I finally got around to updating our Forum theme to match the rest of the website.  This component of Cheat Sheet War Room has always been a 'work in progress', but I hope to utilize the forum more as we near the 2012 fantasy football season.

You can never start too early preparing for fantasy football season, or can you? For those of you out there who just can't wait to get started, Cheat Sheet War Room has configured our custom fantasy football cheat sheets for the 2012 fantasy football season. Player stats from 2011 will be populated in sheets and you can generate new sheets based on any of the available statistics.

We're only getting started for the 2012 fantasy football season. You can expect quite a few new features and user interface updates for the upcoming season. As new features are rolled-out we'll be covering them in detail right here. As usual if you have any requests for new features you can add them to the forum.

This year we placed 14th overall in the annual Expert Fantasy Challenge, a fantasy football cheat sheet creation contest which has been running since 2007.  The basic concept behind the contest is that website owners submit their pre-season player rankings (i.e. cheat sheets) before the season starts, then after the season is complete each website is ranked based on their accuracy. 

There were a total of 41 websites who competed in 2011 up from 31 in 2010.  The 2010 winner, Fantasy Football Trader, didn't fare too well in 2012 dropping all the way to #39.  Real Time Fantasy Sports took the #2 slot last year, and won the overall contest this year, not too shabby. 

I do have one issue with the way Expert Fantasy Challenge calculates scores.  From their challenge description page:

Players will be excluded from the competition for reasons such as an injury that cause substantial time on the sideline or significant role change (e.g. demotion, trade) not known prior to the beginning of the season.

I think part of creating accurate rankings is knowing which players are injury-prone and adjusting their ranking accordingly.  Let's say I think that Felix Jones won't complete a full season so I demote his ranking from #32 overall (projecting his stats over a full season) to #45 overall.   

Now, let's say another website puts Felix Jones at #30 overall, thinking that this is his 'break-out-year'.  We now know that in 2011 Felix Jones only played in 12 games because of injuries and ended up #43 overall in total fantasy points.  So, which website do you think should get the highest score for their ranking of Felix Jones?  Should the website which factored-in his fragility be rewarded or should it be a wash?

I would argue that my projection of #45 was dead-on and should be rewarded, but according to their rules Jones could have been eliminated from the contest altogether because of his injury.  I don't believe that removing Jones from the contest actually accomplishes anything because any dowmtime it would ultimately affect every site the same way. 

The Felix Jones scenario outlined above is just an illustration of the type of thing that could happen under their current scoring rules; I have no idea if Felix Jones was considered in their 2011 scoring or not.  I do think their is room for improvement in their formula, but it is a cool contest nonetheless.