We tried ESPN last year, and after a week we almost moved back to CBS - even knowing we were going to have to manually transfer all the stats over. There was one giant flaw for us that was almost the deal breaker: in roto leagues, they did not track game played per position (which is ridiculous, in my opinion). You got a certain amount of games played to use for your entire offense, however you want to divide them up across your active positions - we ended up tracking it manually. Things were probably fine for H2H in that regard. The interface itself took a little while to get used to, but it wasn't bad - a little bit on the simplistic side. Obviously, the big benefit of ESPN is you get free live stats, but otherwise I'd rather use the Yahoo free leagues or the CBS commissioner leagues.
"The government cannot give to anyone anything that it does not first take from someone else"
The biggest thing for me about the CBS commish leagues is everything is correctable. Someone drops the wrong player, you make it right in about a minute. You can go back & correct mistakes from previous weeks if need be.Someone deserves to be out of the league, you boot them & replace with another owner.Its an active commish's dream. You can trade draft picks. You can have a slow draft in the draft room for 2 weeks & it doesn't miss a beat.The 2010 product has been out for 3 weeks, right now CBS has the best product out there.We've been using them for 8 years now & there aren't many problems, at least once the season starts(they did have a problem with the draft order resetting last January). Very reliable. I call it inexpensive: when you divide the cost of the service between 12 or 14 owners for an entire years worth of service, its quite minimal. They have more ways of sorting stats and comparing players than you'll probably ever figure out.Almost everyone that has used yahoo complains that its different, yes you have to get used to a new setup. There is an aweful lot to like & very few things that are bad; perhaps those that are playing in a $10 or $20 league wouldn't want to pay for the $150 commish service. Alot of the league members probably don't even realize whats all there, but a hands on commish will really enjoy & appreciate all they have to offer
Yeah - CBS is so customizable that it is far superior to Yahoo (and of course ESPN) if you are doing anything even remotely non-standard. As someone said earlier, I like the custom stats reports you can create and you can even make up your own stat categories - a couple of years ago I played around with valuations until I came up with dollar values based on actual stats.
A few negatives about CBS that drive me bonkers:
- It drives me batty that when you want to add a player, you have no way to (easily) compare that player to your active roster to decide who you might want to drop (like Yahoo does). It is so obvious and simple to implement, I can't stand it. I've complained for the last 5 years about this in my football and baseball leagues.
- They don't have any sort of player rankings based on live stats. Some prefer this, but it is annoying that all stat reports default to sorting by alphabetical order. Having some way to list players based on how well they have performed over the period of time selected (week, month, season, etc.) would be very useful - and could help in trade negotiations.
- We had quite a bit of bad experience with the draft room during online drafts. They do let the commissioner backout picks and make picks for someone else, so we've made it work in those years when we couldn't do a live draft. It is quite cool for slow drafts over a 1-2 week timeframe however.
All that said, my main money league has moved from Yahoo (3 years) to CBS (5 years) to ESPN (1 year) over the last several years and there was a 12-0 vote to go back to CBS this year.
"The government cannot give to anyone anything that it does not first take from someone else"
Bloody Sox wrote: - It drives me batty that when you want to add a player, you have no way to (easily) compare that player to your active roster to decide who you might want to drop (like Yahoo does). It is so obvious and simple to implement, I can't stand it. I've complained for the last 5 years about this in my football and baseball leagues.
- They don't have any sort of player rankings based on live stats. Some prefer this, but it is annoying that all stat reports default to sorting by alphabetical order. Having some way to list players based on how well they have performed over the period of time selected (week, month, season, etc.) would be very useful - and could help in trade negotiations.
Those are the two main reasons that I didn't like CBS when I tried it a few years back. Picking up new players for your team was a pain compared to the Yahoo way.
Cafe Home
Fantasy Football
Fantasy Basketball
Fantasy Hockey
by bigh0rt » Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:32 pm 
