Avoiding Midseason Malaise: How FCN Keeps Your Fantasy League Fresh

We love you. Wanna know how you know?

Picture this scenario:

It’s early November. Your fantasy football league has been going for about eight weeks, and the dreaded “midseason malaise” sets in. Your team is still in contention (of course), but some of your buddies are seeing the writing on the wall. They drafted hot rookie QBs, they picked up early-season “breakout stars” off the waiver wire, two of the three reliable players they do have are injured. They’re ready to stick forks in themselves, because they are done. More dreadful than Matt Millen, these MMs can kill the fun of your entire league, transforming what was once a cool way to spice up your Sundays into the mind-numbing drudgery of e-mail follow-ups on trade requests, unanswered trash talk, and the grim spectre of some random, abandoned, rudderless, undead ghost team that just happens to have Adrian Peterson derailing your playoff train.

There is a better way.

That way, of course, is us. That’s why you’re here, even if you didn’t know it. The fact that you care about fantasy sports at least enough to read a blog that isn’t titled “Top 10 Fantasy Draft Sleepers” (look for that in July) or “[insert player you drafted in second round here] Out for Season” proves that you are. If you’re listening to reading this, you are the resistance. And we’re here to help.

Formerly, Fantasy Champion Network was pretty scattered. We ran a Ning social network with the goals of uniting fantasy owners, keeping them up to date on the latest news, maintaining groups for them to interact in, providing resources to enhance fantasy play, selling useful and/or cool fantasy related stuff, and making it easy to upload your own stuff to make your games better. We also (eventually) got a bunch of apps on the site (via Ning’s eventual OpenSocial arrangement) and tried to run several of our own fantasy leagues on major platforms (CBS Sportsline, Sandbox, and Yahoo!) with dues administration and prize management. There were only three of us working on it steadily. Things (including our site design) were a bit busy.

The core of the whole thing was, and has always been, making leagues fun for people playing in them. To make that happen, we had to take some time a reassess what the hell we were doing. I think (and hope) it worked. The old Network is still there, and will still figure into our future in a useful way. There are elements there that are helpful to people, and we only plan on enhancing our usefulness. Our philosophy that fantasy sports should begin fun and remain fun all, even in the offseasons of the fantasy games you participate in, has not changed and never will. But, in the coming months, leading up to football season (note: we love baseball, and will have some baseball content coming soon this season, but we want to make our big splash with the 2009 football season), you’ll see us making moves to support that philosophy in the ways that you, the community of fantasy sports fans, are looking for us to, not just in every single way we think is cool. Trust me, it’ll be better for you and us if we just listen to you.

We just wanna make you happy.

Ain’t love grand?

Thanks for coming by. Please tell us what you would make fantasy sports year-round fun for you. What are your suggestions? What are your wildest fantasy wishes? (Not THOSE fantasy wishes. We don’t even know her Twitter @. You’re on your own there, buddy.)

What would you like to see come from Fantasy Champion Network soon?

Tags: Fantasy, league

This entry was posted on April 28, 2009 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.