CheatSheetWarRoom.com, a great tool for Fantasy NASCAR Drafts
I few years back I created cheatsheetwarroom.com, a free web application for creating fantasy football cheat sheets. After years of frustration while manually creating cheat sheets for my various fantasy drafts, I recognized that my process for creating accurate player rankings, while comprehensive, had inherent flaws. It usually went something like this:
- Scour the web for player lists and copy those players into a spreadsheet. This player info quickly became inaccurate because of players switching teams (and thus changing bye weeks), new signings, retirements, etc.
- Find relevant fantasy player statistics and manually type them into the spreadsheet for each player. This was an error-prone and time-consuming process; time that could have been better spent using this information to create accurate rankings.
- Create the spreadsheet formulas necessary to calculate fantasy point output for each player based on the standard fantasy football scoring system.
- Find supplemental player rankings from other reputable sources to compare against my own rankings (as a sanity-check) and enter these rankings into my spreadsheet. With injuries, depth-chart shifts, suspensions, etc throughout the football pre-season, these supplemental rankings soon became invalid.
- Create color-codes for things such as sleepers, busts, and injured players. Add additional columns for miscellaneous notes, etc.
- Clumsily cut & paste players around the spreadsheet while praying I don’t make a judgment based on bad/outdated information or, even worse, accidentally cut someone out of existence.
- Finally, print out spreadsheets for each fantasy position. Then, using scissors and tape, create a giant ‘master cheat sheet’ with all positions that I could easily reference at my draft.
After analyzing my cheat sheet creation techniques, I realized that the vast majority of my time was spent populating and updating the reference data in my sheet. As a result I was left with very little time actually doing what I love: manipulating my player rankings. It soon became obvious that many of my steps could be automated and much of my data could be kept current through software. Being a computer engineer, and needing to learn web development, I had found my pet project.
What started as a personal project quickly gathered a considerable following and today we have over 4000 users who utilize cheatsheetwarroom.com to prepare for their fantasy football drafts. The great feedback I’ve received has motivated me to continue developing the site and adding new features. In addition to our cheat sheet creation interfaces, we’ve added a forum and a blog. We’re also rolling out a new, unified web design in the coming weeks.
A year or so ago it occurred to me that if so many people enjoyed the ease and accuracy with which they could create their fantasy football cheat sheets, why not expand the application to include additional sports? Fantasy football is obviously the biggest fantasy sport on the planet, but other sports such as baseball, basketball, and racing also have considerable followings. Just about every fantasy sport involves some type of draft so my approach to football cheat sheet creation should be transferable to other sports as well.
After careful consideration of other fantasy sports, I chose to implement fantasy NASCAR racing as my next sport. There were several reasons for choosing NASCAR, the most obvious being that the 2011 racing season was starting around the time I expected to complete the BETA version. Also, NASCAR fantasy leagues have the distinction of having numerous drafts throughout the fantasy season, with some leagues even holding a different draft each week. So while our fantasy football cheat sheets are mostly utilized before the football season, the fantasy racing cheat sheet interface could be utilized throughout the racing season.
Our fantasy racing cheat sheets include many of the same features that we offer for through our football sheets:
- Simple drag & drop interface
- Supplemental driver rankings
- Comprehensive & relevant statistics
- Driver news search
- A configurable note area for each driver
- Sheet export capability
- 1-Click printable sheet generation
We are also trying out a few new features in our racing interface:
- Twitter news search – allows you to review ‘up-to-the-second’ breaking news on each driver.
- Average Draft Position (ADP) – an average of driver rankings based on other users’ cheat sheets.
The 2011 NASCAR season is largely a BETA season for Cheat Sheet War Room. Our hope is that we can gather enough useful feedback from our users to improve the interface even more in 2012. We are already receiving valuable suggestions such as weekly ranking updates and ADP calculations throughout the entire NASCAR season (rather than focusing entirely on the pre-season draft). If you see additional room for improvement, please provide feedback via our forum and I’ll consider all requests for the upcoming 2012 racing season.
Our ultimate goal at Cheat Sheet War Room is to create an environment where cheat sheet creation is community-driven and the users are the experts. We are already moving in this direction with a forum and twitter-integration. But what if users could tag useful tweets and have the most useful tweets about each player/driver show-up in the main cheat sheet interface for all other users to reference? What if users could provide links to informative articles about players and have those links become easily-accessible to other users? What if you could compare your driver rankings against your friends’ sheets?
These are just a few of our ideas moving forward, but we’d love to get some ideas from you as well.
Happy Ranking!
GUEST Post by Brad of CheatSheetWarRoom.com
