We've opened up registration for NBA & NHL Playoff Fantasy leagues.  Use early bird offer codes EB_NBA_2017 & EB_NHL_2017 for a 15% discount off your league costs.

The 2017 NFL offseason has been quite the roller coaster ride. From teams losing their top talents to free agency to the anticipation of the 2017 NFL Draft, this offseason has been one for the ages. The veteran player has found that locating staying power is something that is difficult to find. Adrian Peterson, Jamaal Charles, Danny Woodhead, and Eddie Lacy will all have new homes come the 2017-18 season, a large shake up at the running back position we haven't seen before.

Another trend we have seen is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Take the New England Patriots for instance. The Patriots brought in Stephon Gilmore, re-signed Dont'a Hightower, and brought in defensive lineman Lawrence Guy. They are bringing new meaning to rubbing in their winning ways. On the opposite side of the spectrum we find the New York Jets. The Jets are clearing house, parting ways with Brandon Marshall, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Geno Smith, and Darrelle Revis. Their record wasn't...

We're running a free contest for the NCAA Tournament.  Win Prizes!

See the details here:

https://www.fantasypostseason.com/league/contest_signup/59750

Our friends over at The Fake Basketball are providing cheat sheets for the upcoming Men's NCAA basketball tournament.  Check them out.

From the Fake Basketball Team:

"Much like last season we are bringing you a wide array of tools and information to help you with any of your NCAA Tournament Fantasy needs. If you are looking for brackets, bracket analysis, individual player rankings, draft strategy, sleepers, locks, injuries, play-in round analysis, you name it, we have it in our comprehensive 2017 Tourney Package."

Registration for NCAA tournament fantasy leagues is now open.  Create your league now and enjoy the madness!

We've added Return TDs as a new scoring setting for fantasy football.  This value defaults to zero.  

If your league expects to reward individual players for punt return and kick return TDs, please modify this setting accordingly.  Note that DEF/ST will still earn points as special team TDs for those plays.

Join the Fantasy Alarm Challenge for the NFL Fantasy Football Playoffs. Win prizes. Free to join!

Click here for details.

The first round games are set..

NFC

#6 DET at #3 SEA

#5 NYG at #4 GB

(#1 DAL, #2 ATL BYE)

AFC

#6 MIA at #3 PIT

#5 OAK at #4 HOU

(#1 NE, #2 KC BYE)

Week 17 is here and by the night's end the NFL playoff seedings will be set. Our player pool will be updated shortly thereafter.

Courtesy of NFL communications, here are the various playoff scenarios.  

2016 NFL PLAYOFF SCENARIOS FOR WEEK 17

AFC  

CLINCHED: New England – AFC East division title and first-round bye     

                        Pittsburgh – AFC North division title

                        Houston – AFC South division title

                        Oakland – playoff berth

...

Over the last year we invested in the re-design of the UI (user interface) of our website. We've leveraged several Javascript libraries (such as Twitter Bootstrap) and HTML5 to build a responsive website that works on any new browser (including those available on mobile devices). All of the functionality previously available in the app is now available via your device's browser (Chrome, Safari, etc). In fact, with this new approach, as we add new features to FantasyPostseason.com, the features are immediately available to all devices.

At present, we have no plans to further support any platform specific (e.g. iOS or Android) apps.

Here are some links that you might find useful:

5 Awesome Web Browsers for Android

How to Use the Safari Web Browser on iPhone

Our first set of projections have now been computed.  Here are the top 10 ranked players for this upcoming NFL postseason using standard scoring.  No surprise that Brady leads the pack.

At Fantasy Postseason, we offer a number of different options for those who want to keep playing fantasy football during the NFL playoffs. There are three basic configurations that most commissioners use.  

The most common and also most basic is the Player Pool - the further your players advance, the more points your fantasy playoff team scores. This is a simple game format and is especially good for a large number of participants.  

The second format that is growing in popularity is the Start Once format. Managers can start anyone they want each weekend of the playoffs, however they can only start that given player once throughout the postseason. There's a lot of strategy with this approach and usually keeps managers highly engaged throughout the entire postseason.  

Finally, you'll see a number of Salary Cap format leagues where managers build their teams with player salary considerations. There's strategy and deliberation with this...

Entering Week 14 of the NFL season, nearly every fantasy league, regardless of how screwy its settings are, is either in the playoffs already or getting there next week. Not all owners will make it to hallowed postseason play. Those in contention will have some big decisions to make this weekend...not the least of which resides in New England.

Gronk Alternative

Owners of Rob Gronkowski may not have made the fantasy playoffs. It would be understandable if they came up short. Gronkowski, the clear-cut top TE preseason, ranks just 10th at the position through 13 weeks. Using a first-round pick on a tight end that misses half the year and then gets put on injured reserve is a hard obstacle to overcome. If someone did make it through the regular season, though, they will need a starting tight end for Week 14. 

Looking outside the top 12 at the position to someone who may have found his way to waivers, Cody Fleener is an interesting option. Fleener had a lot of...

We've opened up registration for our 2016-2017 playoff fantasy football leagues.

A number of new features have been added since last year including the following:

• New Responsive User Interface Design - Our new UI is cleaner, more usable, and device independent.
• Limiting the # of Players from Each Team -  Commissioners can now limit the number of players from each playoff team. This prevents managers from "loading up" or going all in on one or two particular teams.
• Requiring 1 for 1 Free Agency Transactions - This configuration option requires that free agent player swaps are one for one. This is particularly useful if you are in a Salary Cap league and you want to prevent players from dropping 2 less expensive players to pick up 1 more expensive player.
• Allowance for Late Joins - Commissioners can now allow managers to join after a league has been activated.
• Creating Proxy Teams - Commissioners can create teams on behalf of other owners....

The regular season fantasy football playoffs are right around the corner. Thanksgiving week is always a turning point in the NFL as well as fantasy. It's a time where owners comfortable with their place in the standings can begin to make moves looking ahead. It is a time where those on the bubble break out all the stops to just get into the playoffs. Just like real life football, all it takes to win a title is getting in and getting hot.

The Returnees

Every year, there are random dudes who swing fantasy postseasons. Often, these are guys no one had ever heard of weeks before who suddenly fell into playing time through injury or what have you. In 2016, the story is vastly different. Instead of no-names getting huge opportunities, we will have the biggest of big-name stars returning right before or during the fantasy playoffs.

It's possible some devoted owners held onto these guys throughout the weeks, but most likely, these stars are or were recently on the waiver wire. The...

Relievers are often the Rodney Dangerfields of fantasy baseball, they get no respect. However if you look at the top scorers in last year's MLB fantasy postseason, you'll find a number of relievers in the top 25 overall scorers. Wade Davis (KC) was the leading reliever, checking in at #12 overall with 59.27 pts.  Notably, he outscored the likes of Josh Donaldson (#13), Jake Arrieta (#14), Alex Gordon (#15), and Kendrys Morales (#16). Further down the list you'll find the Royals setup man Kelvin Herrera at #19 with 51.12 pts. Jeurys Familia, the Mets closer, ended up at #22 with 46.22 pts.

So as we turn our attention the the 2016 MLB postseason, we should take a look at which postseason bound closers and setup men are finishing the regular season on a high note.

September Save Leaders (thru Sept 25)

Yesterday we took a look at hitters who have had hot bats in the month of September.  Let's now turn our attention to starting pitchers to focus on for your upcoming posteason fantasy baseball drafts.

September 2016 Stats (thru 9/24)

A key step in preparing for your fantasy baseball playoff draft is reviewing the list of players on playoff contenders that are entering the postseason with a hot bat.  These are the players that you need to keep an eye on..

September 2016 Stats (thru 9/23)

The first major league baseball team to win back-to-back World Series was the Chicago Cubs (1907-08). But then the droughts came and they haven't won since. On the other side of the playoff bracket, you'll find the Cleveland Indians. The Indians last won a championship in 1948, though, they have knocked on the door several times since then. They represented the American league in the World Series in 1997, 1995, and further back in 1954, losing each time. 

So what are the chances that these two longsuffering teams could end up facing each other in this year's MLB postseason?  The Cubs have clearly been the strongest team in baseball during the regular season and are odds on favorites (21/10, +240) to win a World Series ring in October. Cleveland is a solid team, but they have more modest odds (9/1, +950).  

The Cubs have the most talent in baseball and they have a strong pitching staff too, which certainly matters in the postseason....

The MLB playoffs are a few weeks away and soon you'll be planning for your postseason baseball draft. Let's review the results from last year's fantasy postseason (using standard Fantasy Postseason scoring) to see what lessons we can learn. Daniel Murphy was the top scorer, and this is no surprise given his incredible performance. He's a prime time performer and someone who can be expected to do well when the lights are the brightest. The rest of the top ten is mostly composed of players on teams that made the World Series, with the lone exception being Jose Bautista whose Jays lost in the ALCS. No doubt, the key to doing well in a player pool is picking players that are going to both do well and also advance to the World Series round. One other thing to note is that 8 out of the 10 players are position players, not pitchers. Pitchers can be risky, since their scoring is heavily dependent on them getting credited for wins and/or saves.

A few other interesting...

We have opened fantasy league registration for the MLB playoffs!  Get your postseason leagues started today and invite your friends to join.  Drafts will begin on September 30th.

In addition to updating our user interface to be compatible with all devices, we have added a number of new features this summer.  Here's the run down.

• Limiting the # of Players from Each Team -  Commissioners can now limit the number of players from each playoff team. This prevents managers from "loading up" or going all in on one or two particular teams.
• Requiring 1 for 1 Free Agency Transactions - This configuration option requires that free agent player swaps are one for one. This is particularly useful if you are in a Salary Cap league and you want to prevent players from dropping 2 less expensive players to pick up 1 more expensive player.
• Longer Preservation of Previous Year's Leagues - We will now keep league history around for 2 years. You can study the prior year's rosters and player performance to gain a leg up on your competition.
• Improved Usability for Pick One Daily Leagues - We have a special...

The most common draft order format in fantasy leagues is the Snake (or Serpentine) draft order.   The draft 'snakes' through the number of managers. The order for a twelve manager league would be 1-12 in the first round, then 12-1 in the second round, then 1-12 in the third round and so on. In a regular season draft, this approach is reasonable, but one may want to consider other approaches for the postseason. The reason for reconsidering your draft order configuration is that the scoring is highly leveraged towards the players that go multiple rounds. Players on teams that make the NBA and NHL championship games can often play 3x or 4x the number of games as other players. For some sports like the NBA playoffs, this is exacerbated by the fact that superstars dominate the scoring in the postseason. In one particular league I was in last year, Lebron James and Steph Curry (the overall #1 and #2 total fantasy points scorers) scored almost twice as many points as the 6th...

After a few requests to accommodate a format similar to the popular 'Drive to the Finals' NBA Playoffs fantasy game, we've added a new league format named 'Pick One Daily' (currently for NBA, NHL, and MLB leagues only).  Main concepts:

• There is no draft.
• Scoring options are configurable (i.e. points, rebounds, assists).
• Commissioners should activate the league only after all managers have joined. 
• Teams consist of only one player.  Note: Bench slots can be added to allow for lineup setting for days in advance.
• Once the league is activated, managers need to add one player to their team on each game day via free agency.
• Players can only be used once.  Once used, that player must be replaced with another one to generate additional scoring.

We've been running playoff drafts for the NHL postseason for a number of years. There's one constant piece of advice that we can offer and that is to draft a goalie (or team goalie) from a team that has a potential to make a deep run towards the Stanley Cup.  Unlike the plethora of forwards and defensemen, goalies are a limited resource.  There are 16 teams in the NHL playoffs and usually one primary goalie per team. After the first round, the number of goalies is cut in half, and so on, and so on until you reach the two remaining during the Stanley Cup finals round.

Consider the results of a playoff fantasy league with the following scoring settings for Goalies.

This particular league used "Team Goalies" and to no surprise the top two scorers were the goalies from the Chicago Blackhawks (66.00) and the...

The team at Fantasy Postseason has added a new method of creating pre-draft player rankings via the Playoff Projections Tool. Through this tool, you can enter the # of games that you expect a given team to play, and the tool will do the rest. It will generate new projections based upon your input, and give you the option of saving these new rankings.  You can then make further specific adjustments via the Pre-Draft Rankings page.

Although we have tried to make league setup as simple as possible, there are still some common pitfalls that hang up league commissioners as they set up their postseason fantasy leagues. Here are the most common mistakes that we see.

1. Failure to activate Off-line leagues. Commissioners must 'activate' leagues that are using offline drafts (manually loading all the players) before scoring can start to accumulate. Leagues do not 'auto-activate' for offline draft leagues because many commissioners are often still filling out rosters a day or two after the playoffs start. League activation occurs under the league Admin menu, and should occur after rosters have been loaded. Note that this does not apply to Live draft - as they auto-activate and will automatically start to score after the draft completes.


2. Setting Per-Round Multipliers to Zero. A Per-Round multiplier is a feature that is specific to postseason fantasy pools, and consequently sometimes commissioners do...

As you plan for your Fantasy Postseason NFL draft, you should consider the historical advantages for teams that play at home during the playoffs.

Here are the relevant numbers to ponder based on games played over the last 10 years:

Regular Season Home Winning %: 57
Wild card Round Home Winning %: 57
Divisional Round Home Winning %: 60
Conference Championship Round Home Winning %: 70

As you can see, there's nothing special about the first or second round in terms of being different from the regular season. The big difference comes into play during the Conference Championship round where the home team wins 7 out of 10 contests.

Success in postseason fantasy comes with choosing high performing players on teams that advance deep into the playoffs. A key component in determining which teams are going to advance is home field advantage, or is it?  The statistics say that postseason home field advantage varies tremendously from sport to sport.  Per Bleacher Report, NBA playoff home teams win roughly 70% of their series, NFL and NHL playoff teams win about 60% of their series/games, and MLB playoff teams win just 50% of their series.

Keep this in mind as you figure out which players to draft in your upcoming MLB postseason fantasy draft.

References:

Home Field in the World Series Ain't So Great (Fox)

Winning Series home-field advantage is important (MLB)

Is Home-Field Advantage as Important in Baseball as Other Major League Sports? (B/R)

Thanks to Phil Thompson at the Chicago Tribune for showcasing us this morning in two separate articles regarding our NCAA tournament fantasy offering:

A New Game in Town: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/ct-fantasy-ncaa-tournament-03-15-20150314-story.html

Beyond the Brackets: http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/ct-beyond-brackets-ncaa-spt-0315-20150314-story.html