sunday 9/20 at 7:15 PM EST Monday 9/21 at 10 PM EST Tuesday 9/22 at 8:45 PM EST Wednesday 9/23 at 9:15 PM EST Thursday 9/24 at 10:30 PM EST Saturday 9/26 at 5:15 PM EST & an official autopick. Reply to this email with your time preferences or reply to this thread with them. As I send this out, the autopick league only has five spots available. If you request to be in the autopick league, please supply a back-up time. I hope to send out league designations on Monday at the latest. To avoid being late to join a game or not getting your ideal draft time, always check the league website and message board once a game opens on Yahoo. I create the ASFL2 leagues and groups the day games are opened and make them public on the message board right away. If you don't plan on participating in a game that's fine, but you must let me know of your intentions not to participate or you will be docked points. With another draft game comes more ASFL2 Keeper Leagues designations and slow drafts as well as more ASASFL drafts. Those of you who signed up for keeper league hockey will receive your designation shortly with information for your slow draft sent shortly there after as I'm still testing to make sure everything's working properly in the transfer from Fantasy Football drafts to Fantasy Hockey drafts. The same is true for those qualified for the ASASFL competitions. All ASFL2 Keeper Leagues & ASASFL Fantasy Hockey slow drafts will begin Monday at the latest, hopefully Sunday. Please monitor the league website and message board closely for updates. Remember to keep watch for Fantasy Basketball draft times around mid-to-late September. |
I'll wrap things up like I normally do, with information on the league's future. The draft application I spent the better part of the summer coding is working well with room to grow for next season. Hopefully those of you using it agree. I coded the draft application for two primary reasons. First and foremost I needed the draft system for the Keeper Leagues to be automated in order for me to be able to run them. Second, I did it in hopes of boosting the traffic on the website to boost the minimal ad revenue generated. As I said, the first goal was a success. As for the second goal, the two and a half weeks of Fantasy Football drafts helped to double the hits on the website from July to August and the first few days of this month have already surpassed the total for July as well. While that helped to triple the ad revenue for the month, unfortunately that's still a single digit earnings total. I'm certainly glad to see the potential for success there, but in order to reach that potential I'm going to have to find a new ad network and most of the reputable ones require the website's traffic to stay around the level it has been during the drafts for an entire year. To help achieve that, I hope to code some of the unofficial games to be conducted on the website as well as the official message board games (College Bowl Pickem, Fantasy NFL Playoffs, Standings Pickem, Playoffs Pickem) with the potential for some of the games presently run on Yahoo! (NFL Pickem, College Football Pickem, etc) to be run on the website one day as well. Please help me out by using the website to check the league standings regularly. Look at how you stack up in history section for the all-time league standings and the all-time standings of each fantasy game. If you have a question on the rules for a game go ahead and look it up on the website. There is a lot of information on the website and I put in a lot of work to update things regularly. In planning with moving the league forward I've elected to attempt to start up money leagues by next Fantasy Baseball season. 67% of the 39 members (if you haven't filled out the survey, please do, this is the last time I'll ask; I'll have a summary of the results on the website in a week or two hopefully) that replied to the 2008-2009 Review Survey said they would be interested in a pay league. As of now I plan to have multiple levels of leagues from $10 buy-ins to perhaps $30 buy-ins. Pay-outs will be given to those who win the regular season of the league, finish as regular-season runner-up, playoff champ & playoff runner-up with the percentage of the pot won at each spot being determined later, but anywhere between 2 and 4 members could wind up winning money. Please keep that in mind when you're preparing for this Fantasy Baseball season. In keeping on the results of the review survey, almost 80% (31 of 39) who responded said they would be willing to pay $5, $10, $1/game, $2/game or more than $10 to participate in the league. The last thing I want to do is require members to pay to participate, I'd much rather receive money for traffic on the website or other website partnerships, but at this point that's not enough. I'm not about to institute a fee for next season, but if you were willing to pay if it was required, please consider donating even though it's not required. I've been quite thankful to have received a few donations recently that have helped me break even from the league trophies for the 2008-2009 season. On top of the simple balance between keeping the league in the black and not the red, I've recently decided to take (at least) a semester off from college to try to save up money for future semesters and/or new schooling. I've had a scholarship from the state throughout my time in school, but it is about to run out and with the economy the way it is I'm going to have to scrap together the money to pay for a degree myself or find a career based on the education I have now. I've decided to limit my search to a part time job for the fall to ensure that I have the time to guide the league moving forward and code the games for use on the website. If anyone out there has any other ideas to allow for members to use the website more, to help with generating revenue for the website through advertisements or even any potential job ideas with free time I'd be willing to listen. I can say that I eventually hope to be able to offer free money league teams as prizes for some of the more active unofficial games held on the website in the future (such as MLB Day-to-Day Pickem & MLB Daily Roto). My apologies for the delay in sending this so close to the start of many of the games. Enjoy your Labor Day weekend. Stay safe if you're traveling. |
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