Fantasy sports take the impulse to armchair-manage your favorite team and turn it into a dare: You think you’re such a tactical genius? Okay, then draft the players, choose who plays each week, and see how you do. Do you have a better game plan than Bill Belichick? Is your baseball IQ on a par with Joe Maddon’s? Or, at the very least, do you have a better sense of sports than your friends?
After 15 hours of research and a pre-season spent trying out mock drafts and digging into all of the information these platforms have to offer, we’ve found ESPN Fantasy Games to be the best entry point for most people.
But most fantasy-sports platforms work just fine, with little to differentiate them. So if you and your leaguemates already love the service you’re using, there’s nothing game-changing enough to justify the work it takes to switch.
Our pick
The most widely used platform is free, well organized, and a breeze to learn, and it has lots of customization options.
ESPN Fantasy has an easy-to-understand interface and a robust slate of analysis and data that’s both well organized and clearly delivered. It quickly surfaces relevant information, including injury notifications, playing time, and projected performance. And it allows for a broad amount of league customization, so you’ll likely be able to set up the rules of your league exactly as you want.
It’s also the longest-running online fantasy-sports platform (though, as a hobby, fantasy sports leagues have existed in analog form since the 1960s), and by far the most widely used. So chances are good that you or your friends who want to start a league have either played in an ESPN league before or know someone who has.
This familiarity is likely to outweigh any of the user-interface or feature differences other sites may offer. But we’ll continue to test in order to see whether that remains true over the course of a full season.
