Review: What's the Best Fantasy Football Host Site This Year?

Everybody plays fantasy football, but not everybody plays on the same platform. What's the difference you ask? Well, a lot it turns out. From navigability to added features to something as simple as type-size, there is as much variety in the sites you'll use to host your league as there is in various draft strategies.

To help you decide which site to host your league this year, we signed up in leagues on six different free platforms: CBSSports.com, ESPN.com, FleaFlicker.com, FoxSports.com, NFL.com, and Yahoo.com. We went through each site's pages and ranked their overall ease of use and information access. We've also provided screen shots of each site's Draft, Team, League, Player Pool and Research pages, so you can judge for yourself. Put it this way: If you put as much research into your team as we did into ranking the host sites, you'll win your league going away. Read on for our take on the Best Fantasy Football Host Sites in 2011.

The draft on FleaFlicker felt like using Yahoo! from 10 years ago on a bulky desktop. All it was missing was a dial tone every time you drafted a player. One nice thing was the help from the draft host and draft advisor in the main feed. Though it’s not hard to figure out, it took the position you needed most and told the top ranked player in that position. The most frustrating part was using the player queue. There was no drag-and-drop, and it seemed the only way to use it was to double click and select.

The league home page for FleaFlicker is pitiful. The only thing it shows is the standings. There is no news, no transactions, and no discussion. Some of the other sites offer 10 times more information and options than that. The home page should be a central place to see all and do all, but theirs is merely a jump-off point.

Following the trend, the scoreboard and player pools are pretty basic. There is no way to match players up against each other like some of the other sites, and clicking on a player takes you to another page rather than a pop-out player card. If you are trying to make comparisons or decisions quickly, this site is probably going to make you angrier than post-game Dennis Green.

Aside from pleasing aesthetic appeal, Fox provided one of the most frustrating drafts. For starters, their client does not even run on Google Chrome. Even using Safari and Firefox, the system was spotty, freezing up at times and not allowing certain functions on screen. When your team is on the clock, you don’t want to be scrambling to restart because the draft button isn’t working.

The league home page is solid. It has everything you’d be looking for, including added features like polls that you can create and a very useful feature, tailored news about players on your team. This can save your week if you had no idea your tight end pulled his hammy playing freeze tag with his kid on Saturday.

Usually, it's pretty hard to mess up the player pool. You have a list of players and the stats. What we’ve found out from Fox is just how important it is to make sure that list is 100% up-to-date. Last year it took Fox at least two weeks to get Danario Alexander, a player with tremendous talent and potential, into the system when he was called up to start. In deep leagues where you’ll be needing those types of players, that’s just unacceptable.

Yes, we are young and are supposed to have fresh eyesight, but c’mon CBS. Even for 20-something dudes, the type in this draft board is tiny. Who wants to be straining to see how many touchdowns Greg Jennings is projected to have? Additionally, as far as we can tell, you can’t just select a player to draft. You have to click on his profile or put him in the queue. Also, the list of players isn’t streamlined into one long list. You see 33 people at a time and have to click next to see more. Frankly, these extra steps are unneeded and annoying.

The league home is good. It has a lot of information in a relatively organized fashion, which is what you want. The best part is that it is customizable. You can drag and drop features like the message board, transactions and player news. Even the feature story section is open for deleting or moving.

One thing great about the CBS team page is the small weather feature next to the game times. We can’t tell you how many times you’ll have a starter’s game turned into a mud bowl, wasting a precious roster spot. When it comes to finding free agents, CBS takes a slightly different approach. Instead of filtering the people after the fact, they have options to click offensive or defensive leaders based on specific stats.

The live scoreboard is nice too. They provide a preview for each match-up that compares each team’s positions and gives an “edge” to one team or another based on projections, which is pretty cool to see. CBS also has a unique power rankings feature within the standings. It takes into account your team's record, points, and breakdown, and formulates league power rankings.

NFL.com has a pretty solid draft board, but there are two main things that stick out: Drafted players and the chat. Often people will have draft kits or cheat sheets up elsewhere on the computer to help with the draft, so the compact size of this draft is convenient, however there isn’t a space to always immediately see the past picks. You either have to click on a separate tab or look at the top ticker to see only the last pick.

The chat provided the most frustration on this draft. Let’s be honest, drafts are the best if you actually are in the room with your buddies and able to talk smack about picking your best friend’s favorite player. With that said, if you aren’t able to physically get together, chats are the next best thing. On a 15” screen, I had to scroll down every time that I wanted type something in the chat. It might sound minor, but trust us, it’s annoying if the chat is lively.

The NFL.com team page has a very polished and organized look. It uses the standard drag and drop feature to move players around and it’s easy to find any stat or projection you are looking for. One nice hidden feature is in the “schedule” tab. There is actually a button straight on the page to link you to buy tickets for any of your players’ games. Tempting, right?

The scoring match-up page again brings a refined look, offering everything you’d need from head-to-head player stats to full stats for your entire team. It also has a convenient feature to have a highlights tab if you are currently unable to watch the games or just want to check out that disgusting horizontal grab Larry Fitzgerald made.

The Yahoo! draft is a perfect mix of simplicity and necessary components. You don’t have a useless oversimplified board, but you don’t have a busy, overcomplicated one either. One thing we'd change would be the better availability of projected stats for the players. We mainly had to use last year’s stats to go off of.

Yahoo!’s team page is nothing special, but it’s extremely easy to use. It’s just the basic drag and drop to switch players. This is part of the reason that we love Yahoo!. The design isn’t so boring that it hurts to look at, but its stock structure makes everything quick and efficient.

Like ESPN, Yahoo! has specific experts that focus solely on fantasy football. It’s nice to get advice from people who know are so knowledgeable that they know the stats and splits of third string running backs. Most of this information is easily accessible from the league home page or on player cards.

ESPN’s draft page is absolutely fantastic. It’s super intuitive and there isn’t a piece of information that isn’t one click away. The position bar atop the screen makes it crystal clear when your picks are coming up. Also, if you are an “IN” subscriber on ESPN, then a tab allows you to look at expert analysis and advice straight from within the draft board. The board does take up the entire screen, but it’s worth the extra space.

The team page is easy to use as well. Our favorite features are the in-screen availability of helpful information. Not only do you get statistical info for each player, but ESPN also provides written analysis of projections and news without having to go to different pages.

Something nice about ESPN’s player pool are the options under the “action” bar. Adding and comparing is easy, and you have the choice to put players on a “watch list.” If you hear that a player is coming back from injury soon or has the potential to start in place of an injured player, you can put them on this list so you don’t forget about them.

ESPN easily takes the cake when it comes to scoring. Along with Yahoo! and CBS, ESPN provides free live scoring. This is particularly useful when you go into the Monday night game up by 13 points and the only player left to play is Jay Cutler on the opponent’s team. They also house the most comprehensive and in-depth scoreboard of all the sites.