Yahoo Vs. ESPN: What's the Best Fantasy Football League?

The fantasy football season is in full swing but many fantasy football leagues are offering wannabe players the option to join in now or to still create their own leagues and run their own drafts.

While most fantasy football players play early and often in multiple leagues, there is still a large contingent of people who prefer to wait until a couple weeks into the NFL season to get a fantasy football team going. Many of them want to wait and see how things pan out and also to see which players get injured before drafting them in a fantasy football league. Others aren't sure if they have the money to play or maybe their home town team is doing bad in the NFL and they want to do something that will give them a whole new rooting interest in the NFL again.

Whatever the reason for wanting to join a fantasy football league, knowing which ones are the best is a big key. ESPN and Yahoo.com both offer quality fantasy football leagues, but which one is the best? It's a tough choice.

ESPN features really good live scoring updates that seem to stay right on top of things as you're watching the games. That part is important but at the same time I have had a lot of problems accessing the site in the past because of high traffic on the site as ESPN.com is extremely popular and the fantasy section is one of the most popular on the site, second listed on the top menu bar as a matter of fact.

The fantasy draft on ESPN is also really good featuring some nice Sportscenter sound effects for each pick, making it feel almost as if you're in a mini-NFL draft of your own.

The live scoring has one other small problem as well, though. It seems like the stats are often a bit off and ESPN often has to come back and correct them afterwards. It can make you think your fantasy football team is doing a little better or worse than you thought sometimes. Not a big problem, however. I haven't noticed this quite as much in Yahoo leagues but it does happen on both of them from time to time.

ESPN allows you to update your team logo as any picture of your choice which is a really nice touch. Fantasy football team logos are always good for a few laughs.

Yahoo on the other hand only lets you use an avatar or a pre-made helmet/lettering for your logo which is both good and bad. The yahoo.com avatar that can be transferred to your fantasy league is fun to put together as you can pick from tons of different costumes, looks and even pets for your own personalized character. Then you can add smack talk that is shown in a speech bubble coming from your avatar making for some funny moments.

Yahoo's draft menu is a little clunky and confusing sometimes which I didn't like compared to ESPN.com's. It wasn't terrible but not quite as good as far as ESPN and other fantasy football drafts I've done. The player sorting is a little hard to scroll through on the default settings as it's hard to find the players you want in the mess of names that have already been drafted.

All things considered, I think ESPN is a little better but I yahoo has its own charms as well, especially with the avatars. Both do a good job of keeping track of all your games played so you can collect trophies and show your friends how good you are at various fantasy games.

ESPN's major downside is the occasional lag but they do offer very good fantasy tips right there on the site and have been much better about providing free content in recent years for fantasy football players. It's your choice but you can't go wrong with either league.