Site Name: The Huddle
URL: http://www.thehuddle.com
Category: Full Service, Subscription based Fantasy Football Website
Content
The Huddle offers a comprehensive view of fantasy football, covering almost every imaginable area of investigation in their articles and analysis. Of particular note is their focus on IDP content, with at least 1-2 articles a week focused on that under served, but growing area of interest for FFers. The huddle offers two sets of player ratings each week. One crafted by site owner David Dorey (aka DMD on their message boards) which reviews each NFL match up and predicts the scoring totals for each key offensive players, kicker, and D/ST. The other, written by John Tuvey (J2V on their message boards), looks at each active team and places them into tiers from highest recommended players at Start 1 (S1) through S2, S3, Bench (B), and upside players (U). Given these two different views of player rankings they offer a commentary that explains any differences of opinions between the projection articles.
Off-Season content is on par with other subscription services in both activity and quality. Key offseason articles to watch out for include: Fantasy Sleepers, Ease of Schedule Series, Player and Coaching Movement Trackers and Analysis, Draft recaps, IDP Rookies, and the very good pre-season draft kit.
Rating 4.5 out of 5 stars
User Experience
The site is organized much like a newspaper. The highlight article takes the premier spot on the left part of the page with a large supporting photo. Recent news and analysis is in the left column. The other daily or weekly columns and articles line up underneath the headlined article. The challenge The Huddle presents from a user experience is the inverse of it’s strength in content. There is just so much (good) stuff.
Top level navigation includes, Home, Fantasy Draft Kit, In Season, Articles, News, Stats, Forums, Teams, Players, NFL Draft.
Experienced users are able to find the content quite easily, but new users will have a bit of a learning curve to identify what content is most valuable and interesting to them. The highlighted articles provide good clues to some of the most interesting content, but as they are rotated out fairly quickly, if you are not visiting regularly you might miss some really compelling and useful stuff.
There is a full text search feature, which helps when you are looking for something specific, but again, given how much content there is, it’s a bit of a mixed bag of returns. A search for “IDP Rookies” provides you with the current IDP rookies, but also over 20 pages more of IDP content where “rookie” is mentioned somewhere in the text going back to 2009.
Rating 3 out of 5 stars
Community/Social Media
The Huddle’s online forums are among the most vibrant in the fantasy sports community. Offering a full exploration of content on every FF topics available as well as areas as diverse as Food and Beverage and Photography (and every other major sport imaginable). FF Advice is routinely asked for and given literally hundreds of times a day during the season. These are quality people and fantasy sports fans interacting daily, and best of all, it’s a free service. Huddle writers do often interact with the community via this forum as well.
The Huddle is also on Twitter (@thehuddle), but mainly as a device for sharing their key player reports and analysis, not for having their experts interact with users. There is also a chat room on the site that is fairly acive during the season (15-20 folks during a regular Sunday)
Rating 4.5 out of 5 stars
Uniqueness/Entertainment
The depth and breadth of content is one of the unique qualities of the site. There are also several well researched, but off beat looks at Fantasy Football that will often elicit both a chuckle and an aha from the reader, including Tunnel Vision and JUMbotron.
Rating 4.0 out of 5 stars
Bottom Line:
The Huddle is highly recommended for all levels of fantasy football players, but especially for those who are willing and interested in daily interactions and content around FF. Anyone that loves fantasy football should stop by their free forums, sign up and join in the dialogues.
The Huddle costs $29.95 for one years access, 24.95 per year for returning members, and 39.95 if you sign up for a 2 year commitment.
- The Huddle – 9/9/2011
- DLF – 9/9/2011
- Fantasy GodFathers – 9/9/2011
- BrunoBoys.Net – 9/14/2011
