Improving Settings Options For Fantasy Football

Introduction

While Fantasy Sports may have begun on the baseball diamond, the surge of sport gamification took place when it hit the gridiron. The increased audience, variety of positions, and schedule made the NFL ideal for fantasy sports. However, with that popularity has come a lack of variety in what fantasy football formats are played. This causes a “one size fits all” approach often in the fantasy football industry, which leads to users using formats that either are not catered to by the site they are using or sub optimal for their participation in the league.

What Settings Do People Want?

To determine the issues there are with the current slate of settings, a survey was conducted with five hundred respondents located through online resources. This survey looked at what settings people wanted to add to their leagues and how the implementation of that can be accelerated. The demographics of the survey consisted of 55.1% of respondents being between 19–29 years old, 20.4% in between 30–39, and 12.2% being between 40–49 with the rest of responses being outside of 19–49. The respondents were also asked how many leagues they planned to play in. Roughly half, 46.9%, were in two to three leagues. A quarter were in 4–6 leagues, 8.3% were in more than six, and 18.4% were in one league or less.

Respondents were asked which settings they would want to add to their fantasy football leagues. The most popular setting to add to conventional leagues was Point For First Down, with 37% of respondents marking that as an option. The second most requested feature was Superflex or having the capability to start two quarterbacks, with 30.4% of respondents marking it. The next most popular results were Individual Defensive Players at 26.1% and Yardage Heavy Scoring at 17.1%.

One common thread with the features that participants wanted added in was a desire for less randomness. The features that reduced randomness (Point For First Down, Superflex, Yardage Heavy) were more popular, while options such as rewarding touchdowns based on distance or TE premium were not. This shows that more meritocratic scoring was most popular amongst the respondents.

While these may have been the most popular to add, each of these settings was significantly below their percentages when asked what settings respondents actually use. Superflex was the most popular to be used at 31.9%, followed by Point Per First Down at 27.7%, Individual Defensive Player at 23.4%, and Yardage Heavy at 14.9%. This shows that while many may prefer to add these settings in their leagues, actually having them in the league is a different issue.

Why are settings below desired amounts?

To gauge why it may be difficult to add settings to their league, respondents were asked what the reason is for being unable to add new settings. The most common answer was that managers were uncomfortable moving to a new system, with 55.3% of respondents marking it. The next most frequent answer was providers do not actively accommodate new settings, either by lack of availability or by not making them easy to use at 36.2%. Behind that was managers being unwilling to change due to traditionalism, also at 36.2% Not being able to find setting you wanted to implement was in fourth at 14.9%.

Based on these responses, it appears that a significant reason for users not being in their desired settings for the leagues they are in is issues with onboarding the settings either by the provider not offering them or users feeling trepidatious. This could be corrected by a more active approach to assisting the adaptation of new settings by providers.

Conclusion

There does seem to be an issue with adapting new settings for leagues. There are a couple proposals available that would assist in adding new settings. One item would be adjusting the projections and predraft rankings based on the setting so the league. While the majority of sites do cater projections to settings, predraft rankings are typically standard across majority of settings. If they were adapted to each league, it would allow for easier onboarding of new features.

Another option to improve accessibility of new settings would be to allow for a survey that guides users to settings that fit them. Technology has continually evolved from “one size fits all” to fitting a product to its users. Inputting a tutorial survey that functions similar to the guides when starting an iPhone initially, asking users what they want out of the device and catering features to it would be a way to easily present new settings to users. This would give an experience customized to the users’ interests utilizing expert input.

Finding new ways to cater to users is paramount when working in tech product. This study shows where current fantasy football providers are lacking and can evolve to grow in the market.