Site Name: The Fantasy Shrink
URL: http://www.FantasyShrink.com
Category: Free Fantasy Football Blog
Note – we’ll have two types of articles around the sites that we evaluate. Reviews – which mean that we’ve been tracking a site for at least a year. Previews – which in general indicate this is a new site/blog. Both articles will have the same categories of evaluation, but in Previews we will not provide star rankings.
Content
Geektastic! When you scroll through the front page of a fantasy football blog and find no less than 11 charts interspersed with the written content you can accurately assume that you will be reading a lot of fact based analysis and interpretation.
We’ve got strength of schedule data. We’ve got big board positional rankings, with tiering, SOS, average production, and commentary integrated in one chart (broken down by PPR and standard by the way!) We’ve got very deep analysis of sleeper players like Ryan Fitzpatrick. We’ve got the “Chain Reaction” series of articles where well respected fantasy football writers from across the web explore scenarios of player movement and fantasy implications.
The content seems to be more oriented toward offensive position players and D/ST with a re-draft slant, with no mention of IDP content as of yet. There are no formal sections for keeper/dynasty, but more sophisticated fantasy footballers will be able to derive a ton of insight from the content here for dynasty and keeper moves and drafts.
There are other sites that present a lot of data to fantasy footballers, but very few that add in well written and actionable insight and analysis on top of the data. This is the sort of content that can take a dedicated FFer to the next level of winning and success in their leagues.
User Experience/Navigation
A simple and very clean blog format sets up the site navigation. Articles are displayed in reverse chronology, with the newest post at the most prominent position at the top of the page. The right side of the page gives a bit of background on John Paulsen, the site owner and crafter of much of the content. Continuing to scroll down, provides you a list of the 15 most recent posts and the option to sort by pre-defined categories that John is using to tag his content (ranging from positions (RB), to article types (strategy), to data sets (ADP).
All in all the blog is very easy to navigate and the logic that comes out in the analysis also seems to have been well applied to site design and architecture.
Social Media/Community
John is an extremely active participant on Twitter, using it as a channel to push content from FantasyShrink.com as well as a way to interact with other ff experts and with fans and users who have questions for him. Comments are “turned on” for all of John’s posts at his blog and in the past few months a few discussions have formed around the content he has published.
Uniqueness/Entertainment
The strength of this site is in its presentation of statistical analysis. It’s not the data, which is somewhat of a commodity in the fantasy football space (meaning that many sites have similar breakdowns). The value here is really in the analysis and insights that are drawn out of the data and importantly the connection of those insights and analysis BACK to the data so you can see the thought process that lead John to his conclusions. It gives less experienced or invested FFers the opportunity to get first class insights, and more invested or sophisticated users some lessons in how to analyze all of the data that we have the opportunity to explore as fantasy sports enthusiasts. We know John refers to himself as the Fantasy Shrink, but a few on our team thought “The Fantasy Professor” might be the better title!
Bottom Line
We have high hopes for this blog and look forward to a full year of content so we can provide a more in depth review. FantasyShrink.com is recommended for all fantasy football users, but especially for those who have a high interest in making statistical based decisions.
John’s recently joined the team over at 4for4.com (a full service, subscription based site that we’ll be reviewing later this summer).
Must See Feature: The Dependability of Preseason SOS. There are a lot of sites that publish SOS data and I hear time and time again from FFers that they have no idea how to use it or how dependable it is. This article gives some insight into that quandary.
Area for Improvement: Helping some newer FFers make the connections between the insights and how they effect dynasty and keeper leagues would be great!
