This is a brief description of the total pwnage that CBS Sports exhibits over Yahoo in fantasy football.
Free Agents / Waivers: Yahoo has a free-for-all system where you basically pick up players at any time. This means that the jerk who hovers over his laptop all day on Sunday will always win. CBS Sports handles this in a much more sane and intelligent way; cherry-picking from their rules:
All players will be placed on Waivers at the start of games every Sunday afternoon, at 12:55 PM ET during the course of the NFL season.
The waiver process will run for the first time each week between midnight Tuesday/Wednesday and 6:00:00 AM Wednesday which is approximately 24 hours after the completion of Monday night’s game.
During the waiver process, pending transactions are processed in an order determined by each team’s waiver rank. The team with a waiver rank of 1, considered the highest, will get its first requested player. After the transaction is executed, the team’s waiver rank is then set to 12 (last), and all other teams move up one. The waiver ranks are reset once each week after standings are updated on Monday night/Tuesday morning. The last-place team (based on won/lost record) will be given the waiver rank of 1, down to the first-place team, which gets the waiver rank of 12.
Scheduling: Yahoo allows for a flexible number of teams in a league, pitting them against each other in a round-robin fashion. CBS Sports forces you to have exactly twelve teams in a league. This might seem restrictive, but the benefits soon become very clear:
- A league of twelves teams allows for the creation of three divisions, each containing four teams.
- You play each team in your division twice, and non-division opponents once.
- The structure is thus more similar to the real NFL with division rivals, a wildcard chase, and strong/weak division debates.
Live scoring: Yahoo charges for live scoring; CBS gives it to you for free.
Data mining: Yahoo does provide sortable/selectable views of statistics, but CBS goes a lot deeper with it. You have much better control over manipulating the data and advanced features abound.
Alerts: If memory serves, Yahoo’s email alert system was skimpy at best. With CBS, you can configure the types of alerts/reports that you want sent to email and SMS messages.
In conclusion, I first found the CBS Sports interface to be amorphous and bland compared with Yahoo’s sharp, cohesive and AJAXified presentation. But after playing around over the course of a week or so, I see that CBS offers a rich, feature-filled, and customizable fantasy football experience. All in all, Yahoo is pwn3d.