A new year brings a new set of challenges for fantasy football, in the last season before the 17th and 18th teams change the game forever.
I’ll use this post to clear up a few things for 2010. First things first, the Fanplanner now has a Trade Group feature, whereby when you start a new plan team you’ll see links to “choose all” players for each position, and when you have players in place there will be little green icons with a fast forward symbol to access the same page again. After some consultation, I have decided not to enforce salary cap limits on these pages as I have done in limiting the players you can select using the old Add page, as I have been told that users enjoy the freedom to do with their side what they like. You will still see the salary cap amount on your Team List page if you want to stick to it.
I have added raw statistics – kicks, marks, tackles, et cetera – to the yearly tables for each player which are accessible through player profiles, like Dane Swan in 2009. This is a bit of a departure for FanFooty, as for the five previous years of its existence I have avoided posting raw stats. Part of it was respect to Paul Jeffs, the operator of AFL Tables, for his kindness in sending me the historical stats database that got FF going in the first place, and I still link to his site in all the profiles. Part of it was also not wanting to tread on the toes of other sites out there that did post them. I think it has been long enough, though, that those are no longer issues, at least for historical numbers. I’m still going to stick to fantasy numbers for the live scoring, if only because the live pages are filled up with stuff already!
I have been thinking about a player comparison function. Some of you might be familiar with examples of it that I haven’t seen, but the ones I have seen are fairly boring in my eyes, being just a two-line table with each players’ stat lines. Can anyone think of something more sexy than that? Let me know in the comments.
Alright, what else? Ah yes, some people have been asking for the purposes of the Fanplanner whether I should be including the donuts that the likes of Brent Harvey and David Hille got last year for the purposes of calulating 2010 prices. I can tell you that I went through the 2009 prices and there were two players who copped a donut in 2008, and both of them had the donut included in calculations for their 2009 price, so that’s the procedure I have followed.
Those of you who want to suggest other things should read the FanFooty 2.010 thread in the forums, where some things have been shot down in flames but others have been embraced. In particular, the Bubble Boy and Rollercoaster blog features will be turned into pages on the site once Round 3 comes around. If you can think of anything else you want to see on the site (within reason!) tell in the comments here or in that forum thread.
