Thoughts on Dynasty football on ESPN

[Adidas95]

Just wondering how it is playing dynasty on ESPN. I know on nfl.com you can only set keepers and that's about it. Can you do off-season trades on ESPN? Does CBS offer more?

[jcc6fd]

You can do offseason trades on ESPN. You can also set Keepers. You however cannot trade draft picks to my knowledge so you'll have to track that separately.

[Kramer]

ESPN doesn't track draft picks, but in my league we just have a google doc setup that the commissioner updates after any trades. Everyone in the league is so used to ESPN from redraft that we just stuck with it and it works out well for us since we know each other. Might be harder if it's all random people though. As jcc said, you can set keepers to be the whole roster and carry players over from the prior year.

[nabright]

I don't mind using ESPN for dynasty. It's just a little more work for the commissioner to keep track of picks. I think ESPN's biggest fault is lack of customization with the scoring. You basically would have to have a pretty vanilla league to use ESPN. I recently started a new start-up and I am being forced to chose between MFL and Fleaflicker to make my league bc ESPN can't support my minor scoring tweaks. Like having different PPR for TEs and RBs from WRs. You have to have the same PPR for all positions, which definitely sucks. They have a great platform, but they haven't done much to expand it. It'd be pretty easy to add trading of draft picks and more scoring customization. Not sure why they haven't done anything like this yet.

[Tsunami]

ESPN is my least favorite site for fantasy football, mostly because of the horrible messaging system. The site only goes down for about 2-3 weeks in the off-season around the NFL draft, so you can make trades all year. But it has no mechanics for trading draft picks and if you try to attach a message with a trade offer it doesn't go through half the time.

I recommend Yahoo if you aren't active in the off-season, or maybe Fleaflicker with a free draft on MFL if you have to trade before August. Someone said FanTrax was very good but I haven't tried that one yet.

[Adidas95]

You can do offseason trades on ESPN. You can also set Keepers. You however cannot trade draft picks to my knowledge so you'll have to track that separately.

You can customize the draft board right?

[BuckeyeNation]

I've always liked ESPN for Redraft, probably because of their Gamecast. If they ever added true dynasty features to their site then I'd instantly push to move my MFL leagues over to ESPN. Of course dropping that insane MFL league fee plays a large role in that.

[Coogan Football]

Just have everybody pitch-in an extra $8 and move to MFL.

I am a firm believer in paying for a good product rather than going for a half-assed product to save a little money. It's literally only a few dollars per team and it makes a huge difference.

[Ruggenater]

ESPN doesn't track draft picks, but in my league we just have a google doc setup that the commissioner updates after any trades. Everyone in the league is so used to ESPN from redraft that we just stuck with it and it works out well for us since we know each other. Might be harder if it's all random people though. As jcc said, you can set keepers to be the whole roster and carry players over from the prior year.

Same as this for my league. We pair ESPN with GroupMe for league communications and a platform for discussing trades with other owners. As someone else noted above, ESPN has an abysmal messaging system.

[Crwdstunna]

I have a few leagues housed on ESPN but limited scoring options and messaging hold it back. I mean how do they screw up the e-mail function?

[jcc6fd]

You can do offseason trades on ESPN. You can also set Keepers. You however cannot trade draft picks to my knowledge so you'll have to track that separately.

You can customize the draft board right?

You can set who drafts when. Admittedly I haven't ever been a commissioner so I don't know if you can change the draft order mid-draft in a startup to account for trades. You can absolutely assign players to specific teams.

[Kaz]

So, I've been using ESPN for years, and I feel like I can give you a decent rundown of the platform. Currently, the biggest issue is the email system. Though, I haven't had the issue for the last couple of weeks, ESPN has been dropping emails pretty frequently. I wasn't receiving trade offers, messages, or anything.

The next biggest issue is the scoring, like people said. It's not a big deal if you want to run a fairly vanilla league, but you can forget running anything with super specific rules. IDP is pretty much the same way, though it does allow for the standard customization based on sacks/tackles/asts and so on. As far as other communication, ESPN does allow html posting on their main page, so it's easy to drop a chatroll in for everyone to talk with. People can even create their own private rooms to discuss trades if they are both on at the same time.

The draft is... meh. I manually keep track of all trades involving future draft picks through the regular year through the message board. After the offseason maintenance, you can schedule a snake draft and draft pick trading. You can then trade around all the picks to ensure everyone has the correct ones. As long as you kept decent records, that shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes. The big issue is that ESPN doesn't allow you to use the draft client until Jul 1 at the soonest. So I typically enable this until we get ready for a message board draft and then disable it so that I can add players manually. All further trades have to go through the message board after that. I should also note that if you do use the live draft client, you can't trade picks while it is being used.

ESPN does have some perks to it as well. They generally have the best, cleanest interface and the live scoring is by far the best out of all the clients I've used. They also let you split cb/s and dt/de, which fleaflicker doesn't allow. This sometimes creates positional inaccuracies, but they've really gotten better in the last year or two about those. They just recently introduced the edge rusher position, and if your league uses a generic DL position, it allows you to start 34 OLB there as well, which is pretty neat.

ESPN is really good for redraft and standard leagues, but they lack the conventional dynasty features that would make them much better. I've no idea why they've been so resistant to developing them, because I feel like it would put them head and shoulders above everyone else if they just added a few things like in season draft trading and some scoring upgrades.

[Kramer]

One more thing that I wanted to add. We created a facebook group with all the members in it. We usually post any updates, trades, polls, etc on there. Plus it's easy to communicate with all the other members in the league as they're all part of the facebook group. Usually works out pretty well for me with regards to trade negotiations, etc. Although it helps to know most of the people in real life.

[Phaded]

I will not even play on anything but ESPN to be honest. To me, it just provides the cleanest overall experience. I do not mind the very small amount of extra work as a commish.

Most people swear by MFL and while it may be more friendly in automation, it is so damn ugly. I would not even use it if it were free.

The 2 biggest faults of espn are draft pick trading and their email system, both things that can easily be overcome.

[Adidas95]

Messaging isn't a problem for my league because we all know eachother and already just have a group chat. I'm wondering if you can customize the draft order on ESPN. For example, if someone trades me their first round pick, can I customize the draft board to give me their first round pick? Or would he have to draft the player I want and then trade me him after the draft. I'm thinking about moving my league to ESPN because NFL.com doesn't allow off-season trades