If you love Fantasy Football, be very glad you're a member of Stampede Blue, where we love us some fantasy football more than any other site on SB Nation. We ran 13 different leagues in 2011, and ran 12 of them each of the past two years, including a league just for league winners from the previous year (which is a blast and extremely competitive, obviously). Last year I decided to make that league an Auction draft, which added to the strategy of the league and really saw the cream rise to the top. Winning the league was fisherdr, while I finished a respectable 3rd place.
He's defending his title this year against league winners from last year, who already got their invite for the league (if you won your league and don't have an invite, please shoot me an email). This was the first time in the three years doing this that I didn't win a league. I was pretty bad across the board last year, other than in that Champion's League. Because I have to be commissioner I get to play with those guys, but I'm feeling the pressure to win a league this year.
Some features of our Stampede Blue leagues:
- Unified scoring across all leagues, allowing us to compare across leagues for the overall best teams. I promise to give out a prize this year for the overall best team after Week 16. I failed to do so last year and want to make it right this year.
- Everyone who says they want in, as long as it is before the deadline, will get in a league. Some other SB Nation sites limit it to just a league or two, but as I said earlier we like including everyone. The more leagues the better.
- Multiple draft times and dates, chosen by you, so that we have full drafts. It makes the leagues much better if everyone is at the draft and not allowing the auto-drafter to go for them. I have them set up for all of the leagues from a year ago, and have a draft time on each day of the week, and different times for different time zones.
- To go along with that, since we have quite a few international fans that want to play, so they'll get preference to the late-night and weekend leagues. Yahoo finally started allowing drafts all 24 hours of the day (you mean people live outside the Eastern Time Zone and are up after midnight ET?), so we have one late Friday / early Saturday for our European/Aussie/Night Owls. You'll get more details later, but I've got you covered once again this year.
We've had a surprisingly great participation throughout the season, even when teams are bad, which makes the leagues that much better. That said, I'll be on the lookout for teams that haven't done much for several weeks to at least take out Bye week players, but everyone was really good about playing out the season, which again makes it more fun. If you sign up, please play out the season, even if your team is riddled with injuries.
Here's the how the process is going to work:
- The easiest way is for you to just leave a comment here in this story. Then just check the email address registered with SB Nation sometime Monday morning, and you'll have an email from me with a list of dates and times of drafts. Then you'll email me back a date and time you'd like to draft (thus confirming your participation), and you're in! There's no need to leave your email address in the comment unless you want me to not use your registered email address.
- For those of you who just lurk around, you can directly email me that you're interested in joining, and you'll be included on the same email Monday morning. My only condition is you must be registered on Stampede Blue to participate, and be in good standing (not banned). Just included your user name in the email.
The deadline to sign up is Sunday, August 3 at 11:59pm ET. Anyone after that will be put on a wait list, which we will use, as we have done liberally each year. If you want to play, just let me know before that time.