Yahoo.com
Yahoo has a large fantasy football league community. They offer basically two options – a free option and a paid option. For no charge, you can set up a league and get a robust set of controls which allow you to customize the scoring to your needs. The paid version, provides extra features like a stat tracking feature, scouting reports and preseason draft kits.

ESPN.com
With ESPN’s sporting news popularity, it is no wonder why this site is so popular. Like Yahoo, you can get a tremendous amount of features for free. You can join a league or start one with some friends. The user interface is very intuitive and has live scoring. One cool thing that ESPN also does is allow you to join public leagues with some excellent prizes.

NFL.com
NFL.com provides a standard set of features for free leagues. One caveat to their set up is that they play the role of commissioner and thus limit leagues to what they can do somewhat. However, since it is tied to the NFL, you get some nice perks if you join one of their public leagues like prizes to NFL events like the Super Bowl and the actual NFL draft. Like the others, there is a paid option where you can get more control over your league.

CBSSports.com
As far as features go, CBS probably takes the cake. Everything is integrated from player news to weather reports to help you set your lineup. However, for the nearly unlimited flexibility, you can expect to pay the most compared to the other options above. For a league fee, you can set up customizable leagues with different scoring systems, tweak your roster limits and track finances if you want to. Like ESPN, CBS provides great prizes in their public money leagues.

Whether you’re looking to join a free league with prizes, start a free league or start a paid league where you get to control more aspects of the league, there are plenty of options for your online fantasy football league. Once you play fantasy football, you’ll never look at the game the same way!

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1. Consider Joining A Fantasy Football Keeper League

Thanks to the internet, fantasy sports continue to grow in popularity bringing in more and more players each year.  In the old days, league commissioners would pull out the box scores in Monday’s paper in order to calculate the scoring for the teams in the league.  How laborious that would be! Today, through technology and automation, there are many sites that specialize in fantasy league management. In addition, roster or team management is much easier for the team owner with up to date injury reports and even weather reports to help you set your lineup.  All this helps in managing a team from year to year.

What are fantasy football keeper leagues anyway?

In order to understand what a keeper league is, a definition of a couple of other types is in order.  First, there is the traditional year to year draft league.  A year to year draft league starts from scratch each year and teams are typically built in a serpentine type draft order where the draft order is first determined and the sequence for round 1 goes from 1 to 10 (assuming 10 players in the league) and then back down from 10 to 1 for round 2.

Conversely, a dynasty league, allows for each owner to keep the entire roster from year to year and only add the new rookies coming into the NFL during the fantasy draft.  Obviously, this type of league requires a strong commitment from each of the owners from year to year.

Keeper leagues are a combination between a standard year to year draft league and a dynasty league.  Before each football season, you will have your fantasy draft similar to the standard draft.  However, owners are allowed to keep a predetermined number of players on their roster from the year before.  Keep in mind that your draft strategy will vary based on who is kept from the previous year.

Keeper fantasy football leagues can be a lot of fun.  As an owner, you could potentially keep a player that you really like and if lucky enough, hold on to a perennial star player from year to year.  The two things that you will need in order to join a keeper type league are a good fantasy football site to help with team management as well as a good group of players who are dedicated to the fantasy football keeper league.

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1. The Top Sites For Your Online Fantasy Football League

While each site has its own little quirks, they all offer pretty much the same things, especially with football. However, when you are playing in a low budget league or a free one, why would you pay for the software?

ESPN offers very good free fantasy sports software. A lot of the sites will not allow you to see real time updates as the games are being played. While it was the case with ESPN a couple of years ago, they received too many complaints and have thrown that into the free package now. They also offer upgraded service, but the free one really is one of the few sites that give you just about everything that you need to enjoy your league.

Yahoo is another site that is very popular amongst the fantasy leaguers. Their software gives you a few more options regarding what you can do with the scoring, but is almost too many options. Baseball is a great example of this as just about every statistic in the world can be used for your league. You can even count holds for relief pitchers if you want. Who counts holds? When you think of the amount of players that you will have to draft, it gets a little ridiculous.

Another factor when you are considering your free fantasy sports software is whether or not you are going to have a daily or weekly scoring system. While this is not an issue in football, it is for every other major sport. This is an important factor because it will affect the players that you start, especially your pitching staff in baseball.

Whether you choose rotisserie style or head to head, weekly or daily scoring, there is an ample amount of free fantasy sports software programs out there for you to choose from. In all honesty, the best way to figure out which one you like is to play them all for one season and see which one fits the league style that you want to run. Remember, they don’t cost anything so there is no harm in being a total fantasy sports junkie for one season. Just be careful not to get hooked and join that many leagues that you have to pay for!

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1. Choosing The Right Fantasy Sports Software

While the free sites will allow you to change some of the settings, it is unlikely that you can have it do everything that you would like it to. There are just too many variables that the program would have to deal with in all of the free leagues that the sites cannot let you do anything that you want. You may be able to have some standard setting changed, but if you have certain performance scoring methods and involve both offensive and defensive players in football, you are going to have a problem with free software.

If that describes your league, you may want to start to check out some of the pay fantasy sports software programs that are out on the market. When you look at the overall cost, it is pretty insignificant to have a league that is set up exactly the way you want it to be.

For instance, most free software programs allow you to play a defensive team, but very few of them will allow you to use defensive players in the game. This can be frustrating if you are trying to make the game as realistic as possible. Furthermore, you can add bonus points on defense for various different things when you pay for the software. It adds a whole new dimension to the game.

If you have a big money league and really want to set the game up, you are going to want to seriously look into pay programming for fantasy sports software. Ultimately, the decision is yours to make, but when everyone is already putting up a couple of hundred dollars to get into a league, adding another $35 a man or so is no big deal when you look at the uniqueness that you can add to your fantasy league.

Just remember, you get what you pay for in this world and if you want the league to really be yours, you may consider paying for your fantasy sports software. You will have a league that will truly be your own and that will have everyone else begging to be a part of. You know what that means? Higher prize fund for everyone to enjoy!

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1. Using Free Fantasy Sports Software To Run Your League