I think our current power rankings stink. I have no idea what it means. I think it has something to do with projected future points, but your guess is as good as mine. And what does this ranking really tell us about being a manager? We should be ranking teams on the decisions that were made at the draft, on game day and all throughout the season? The standings and points scored only go so far, we can go deeper. We can see exactly how great teams were built and where other teams blew it. How lucky a team got, how injury effected another team and if managers are good team builders, but make poor decisions when it comes to who to start or draft poorly and somehow patch together a playoff contender.

For the last few seasons, I’ve been tinkering with a rating that does all that. I try to take all the decisions that go into your starting line-up and grade everyone on each of them. Items such as: draft, free agency, trades, cuts, points scored, points on bench, injury, optimal line-up and luck. I calculate how many points above or below average someone is in each category and convert it to winning percentage netted (I can go into further detailed upon request). Then I put these decisions in different buckets: Skill/Luck, GM/Coach and Draft/Free Agency/Trade. I average this rating with the teams’ actual win percentage and win% if they played everyone every week to come up with their “Kosmo Rating”. Now numbers guys who are all over fantasy sports, can see how they performed at a granular level. We can see where we need to improve, if the #1 seed is a paper tiger and which team we really want to avoid in the first round of the playoffs.

I want Yahoo! to use it. I would love to see the historical profile of everyone in our league since our inception in 2004. Currently, I can just see final scores and can’t go back to see old line-ups with projected and actual points scored. I want something that separates Yahoo! from other sites and retains leagues. I made this easy to do on an excel spreadsheet. After adding the draft and team names, all I have to do is paste in the weekly line-ups. I would be excited to test it out on other leagues.

Block any team owner from dropping a player that has played, regardless of whether they are in their active line up or on their bench. The owner in my match up did not set his lineup before the games started. After the Sunday night game when he saw that he had a chance to win if he had set his lineup correctly, he dropped two players from his bench that had already played on Sunday to add two players in the Monday night game. Now he stands a very good chance to get the win. Whereas, before he was going to lose.

Yahoo should make the change to lock all players that have already played regardless if the are in the active lineup or on the bench.

Have you ever been in a situation where another manager keeps sending you lopsided trade proposals in their favor over and over again (including the same ones) even after you reject them? Or a manager that keeps sending annoying emails through the league message system (even if you've already blocked your email address in the league)? Well if Yahoo would implement a software update (in all fantasy sports, not just football) that would allow managers to select which other managers not to receive trade offers or league messages from, it would instantly solve the problem and Yahoo would never even need to be contacted about it.

Yahoo does not have enough options to accommodate live drafts. Did a live draft this year and it worked out great but I had to use Clickydraft instead of yahoo. The options that made us choose Clickydraft are:

1. Read only URL of live draftboard. This allows anybody to stream the draftboard where they have a web browser. We were able to put the draftboard up on a 70in tv for everyone to see at draft party.




2. Extend draft pick timer and pause timer. While hosting a live draft party with 10 close friends and a lot of drinking, it would be nice to have the ability to adjust the pick timer (even mid-draft) and allow the commissioner to pause draft for when there are significant interruptions and shenanigans happening.




3. Allow for managers to either pick from their own devices or the commissioner can make their picks for them. This allows for if one or more people can't make it, to be able to combine the live draft and online draft.

I don't have any affiliation with Clickydraft but you should check them out for how to run a draft. This would greatly improve the whole draft process and make Yahoo unique.