If you’re like the millions of other rabid fantasy football fans, the strategizing began the moment last season’s championship game ended. In the meantime, you’ve kept tabs on the incoming rookies and where they might fall, while continuing to deliberate which key players you intend to keep for the next year and pondering what players you should drop to your current draft spot. Hell, you’ve probably even made a series of graphs comparing the top position players’ bye weeks to your team’s biggest needs. At least, we hope you have.
However, if you still need to brush up on your NFL knowledge, rest assured that you’re not alone. With plenty of expert fantasy info available at your fingertips, anybody can hoist their league’s trophy by season’s end using one of the many stellar apps available for iOS, Android, and Windows platforms. Below are our top picks for the best fantasy football apps, so you’ll be able to know the difference between Bishop Sankey and Latavius Murray, right down to the very street they grew up on.
If you’re looking for the best websites to help you through this football season here are the top 6 fantasy football websites compared and our guide on how you can stream live NFL games online.
Footballguys Draft Dominator ($5)
A serious app for the serious football fan, Draft Dominator combines more information than you’ll know what to do with. You can quickly access game scores, player updates, commentary, depth charts, newsletters, cheatsheets, rankings, projections, podcasts, forums, and more within the app, and you can even filter the information to exactly what you want to read or hear. Fantasyguys.com’s all-encompassing football app offers several unique features, too, like dynamic draft lists that update during the draft and the ability to weight the season by week, so you can place extra importance on bye weeks or particular matchups. The Draft Dominator app doesn’t host fantasy leagues, though; it’s simply a mock drafting resource to help you plan for the real (fantasy) thing.
Yahoo Fantasy Sports ($5)
Yahoo continues to lead the pack for fantasy sports services, hosting more users and leagues than any of its competitors. Though Yahoo’s official app primarily serves as a league application, you do have access to various stat updates, expert analysis, and mock drafts. The app also covers three other sports — hockey, baseball, and basketball — and allows you to switch between your leagues, view breaking news and community forums, and check messages to scope out the potential competition. As expected, you can also manage your roster, pick up wavers, and make trades.
numberFire Fantasy Football Draft Kit ($5)
Create custom made rankings and auction values for your fantasy draft with numberFire’s cheat sheets. The app has numberFire’s in-house ranking mechanism called FireFactor. FireFactor takes into consideration a player’s projected fantasy points compared to the value of a replacement player for that position. You have complete control when creating and managing your team lists and it has integrated player profiles. It also gives you real-time news and updates on the players and all fantasy articles.
RotoWire Draft Kit ($5)
If you’re an iOS user, the RotoWire Draft Kit app has all the tools to help make you a champion in your fantasy league. The app includes a dynamic cheat sheet that automatically adjusts to your league’s settings, individual player assessments and predictions for the upcoming season, depth charts…. you name it, it’s here. Want to mark certain players as sleepers? Done. Looking for individual defensive player rankings? You got it. The Draft Kit has nearly all the bells and whistles that Draft Dominator brings to the table, but it’s been spit-shined and placed in a gorgeous, easy-to-use package. Don’t sleep on Mr. Roto.
ESPN Fantasy Sports (free)
Even though ESPN’s fantasy football system (and its app) has been criticized and maligned, it still ranks just behind Yahoo in terms of overall popularity. Despite the relative lack of tools and resources available, ESPN will never be accused of making an app that doesn’t look good. The clean UI makes for a fairly enjoyable experience, and it’s actually a great app if you pair it with something like Draft Dominator or RotoWire Draft Kit. There’s not enough here to get your wallet out, but the app is free, so don’t worry. Plus, it doubles for a drafting/fantasy league app for baseball, basketball, and hockey.
Did you know that football players could sell their health data? Picking players for your fantasy football league could get a lot more interesting thanks to the Whoop 2.0 wearable wristband.
Update: We took another look at this list and added numberFire’s Fantasy Football Draft Kit.
