NOTE: IF YOU'RE ALREADY SUBSCRIBED FOR '14 AND GET OUR '14 E-MAILS, YOU CAN UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS LIST BY CLICKING THE LINK BELOW.
----------------------
This e-mail is from FantasyGuru.com's Expired/Free Off-season mailing list. To remove yourself from this list, check the bottom of this e-mail.
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
10/9/14
Free Off-Season/Former Subscriber:
We thought you might be interested in this special offer in which you can get on board for the rest of 2014 for FREE if you subscribe for 2015 now. As a subscriber, you'll enjoy
- Weekly DFS column that is winning subscribers MONEY
- Weekly Matchup column by Greg Cosell
- New and improved weekly game center with elite matchup information
- Accurate column telling you which players to trade and trade for each week that included Eddie Lacy, Demaryius Thomas, Andre
Ellington, Kendall Wright, and Vincent Jackson going into Week 5.
- Better overall content than ever!
- NEW Roster import tool and Upgraded MyGuru smart phone app!
Here's part of an article from last month that covers all our offerings and content in-season!
SUBSCRIBE NOW IN 1 minute here!
----------------------------------------------------------
Site Content
Everything is arranged neatly and logically into four sections:
1. News
2. Articles
3. Interaction
4. Site tools
The news is at the top, since that’s obviously most important. Our NFL News Feed is constantly-updated with news, injury updates, transactions, and more. It’s sortable by team and position, searchable by name, and fully integrated into the site, so you can also view news on each player’s page and within MyGuru. We also have the latest headlines in this section in the homepage and added some quick links to some of the more compelling articles in “What’s Hot” and links to some very important things like MyGuru, Projections, Depth Charts, and a page where we provide updates on Our Apps.
If you’re looking for an article or projections, there’s one main section of articles with different types of content tabs, and you can’t miss it. During the regular season, ALL our written content is in one single area and is clearly listed by type in our various content tabs.
The main point in terms of finding articles is that you can see them all listed by date and order of publishing if you simply view the main “Articles” section, as it defaults to the tab that shows everything we put out listed by date, with the most recent items at the top. If you want to see specific types of content, it’s broken down by general articles, rankings & projections, strategy, IDP, etc.
Next, all our interactive stuff, like podcasts, our blogs, poll, and Twitter feed. PLEASE NOTE: We have a NEW Twitter feed for the company, which is @FantasyGuruSite. We added this account for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons is the @Fantasy_Guru account was both my account and the company’s, and I didn’t feel comfortable promoting EVERYTHING we have going on for the site because most of the followers to my account are NOT subscribers. By following the @FantasyGuruSiteaccount, you’ll be able to get more updates meant ONLY for FantasyGuru.com subscribers. The @FantasyGuruSiteaccount feed is the one that’s not on the site now, not mine (@Fantasy_Guru).
Finally, the Site Tools section is where you’ll see links to our Apps and all of the site’s database tools. For more information on all the tools we have, you should check out our Site Help page. We have a lot and most of it is tied into MyGuru, but we certainly have a lot of tools that even a casual user can take advantage of. Some of them of note are: Points Allowed, SOS, History Tool, Red Zone Report, and our Player Comparison Tool, which is really awesome.
Here’s more on a big element of the site: MyGuru
MyGuru/Roster Import Tool
New for 2014, we’ve added a tool that will allow you to automatically import (and constantly sync as your team changes) rosters from ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, Myfantasyleague.com, and NFL.com. Currently, it’s only importing rosters, but soon we’ll add scoring systems as well, so this tool is obviously better than ever.
Here’s what you need to know about MyGuru:
- First head on over to MyGuru.
- Scroll down a little and create a team by naming one.
- Once you name a team, you can add your players manually or use one of the import features from the top league management sites (listed above). Again, scoring import is coming very soon, but you can manually input them now. The import process is very easy, and once you create a team (15 allowed) you can
That’s all you need to know. When you do this, you can then view customized info for your players, see your team’s scoring system as a pull-down option within projections and all of our tools. For example, if you’re looking at the Points Allowed Tool, you can toggle to your team and see points allowed in YOUR scoring system.
MyGuru App
If you have an iPhone/iPad or Android device, make sure you download our MyGuru app, which is free for subscribers. If you login, you’re pretty much getting the whole site and all its key components on your phone or tablet.
The coolest new thing is that you can now head to MyGuru online, import your team, and then view information for that team (news, projections, etc.) on your phone. The Roster Analyzer within MyGuru on the app (and online) will give to you our suggested starting lineup, although I wouldn’t simply use that as the end-all, since a human element should be incorporated into your lineup decisions.
Otherwise, we have a steady stream of news and injury updates populating the app, taken from our News Feed, and that’s essentially 24 hours a day. You’ll find depth charts, 2014 schedule, and you can also play all of our podcasts right on the app.
We have most of the key articles featured in the app by name (Stock Watch, Waiver Wire, etc.) and the cool thing is there’s a red “New” banner that appears when one of these articles has been updated, which is awesome. Full disclosure: the “New” banner will appear even if we go in and fix a typo, but it’s still nice to have as a feature. We obviously produce a lot more in terms of articles than the ones that are featured, and you can always find all articles if you tap on “all articles” on the top of the article area.
Of course, we can view all projections in all of your inputted scoring systems if you tap on “projections.” Make sure you tap on a player for his projected stats and our comment for the week.
One other note on MyGuru and our tools: We listened to the people last year and we changed our default scoring system to PPR. This was requested by hundreds, so we put up a poll and PPR beat non-PPR with 64% of the vote. Of course, it’s really a non-issue for non-PPR people because they can create a Non-PPR scoring system in about 3 seconds, if they go here.
Weekly Articles/Content
Again, I’m glossing over some other benefits to the site that you can learn about on our Site Help page, but I wanted to focus this week on mainly our written content, and how to consume that in a way that will be most beneficial, so let’s cover our publishing week and cover everything we’ll do over a seven-day period during the season.
Let’s start with Monday:
Monday
On a Monday, we’re typically breaking down all the digits from the Sunday action, focusing mostly on pass targets, snap counts, catch rates, and red-zone utilization. We’re also getting started on watching the games. I’ll usually get 2-3 games watched in on a Monday, and that’s something I haven’t done in the past. For the most part, I’ve watched games while writing, so I haven’t focused on them. Sometimes, I’d have games on twice in the background but with always an ear and an eye open. This year, we’re actually watching every snap with no distractions. It’s time-consuming, but I think it is helping.
What’s ironic is that my time has been used up more than usual, so some things like this column haven’t been quite as substantial the last 1-2 years. For right or wrong, I’ve been spending more time studying the matchups and trying to get more things right within the league than discussing strategy. I’m going to get contributor David Gonos to start writing up some strategy pieces starting soon to help there.
But back to Monday, which is a very busy and long day for us. The first thing that comes out is the Waiver Wire report, which will usually be up Monday afternoon. I’ll update that report all day Monday, and there’s a lot of updating to do. Meanwhile, we’re also compiling our massive Stock Watch report from week that was. If you’re looking for a quick but totally comprehensive look at the events of the week, this is where you go.
Those two reports are huge, and we also put up early in the morning our weekly look Inside the Boxscore. This report also includes catch rate information, red zone and deep targets, and in 2014 we’re going into more detail in terms of notes culled from examining the game logs (see this week’s for an example). It’s a nice first look at the week’s numbers each Monday morning.
These three reports are massive, and I believe this week they totaled about 30,000 words. But for the most part, we’re talking only small paragraphs on certain players, so you can pick and choose what you want.
On Monday nights we’ll obviously have the NFL inactives on our NFL News Feed, and we’ll highlight them as needed on the homepage.
Tuesday
This is also a very, very busy day. We decided to hold off a week for this, which annoyed some people but was necessary and also probably prudent, since we’ll have two full games to evaluate, but it’s also a tough transition going from the preseason, so we held off this week. We have a Waiver Wire Report and Week 2 projections for those looking to make moves. However, going forward after Week Two we’ll produce our Season ProjectionsIt takes a while to review all the comments (I know we don’t perfectly hit all 300+ of them every week) and, of course, to look at the rankings and projections. These are, by the way, projected weekly averages for the rest of the season. In other words, the numbers you see are what we project the players to average each week for the rest of the year. These are not automated and magically appear; it takes a lot of time.
As you’ll see below, we do so much on Tuesdays that there’s no way we can also do projections for the coming week that day. We get requests for it, but ironically we’re too busy updating our Waiver Wire report and Season Projections, which are the two items that are more important for the long-term, which is what you’re usually looking at when making player pickups. However, in 2014 we’re shooting to get the upcoming weekly projections up late Tuesday night, which at least is better than Wednesday afternoon, which is when they were released in 2013. We don’t automate these like other sites, so they just don’t magically appear. It takes 15+ hours to properly produce both the season and weekly projections.
What we do have early on Tuesday is our Statistical Projections, which are player rankings and projections for the coming week that go 100% off what the numbers say. This includes your specific scoring systems, and there are a lot of other functions to this tool that you can check out. But this is an early look the matchups and you can clearly see the best options ranked in your scoring system by the numbers.
We also do the Monday Night Wrap-up, which was double in size this week due to the two MNF games, which didn’t help our schedule this week as we continue to adjust to the regular season from the preseason. That will cover any Stock Watch entries, plus the Inside the Boxscore info from the Monday Night game.
We also, on Tuesday, put out quite possibly our most-popular article, our Players to Trade and Trade For. I noticed a few years ago that this column was a lot more popular than I expected, so I started spending more time thinking about our weekly options, and I feel it was much more accurate last two years because of that. Hopefully, that will continue. I think we’re off to a good start.
New in 2013, we rolled out our new Keeper/Dynasty Watch. I feel like we always cover young and emerging keepers throughout the site, but I do understand that committing to a weekly column forces us to pay closer attention to these potential keeper pickups, and I’m sure readers appreciate that. The focus on this column, so you know, is to keep an eye on deep sleepers and emerging options for Dynasty Leagues, since everyone knows who the top players are for those in keeper leagues that retain 8-10 or fewer players.
We also last year added the Defensive Report. With the fantasy defenses being a complete joke recently, it makes more sense than ever to play the matchups each week, if possible, for your fantasy D, so we now cover the best weekly “streaming” options for the week, and we do it early in the week to catch your Waiver Wires.
We also update Depth Charts, publish our IDP Waiver Wire report, and our Joe Dolan and Matt Camp are now hosting a quick WW podcast every Tuesday. We put links up for these podcasts on Twitter or Facebook, and on the site. If you use iTunes, just subscribe to our podcasts and you’ll get them all. We’re now doing four a week, the most ever.
Finally, we’ll do a News and Notes update (but check our News Feed page for continuous updates).
And finally, as I mentioned above, I’m striving this year to release this monster Tuesday night now as opposed to Wednesday afternoon, the Weekly Projections. I take about 7-8 hours a week just on the offensive projections, and they’re obviously tweaked several times a day right up until kickoff on Sunday.
Wednesday
We’ve got the “In the Loop” Podcast every Wednesday afternoon, with Matt Camp and Joe Dolan, where you can call in and ask questions. Again, if you use iTunes, just subscribe to our podcasts.
We have several other articles that are rolled out on a Wednesday, like our RB Handcuff article, which is always changing. Wednesday is a big day if for no other reason than the fact that we put out our Snap Report, which is must-reading for the truly hardcore and addicted. You’ll find all the snap numbers, plus all the trends for all 32 teams. Obviously, our Production Tracker report is a big one on Wednesday midweek as well. This report gives you all the numbers that each defense is giving up to each position and goes inside the numbers for insight on specific trends that we can take advantage of with lineup decisions. We also cover all the matchup history in our History Report, which goes back only through 2013, since we know things change quickly in the league (although I think it’s still worth looking at going back only one year).
Of course, everyone’s favorite algorithm is featured in Mike Horn’s Kicker Recommendations, where subscribers consistently pluck productive kickers out of thin air and off the WW. I’m even getting Mike involved with the actual projections, so they more closely follow his mysterious formula, which is why there might be a lag with the PK projections. We don’t argue with the algorithm; we just wait patiently for it on a Wednesday and we clean up when it’s released.
Note: Again, we’re still trying to catch up from the preseason so the Snap report, History report, Kicker Recommendations, and the Production Tracker didn’t get out until Thursday this week, but it’ll be Wednesday going forward. I fully expect the Snap Report and the Production Tracker to be more in-depth and valuable this year, so definitely check them out. The PT in particular is pretty limited this week with only one game sample. But these are two articles that will definitely be better with more detail and insight in 2014.
Also, new this year we’re putting up our Thursday Game Center on Wednesday evenings now, which is earlier than last year. We also have a new stat-based column called Outside the Boxscore, which includes a ton of interesting stat tidbits for each game. This is a nice addition in 2014, and we’ll also do it for all games on Friday. We’ll also put out a Thursday Night IDP Preview.
And in the early evening hours, we’re updating Weekly Projections while posting our Wednesday Practice Report. Our exclusive reports set the standard for injury reporting in this business.
Thursday
We’re up against it now, since we’ve handled all the early and mid-week stuff, which is great and all, but the real heavy lifting for us is still to come with our extensive game and player previews for Friday. I start out the day on the Matchup Podcast, which really helps me gain focus on all the matchups. I think it’s fair to say this podcast and all our podcasts are pretty darn good.
We also put out our Staff Picks, and I know we do these late in the week. I’m sorry, but I would prefer to have time to actually watch all the games before picking them for the next week, and that can’t be done earlier in the week. Ultimately, we’re happy to do it but we started it due to reader request, so it’s not exactly high up on the priority list compared to other more important things. I do see that 4000+ people accessed that article on Thursday, so we will try to get it up sooner going forward, by like 10-11am.
I always try on Thursday to update the Waiver Wire report, so you can look for that on Thursday.
If you play DFS, we also have rolled out another new/revised column this year, the Daily Fantasy Breakdown by DFS Guru Kevin Adams. Kevin is an amazing DFS player because he’s been a Guru disciple for years, but mainly because he’s an elite mind when it comes to finance and statistical analysis. He’s already won 40 grand this year playing daily fantasy baseball, and 2014 is his first year doing that. He’s already dishing out DFS gold in this column, and the best news is that he’s using FantasyGuru.com analysis and projections as a foundation and coupling that with his own acumen.
Also new this year, we have Greg Cosell’s Mastering the Matchups column, which is awesome. Basically, we have the nation’s most-respected NFL personnel and matchup analyst giving our subscribers extra insight on the top matchups to exploit based on Greg’s film study. This column will be more and more insightful as we get some games in the books, as the sample size is still quite small right now. Subscribers should really be eating this stuff up and it’s yet another example of how we’re striving to give you more and more quality content.
Obviously, we also cover the Thursday game in our Thursday Game Center, and we continue to update our Weekly Projections as injury info comes in. In fact, we’ll update them right up until the Thursday kickoff, as we did last night for Week Two. Also on Thursday afternoon/early evening, we’re updating our next round of practice reports in our Thursday Practice Reports, which offers up another status report on all the week’s injured players.
On Thursday, Tom Simons always does his Kick Returner Previews, for those who are interested in return guys.
And we even added a new column this year called Digging Deep, which is a little contest between our guys Joe Dolan, Matt Camp, and Tom Brolley in which they call their sleepers of the week each week. It’s a cool competition, but the main point is it isolates this week’s sleepers.
Also, Thursday is the day I will typically roll out my Hansen on Strategy, this column, which is obviously late this week (I’m still trying to catch up from the preseason-regular season transition). This column has been shorter the last 1-2 years than it’s been in the past. That’s due to a few factors. As I mentioned above, I’m spending more time than usual watching and analyzing the games and the matchups, since ultimately the most important thing is to have a firm grasp on them for lineup decisions and weekly analysis. We also have a lot of things I used to address in this column produced elsewhere. I’m also now producing a mini preview of the Top Storylines I’m following each week, which I will post to my blog.
Friday
This all leads us to the big game-preview day. Obviously, our focus late in the week is all the matchups, player previews, etc.
Hopefully you’ve noticed, but we’ve made some changes to the format of our Weekly Game Center and player capsules for the week. In the past, this project has simply been too overwhelming and has included way too much repetition. Because of this, it was simply too long. Looking at our traffic numbers, our readers weren’t exactly reading these that much – yet we’ve been spending the majority of our time writing them.
So last year, we’ve condensed them, and this year we’ve added more about the teams and the matchups, in general, which makes it easier for us to see and present the big picture without being overwhelmed with all the minutia. As you’ve probably noticed, they have more insight than ever on the matchups, and that’s because we’ve added a legit tape analyst in Ben Fennell, who’s been studying the coach’s tape for years and has been doing great work at NFL Films going back 5+ years. We’ve never had a better command of the matchups than we do this year, thanks in large part to Ben.
These game previews are much more focused in terms of covering the NFL matchups, the fantasy previews, the news you need to know, and more.
So we’re spending more time covering the matchups generally, which again helps us maintain our focus on the most important things (the big picture with the teams and the matchups) rather than being bogged down by the minutia. We think they are easier to write now and also easier to read. The player writeups themselves are smaller, covering only the key points and not every single tidbit that we have in the notes or in the matchup overviews. We publish separately the Game Center (all games, and we added last year a nice pull-down menu to easily go from game-to-game), and we also pull out just the fantasy writeups in Player Matchups and Reaches of the Week.
It’s a logistical nightmare to present all this game/player preview information perfectly and in a way that everyone likes, but I definitely like how this year’s Game Center and player profiles are working out. We know that different people like to read the game/player analysis in different ways, which is why we publish the content in different ways.
Obviously, this is a massive endeavor, but on a Friday we will typically still do several other things. New last year, we’re putting together a little column called Trending Topics, which covers all the key things fantasy players are talking/wondering about for the week, and we’ll of course try to make heads or tails of all the issues. We’re doing this in 2014 as a replacement to our Friday News and Notes, since this column will cover the key things fantasy players should be looking out for.
On Friday, we’ll also offer up our Friday IDP Previews this year, and with IDP AnalystCorby A. Yarbrough doing such a great job on these, our IDP previews are WAY better than they’ve ever been. As opposed to breaking players down by game, we’re simply looking at each position and covering all the non-obvious plays, pickups, etc.
In addition, we of course do our Friday Practice Reports, which is the final big update, since it’s the final big practice day of the week.
We’ll also typically do a chat on Friday, so check the site or our Twitter Feed for updates on when we will do the chat. You’ll find on the site that all of our interactive items (polls, chats, blogs, podcasts, and Twitter Feed) are together right below the main article section.
And finally on Friday, we’ll be updating the Weekly Projections again. Another new item we have this year in relation to the projections is we now have the ability to flag players for certain criteria. For example, if you’re looking for a good WW option you can filter the projections and show only options who we think a) might be available on the WW, and b) are viable pickups based on the matchup this week. You will be able to sort by the following criteria:
Good Matchup
Bad Matchup
Reach Play
Waiver Wire
Weekly Bargain
This is actually a lot more work for us to flag the players in these categories, so I do not expect to be able to get to the actual flagging until late in the week, likely on Fridays. Hopefully, this new feature will make our projections more valuable. The goal, really, is to allow users to bypass having to read up on the players in the Waiver Wire, Game Center, Reaches of the Week, etc. If you trust us, you don’t even have to really read up on which players have good/bad matchups, are viable WW pickups, etc. That information is going to be built into the projections going forward.
And finally, our stat maven Mike Horn usually offers up a stat-based article on a Friday. It’s not every week, as his in-season articles usually attempt to address a prevalent issue worth exploring, and sometimes there are none.
Saturday
This is my day off! By day “off” I mean I work only about 5-6 hours (not complaining). The two main things we do on this day are offer up yet another (and mostly final) update to the Waiver Wire report and our Weekly Projections.
As always, if you’re looking for news, just check our NFL News Feed. We’re monitoring it constantly, and we’ll flag/highlight any item of note. When we do, they automatically go to our homepage under “Top Headlines.”
Sunday
The main reason I work on Saturday is because my Sunday Hansen’s Hints column doesn’t write itself. I hate to say it, but if you wanted to ignore all of our weekly preview content and just read this every Sunday, you’re probably good-to-go. It’s a final look at all the matchups, and when I write it, I have as good a grasp on them as I will have all week, other than when the Sunday inactives come down, which does change things.
The first thing we do Sunday is put our Quick Sunday Update, usually between 10-11am ET. We could get it out a little earlier, but it’s hard to hit send at 10 a.m. when we know there is usually some late-breaking news that comes out around 11 a.m. This report offers up a quick roundup of the injuries we’re watching for the week, my Hansen’s Hints column, which has a quick overview and preview of each matchup, and a Weather Report for the week.
This report is e-mailed, again, around 11 a.m. ET and it’s posted on the site. It’s linked to as the top featured article with a photo, and it’s linked to in the recent articles section. Again, if you’re looking for an article, projections, rankings, etc. you only need to look at the main articles section on the homepage. We list articles both by date published and type of article.
Every Sunday at 11:30 a.m. ET, the inactives start coming down, and we’re covering it all in our Sunday Inactive page. Simply load this page each Sunday if you so choose, and you don’t need to do anything else, as the page automatically updates with the latest news. It’s very hectic gathering up all the inactives and lineup notes, so we’re not exactly lightning fast on these, but we’re usually done by about Noon ET, and we’re updating anything that comes down the line otherwise right up until kickoff. All the inactives and the late-breaking information are also covered on our NFL News Feed, so it’s actually covered twice on the site.
Guru Fantasy Reports, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Web: www.fantasyguru.com
No comments:
Post a Comment