I have played fantasy football since 2002, commissioned leagues for 14 seasons, and built every tool on Cheat Sheet War Room myself. This page is the resume behind the byline. It covers the league I run, the championship I won, the rulings people still argue about, and why a hardware engineer started writing draft software in 2005.
Playing and Commissioning Leagues Since 2002
I started playing fantasy football in 2002 and became a commissioner in 2005, when I took over Pros & Conmen, a 12-team league with standard scoring. I ran it for 14 seasons, most years while managing three leagues at once.
The league is mostly redraft with a few keeper years. Its rules live in a written constitution that covers everything from the $150 buy-in to naming rights over the last-place team. The full document is published as a fantasy football constitution template, payout percentages included.
My one championship came in 2008 with a team called Long Island Ice-B. (One title across two decades is exactly the ratio that keeps a commissioner honest.)
After the Pros & Conmen run ended I kept playing. I commissioned a different league in 2024, and I am commissioning again for the 2026 season.
The Rulings People Still Argue About
A commissioner’s real job is ruling on trades, and I have ruled on about a dozen veto attempts. Eleven were easy. The 2017 one was not, when a 2-5 owner dealt the best receiver in fantasy to the first-place team and I let the trade stand. Half the league still says I blew the call.
The full story, and the two-reason veto standard that decided it, is in the constitution article linked above.
The best strategic play I have seen also came from my own league. One owner spent eleven years passing on his draft slot to take first waiver priority instead, and the math behind why that works is in my article on the best fantasy football league settings.
Building the Draft Tools Since 2005
I built the first version of Cheat Sheet War Room around 2005 to solve two problems at once. I wanted out of a hardware engineering job, and I was spending more time formatting draft spreadsheets than ranking players.
My first project was a PHP and MySQL app for managing a fantasy NASCAR season. That working app earned me an interview for a web engineering job. There I learned ASP.NET by building the cheat sheet ranking tool, and the tool was strong enough to help land the role after that.
So what started as a necessity, preparing for my own fantasy football draft, turned into a full-time position in software development. Twenty years later the custom fantasy football cheat sheet builder is still free and still drag and drop.
Where My Leagues Have Actually Run
My leagues have run on CBS Sports for most of two decades, with some seasons on Yahoo and a little time on Sleeper. That mix shapes what I write.
Platform advice on this site comes from settings I have managed myself, not from a feature chart.
What You Will Find Under My Byline
I write about the parts of fantasy football a commissioner controls. League constitutions, payout structures, draft-order mechanics, scoring settings, veto standards, and the software that makes draft prep faster.
I do not write weekly projections, injury updates, or start-sit advice. When an article touches current product pricing or features, those facts get checked against the live product before publish and attributed to the product, not to my memory.
If you want the short version of twenty years of league management, start with the settings article above. And if your draft is coming up, build a cheat sheet around your league’s exact scoring rules with the free cheat sheet creator. It costs nothing.