MVP

MVP has been chugging along for months for fantasy baseball, and my teams are performing better than ever. MVP can now control all of your football leagues, too, and I’m expecting the same level of greatness.

Just as an update, MVP Baseball has transformed me as a fantasy manager. I’ve always been pretty good—you don’t start writing about fantasy online if you’re not at least okay. However, I don’t actually track sports so religiously to always know who is doing well in-season.

I currently sit in 1st in my AL-only league, 2nd in my NL-only league, 1st in a H2H categories league, and 1st in two more points leagues. My Yahoo ELO is 989 (Diamond).

That’s not to brag but to say: Good in-season valuations like MVP’s are a game-changer for turning good managers into great ones. I’m confident that MVP Football is going to have the same impact on teams.

Just as a reminder of what MVP can do:

MVP is a single app replacement for all of the other apps. It lets you set lineups for all of your fantasy leagues across Yahoo, ESPN, Fantrax, CBS, and Sleeper.
MVP makes in-season decisions easy. You get the best possible projections, updated throughout the season. Those projections are converted into values and rankings that accurately compare across positions.

Onward with the updates!

Sleeper support

My research suggests that fantasy football is a pretty even split between the big 3 players: Yahoo, ESPN, and Sleeper. I already had ESPN and Yahoo (and CBS and Fantrax) from baseball, but now MVP also lets you update your Sleeper teams.

Football-focused UI

One thing I’ve noticed about league platforms is that they tend to adopt a single UI, and they squeeze every sport to fit that. I’ve tried to think through what things are specifically needed for football, rather than wedge it into a baseball-shaped hole.

The obvious difference is the week-long cadence vs daily for baseball.

Another one: For football, it’s really handy to have projected/actual point totals side-by-side. So, on the score for each matchup, I’ve added the projected point totals in addition to the actual totals. (Much less useful on baseball, where you need to account for streaming or rotating starters to get a realistic projected total.)

Likewise, when you are looking at players’ weekly actual stats, MVP shows both the actual points they scored and the pre-game projected total. (For consistency, both columns also show up if you are looking at projected stat lines.)

Weekly projection aggregate

For baseball, I build my own daily projections starting with Steamer and layering on adjustments for ballpark and opponent quality. For football, I’m doing a wisdom of the crowds approach: Each week’s numbers are an average of Sleeper, ESPN, CBS, FFToday, Footballguys, and FantasyPros. Everything is customized to your league’s scoring, as usual.

You can also see the individual projections if you click on a player.

Stat updates every 10 minutes

With baseball, I update stats on a fairly conservative schedule (every hour). For football, I’ve bumped that up to every 10 minutes when games are happening.

Massive speed improvements

I’m quite proud that I build my tools to have essentially no operating cost (no paid hosting, no paid database, etc.)

But that free-stack philosophy was creating a major bottleneck for football, where I was trying to aggregate 18 weeks of projections from 6 sources with every page load, resulting in load times over 1 minute per page.

Over a minute for a page is simply unacceptable, and it necessitated that I find a new path. I explored some options, selected one (which—surprise, surprise—still happened to be free), and cut load times tremendously.

I also switched baseball over to the same technique, so you should notice big improvements there, as well.

Things still aren’t as fast as I’d wish… Most of what’s left is hard to get around and comes from having to connect to league sites. But I’m quite happy with how it’s running now.

One unified app

I debated whether MVP ought to be released as separate tools for each sport, since the layouts are a bit different and the sources are very different.

I decided that one app is easier. Throughout September, I’m still checking and updating my baseball teams, and I’ll be doing the same for football.

If you’ve already been using the MVP extension for baseball, you should be able to sync football leagues just like you did for baseball. (Go to the league site and look for an MVP button in the bottom left.)