I'm a big fan of Footballguys, and not just because I happen to work here. I've been a paid subscriber since 2002. When I joined the staff in 2013, I was still in the middle of a 3-year subscription. If Footballguys had ever offered a lifetime subscription, I would have bought one immediately. There's a lot of really cool tools, cutting-edge analysis, and even just goofy fun.
Footballguys isn't a perfect site, but one of the things I love about it is how well they have always listened to customer feedback and tried to improve. And some of the most consistent feedback I've gotten when talking to customers about cool features is "I didn't even know they had that!" Which is a pretty major failure of communication.
So whether you're considering subscribing, or a new subscriber, or a long-time subscriber who just never heard about it, I wanted to talk about the single coolest, most game-changing, most indispensible feature on Footballguys. As someone who contributes articles, I can tell you it's not the articles. As someone who has contributed to the Draft Dominators, I can tell you it's not the Draft Dominators. Those are all tremendous assets worth the price of subscription alone, but they're not the best part of Footballguys.
The best part of Footballguys is MyFBG.
What's So Great About MyFBG?
MyFBG is the best not because it makes you better at fantasy football, (although in all honesty it's probably the tool that will do the most to improve your teams). It's the best because it recognizes that, while fantasy football is fun, it can also be a time sink. And then MyFBG goes out and reclaims that time for you.
Think about how much time you spend per week just on mundane team-management stuff. Looking over the waiver wire trying to see who is available. Flipping back and forth between your starting lineup and various projections to see who is recommended by whom. Scanning all of your opponents' teams to see who is loaded at one position but weak at another and might be amenable to a trade.
Conservatively, I've estimated I used to spend maybe an hour per league on that kind of stuff. It's not managing my team, it's the basic bookkeeping and accounting that I need to do so that I can get around to actually managing my team. At times, the time spent could be much higher. Multiplied across five leagues, times sixteen weeks in the typical fantasy season, that's maybe 80 hours a year spent just on busywork, stuff that's not really "fun" per se but which needs to be done, anyway.
MyFBG is a tool that lets Footballguys link to all of your leagues so that it can tailor its advice to your specific league. Instead of "these are good waiver targets who might be available", MyFBG scans your actual waiver wire and says "these are the best players who are actually available in your league right now".
Instead of having to flip back and forth between your team and a set of projections, MyFBG says "here are all of the weekly projections from all of our experts for the players who are on your team, as well as the top available free agents". Instead of having to page through each of your leaguemates' teams individually, MyFBG gives you customized rest-of-the-year projections for your league, (in your specific scoring system!), as well as the ability to highlight each team's players individually. Finding potential trade partners couldn't be easier.
All of this helps you make better decisions, decisions specifically tailored to each of your individual leagues. And that's awesome. But all of this also helps you make *faster* decisions, and that's even more awesome.
Using my estimate from earlier, I'd guess that all of that behind-the-scenes bookkeeping stuff is reduced to 15 minutes per league with MyFBG. So instead of spending 80 hours a year on busywork, now I'm only spending 20. That's 60 extra hours for me to do... whatever I want. I can use that time to join more leagues. Or to do more research and improve my teams even more.
Or I can use that extra time to learn to juggle. Or to go to my kid's soccer games. Or to have a romantic dinner with my longsuffering wife, (who sometimes feels a bit ignored during football season). Or to do whatever the heck I want, because it's my time.
And that, I think, is what's so revolutionary about MyFBG. There's lots of cool articles and apps and tools that will make your fantasy football team better. But, at the risk of sound hyperbolic, MyFBG will make your *life* better. It's like hiring someone to mow your grass or clean your house so you can spend your time doing stuff you'd rather be doing instead.
Maybe you think my "60 extra hours" estimate is crazy, but you can feel free to walk through the math for yourself. How much time a week do you think you spend on basic bookkeeping in your leagues? How many leagues are you in? How much time does that add up to over the course of an entire season? I suspect if you try to estimate it, you'll find it's a lot higher than you think.
How To Set Up MyFBG
The first step to setting up MyFBG is obviously going to be finding it. Luckily, given its importance, we've made it really easy to spot. Navigate to any page on the site and look up in the top-right corner at the toolbar. You'll see MyFBG sitting there on the navigation bar. Click through to be taken to your personal MyFBG page. If you're the type who prefers links, you can also get there by going to http://subscribers.footballguys.com/myfbg/my.php.
Once on your MyFBG page, it's time to link up some leagues. Since it's step one, the link to start is helpfully the first one you'll see.
As you start linking up leagues, you'll see the list under "OPTIONAL: pick a default profile" start to populate. This doesn't have a tremendous practical impact, but if you have one league that's your favorite, the one league where if you win there the season is a success even if you come in last in every other league, this is the place to select that league.
When you access any of the specific MyFBG pages, there will be a dropdown menu to select which league you want to see results for. If you haven't made a selection yet, MyFBG will default to showing you information for the league you select here. It's a nice way of maintaining focus.
But for now, let's just click the "Add/Edit/Link League Profiles" link. Here you'll have access to all the leagues you've already linked up, but since this is our first time, let's look for the "Add" button in the top right corner.
Clicking Add will open a prompt to please name the league. The name you use here doesn't matter, so select something that will make it easier to distinguish between leagues later on. You can go ahead and create a profile now for every league you plan on participating in this year, or you can just create one and come back later to do the rest.
The Add button will add a league profile to your list, but you still need to link that profile to an actual league. So click "Link to League (Roster Sync)". This will pull up a list of league hosts that are compatible with MyFBG. At the moment, compatible hosting sites are Yahoo! Fantasy, ESPN Fantasy, NFL Fantasy, CBS Sports, MyFantasyLeague, FFPC, RT Sports, and Fleaflicker.
If you use a league host that's not on that list, unfortunately MyFBG won't be able to automatically track that league for you at this time, but more hosts will be added in the future, so please send support a note expressing your interest!
If you do use one of those hosting services, then select it from the list and enter your login information so that MyFBGs can retreive your league details. Logging in should provide you with a list of all leagues you participate in on that service, so select the one you want to link to this particular league profile. If you're in multiple leagues on a single service, (say if you have a work league and a family league that are both on ESPN Fantasy), you can use multiple league profiles and link them all to different leagues.
Linking a league will allow MyFBG to automatically pull the names of all of the teams in the league, as well as all of the rosters. Unfortunately, at this time it isn't capable of pulling scoring details and lineup settings. Entering your custom scoring and lineup settings will allow MyFBG to tailor all of its fantasy football advice to best fit your particular league. The ability to automatically fill out scoring and lineup settings is planned for a future version, but for now we'll have to enter them manually.
Click the "Settings", "Scoring", and "Lineup" buttons and finish filling out all of the relevant information, then don't forget to select "Teams & Rosters" and indicate which team is yours.
Congratulations, you have now created and linked a league profile and unlocked all of the goodness that MyFBG has in store for you. If you want to, feel free to create more profiles and link more leagues at this time, or you can return later. When you're ready to go, click the "Return to MyFBG" link in the top-right corner.
Before you leave, you might have noticed that after linking up each league a new option was added to the profile saying "Sync Rosters Now". By default, MyFBG will update all of the rosters in your leagues once per day. If something dramatic changes, though—say, someone makes a blockbuster trade— and you want to use MyFBG to see how it affects the balance of power, you can select this to force an immediate roster sync.
You're Set Up. Now What?
Once you're back at your MyFBG page with one or more leagues linked up, you're free to take advantage of all of that personalized goodness. During the preseason, the top of your MyFBG page will be filled with preseason features. Once the season kicks off, this will automatically switch to in-season features so that the most relevant information is always the first thing you see.
And what kind of features are available? Under preseason features, you'll find custom cheatsheets generated for your league's specific scoring system, as well as player projections. You can also look up historical fantasy production, (so if you have a league with a weird scoring system and you want to see, say, how the top 10 tight ends scored in 2012, you can do that).
The real beauty is not just the information, but how it's presented. For instance, in my oldest dynasty league, here's Bob Henry's preseason running back projections. Le'Veon Bell is on my roster, so he's helpfully highlighted in yellow. Our league hasn't held its rookie draft, so players like Leonard Fournette are still free agents and are therefore highlighted in blue as "available".
Perhaps neatest of all, I can click on any team name at the top of the list and that team's players will be highlighted in pink. Here, I've opted to take a closer look at my friend Randall's team. With two strong RB1s on his team already, Randall probably won't be looking to trade up in the rookie draft to grab one of this year's top prospects. That's good to know!
For in-season features, there are custom waiver reports that aren't forced to guess what kinds of players may or may not actually be available. There's the option to see recent news reports pertaining to players on your roster, or to get rest-of-season projections for your league, (along with the same handy highlighting system used by the preseason projections).
But the real crown jewel of MyFBGs is the 10-second primer, a feature so cool we put a giant red box around it to make extra sure you didn't miss it. If you're the bookmarking type, you can also navigate to the 10-second primer at any time at http://subscribers.footballguys.com/myfbg/myjustthefacts.php. (If you're tempted to just set that as your homepage, it's okay, I promise this is a judgment-free zone.)
Now, right now the 10-second primer won't look like much because there aren't any week 1 projections yet to feed into it. But here's an example of what you might have seen in week 1 last season.
The 10-second primer gives you projections for all the players on your roster, tailored to your scoring system, with top free agents listed in blue for comparison, and with relevant news blurbs easily accessible by clicking on any of those small blue "i" symbols.
Moreover, it gives you all of that information for all three sets of weekly projections Footballguys produces, and it repeats that for every single one of your leagues. And this is where MyFBG starts saving you so much time. You can navigate to your 10-second primer early in the week, note the best blue names, and you have your waiver recommendations.
Then you can quickly compare the three sets of projections and set your lineup while you're at it. And in under 15 minutes, using only one page, you've managed to handle all of the mandatory weekly business associated with that league.
And that's the real power of MyFBG. It doesn't just help you build a more awesome football team. It frees you to go out and have a more awesome life while you're at it.
We've worked hard to make setting up a league profile and unlocking the power of MyFBG as quick and painless as possible, but we know that with any technology, sometimes things will go wrong. If you have any issues at all, at the bottom-right corner of every page on Footballguys is a blue circle with a question mark inside.
Clicking that circle will take you to the Footballguys technical support page, complete with frequently asked questions to help you troubleshoot common problems. If you're still having difficulties, in the top-right corner is a link to submit a help request. For any help requests, support will need your Footballguys username; a guide on how to find that is available here.
Otherwise, I hope you enjoy MyFBG as much as I have over the years, and best of luck over the coming season!
