The New SportsHub FAAB Software For NFBC 2018

[Greg Ambrosius]

Okay, we promised a better FAAB setup under SportsHub Technologies in 2018 than we've ever had before and we plan on delivering that. While we have a lot of items we hope to improve in 2018, nothing is more important than saving you time on Sundays doing FAAB. It's the one area that has limited our growth from year to year.

I've heard from enough owners that they've either cut back on the number of teams they've taken in past years or from owners who have quit altogether with the NFBC because FAAB took up too much of their time on Sundays. And while we can't eliminate that completely, we will do everything we can to make that FAAB process less time consuming. One way is to give you the ability to Search for free agents across all of your teams with the click of one button. After that setting up FAAB bid threads needs to be easier.

Tom and I went to St. Louis last week to meet with our programmers and to discuss all aspects of the new software. FAAB was a top priority and they had our requests well in advance and even had much of this done. It's going to be much better everyone, I promise. And our FAAB setup under STATS was good, but we're going to make it even better.

Let's tackle the issues one by one and if I missed anything please chime in. Here we go:

1. Conditional Bids will be exactly the same as we had it with STATS, which I think was set up as the best in the industry. Once you make a bid for a player, you can then click on Conditional Bids and hit 10 players in 10 seconds to load at $1 each. You still have to change the bid amounts, but all of this will be the same. However, one nice addition is that we'll have a drag 'n drop process to move players up and down more easily on your bid threads. I think STATS had this but it didn't seem to work very well. This will work easily and quickly.

We will default the Player List to Percent Owned and this part will be much improved. We will have % Owned and % Active based on the size of the contests. So Cutline percentages will be just for 10-team contests; Online Championship % Owned and Active will be just for 12-team contests; and Main Event will be just for 15-team, 30-round contests. STATS had one % Owned and % Active FAAB list and it even included Draft Champions leagues, which really threw off the % Owned totals. These will be separate for each format and DCs won't be included. The rest of that page will have all of the same features, including the drop-down box that takes you to your other teams, right to the FAAB list.

2. We have developed a system that will allow you to click on any Free Agent name and find out if he is available in any of your leagues. This is going to be as easy as this: Click on Lewis Brinson in your FAAB list of players and his player box will pop out showing you the list of 30 teams you have and a note that Yes or No he's available in your leagues. I'm not positive yet if that action will allow you to bid on him from that player page in each league, but I will find out. I do know, though, that this one click will show you which leagues he's available in and you won't have to go to every league to find that out. In fact, do this for as many free agents as you want from this one page and keep a tally of which leagues they are available in before finally setting up all of these bid threads.

Believe it or not, STATS had this in baseball but it's not there for football. If you clicked on the magnifying glass to the left of the player's name in the FAAB Player Listing for the NFBC, it would show you which leagues he was available in. I'm not sure when that was added or why it was added to baseball and not football, but check it out now on any of your 2017 NFBC team pages. This is a similar concept to what we will be doing, but by just clicking on the player's name.

3. Similarly, this same concept will work if looking for a player on any of your rosters. Again, let's say you have Madison Bumgarner on your Main Event team and today he falls off his dirt bike and breaks his collarbone -- not that anything like that would ever happen!! You now want to see which leagues you have him in since you have 30 of them and you click on his name from that roster. His player box pops out and shows you the teams you have him on. Again, I'm not sure what action can happen after that because we're not done with this, but that's the concept.

4. As for the FAAB process, we will continue to run FAAB by the highest dollar amount on any bid, no matter what the preference order. It will run the same as before, but just wanted to point that out.

5. Cutline FAAB Deadline: We are going to keep 2 FAAB periods for the NFBC Cutline Championship and they will be the second Tuesday of April and early June again. Both Cutline FAAB deadlines will be on a Tuesday rather than a Monday this year. Owners shouldn't have any decisions to make on a Tuesday and yet we can still include those stats for that week. Nobody is picking up a player just because they know the results of the Monday and Tuesday games since these players stay on your roster for 8 weeks or more. So let's have a Tuesday 10 pm ET deadline for the two Cutline FAAB periods with no roster expansion. We'll draft 42 rounds and the roster size will stay at 42 players. If you don't like FAAB and don't want to spend the time to improve your roster, you don't have to do FAAB. But hopefully with no roster expansion and a quicker FAAB setup, you can improve your rosters on a day of the week where you are just watching baseball games. It will still take some time, but only twice during the entire season. We hope this change helps.

I think that covers FAAB. Again, we already have a good start on all of this and when it is done and styled to the new NFBC pages maybe we can create some type of tutorial or video of the new features. We know this is important to you as you plan your season ahead, so anything we can show you in advance to prove our point is helpful. We will look into that before the season starts, but unfortunately it won't be right away.

I hope this helps. Again, if I missed anything or if you see anything that could save you time even more let us know. We are trying to make baseball more enjoyable and less time consuming. Thanks all and good luck this season.

[KJ Duke]

One of the persistent FAAB problems is that as bidding strings get long and/or numerous, the page slows down and column width jumps around often times covering up the grab button to move players up and down. Hope that gets fixed, it is easily the worst FAAB problem since as it slows down the process a lot. This is in chrome, I don't know if others browsers have the same issue (but chrome is nearly 5x larger than any other browser's mkt shr now).

[Greg Ambrosius]

One of the persistent FAAB problems is that as bidding strings get long and/or numerous, the page slows down and column width jumps around often times covering up the grab button to move players up and down. Hope that gets fixed, it is easily the worst FAAB problem since as it slows down the process a lot. This is in chrome, I don't know if others browsers have the same issue (but chrome is nearly 5x larger than any other browser's mkt shr now).

I will send to IT and make sure this doesn't happen. Thanks.

I think I know why it slowed on the STATS site and don't think that will be a problem, but again thanks for the heads up. We will test that in advance.