Content for a Fantasy Football Website

[irish10380]

I have a vision for a fantasy football website for my family. It will not *pull* statistics from an ESPN.com, or an NFL.com, though I would like it to. The commissioner of the league would have to manually enter the stats weekly, on Tuesday mornings.

Since the statistics backend work will be done manually, I would like to offer the rest of my favorite fantasy football options to the other owners in the league. I am looking for some free options to offer the following in this website:
Unique username and password for each of the 9 owners in the league.
A single running messageboard with posts that are timestamped and can only be deleted by the administrator.
Forms that will allow each owner to select this week's starters by a certain time each week. This information will update a separate page with all other owners' starting teams.
Some sort of graphical analysis of manually entered statistics.
Internal email system (thinking about using google enterprise free version) that can be accessed from within the league site by each owner.

If anyone has some FREE ideas on how to make this work, don't hesitate to speak up. If anyone has some ideas on how to pull the statistics from the NFL.com site (as our site will not be a for-profit site, shouldn't be a huge legal problem, as it will have a private login), just provide whatever information you can. It will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[AfroJoJo]

Entering stats manually every week really sucks. I know from experience. Why don't you just use one of the free fantasy football programs. I like yahoo's.

[silentcollision]

You could get the statistics with CURL, and as far as I can see you could build the rest of the app with PHP.

[irish10380]

The free fantasy sports programs do not offer the rules that our fantasy league uses. Only one company does, and they have been unreliable this year.

As per the CURL and PHP, I am not good with either. To avoid paying coders, we are going with something simple. My commissioner did the stats manually for two years before our two years on our most recent fantasy football website.

[silentcollision]

The free fantasy sports programs do not offer the rules that our fantasy league uses. Only one company does, and they have been unreliable this year.

As per the CURL and PHP, I am not good with either. To avoid paying coders, we are going with something simple. My commissioner did the stats manually for two years before our two years on our most recent fantasy football website.

I guess it comes down to preference, but I would really hate manually inserting statistics like that, when you could pay a few hundred to get a script to do it for you.

I realise you wanted free ideas, but you should seriously consider hiring a programmer.

[irish10380]

The stats part is not even the most important part that I am looking for. I am more interested in the messageboard and the other parts that I mentioned. Like I said, the commissioner has no problem manually entering stats.

[silentcollision]

The stats part is not even the most important part that I am looking for. I am more interested in the messageboard and the other parts that I mentioned. Like I said, the commissioner has no problem manually entering stats.

Well for the message board, check out Vanilla (http://getvanilla.com/) or phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/).

[mikelawson]

how would you set up a fantasy site to pull stats from espn.com or nfl.com anyway?