Fantasy Football Tips: Dominate with RSS Subscribing

You want to dominate your Fantasy Football League, right? You spend hours during the days leading up to your Fantasy Football draft scouring different sources for the latest tips and advice. You spend hours during the season bouncing around different websites looking for injury info, start/sit advice, sleepers, and all that good stuff.

Why not have this news come to you and save yourself some valuable time? Do you use an RSS Reader to take some of that workload off? If you do, stay with us...we will have some tips for you later. If you don’t, let me tell you why you should.

Corey, at The Fantasy Football Goat, and I have had this conversation a few times. It’s baffling to think that the serious Fantasy Football owner would not use the technology of Really Simple Syndication. Some conclusions are that they don’t know what it is or what to do with it. Some of you may even be using it and don’t really realize it. How you ask?

Do you use My Yahoo! or iGoogle? You know when you add the news stuff they give you to choose from? Bingo! You see where I’m going with this. They are generally giving you RSS feeds to choose from.

Now you can use this and go with what they give you, or you can take more control and add your own feeds (both of those give you the option to do so).

What is this feed I speak of?

Have you ever seen one of those images that looks like three white lines, usually on an orange background, while surfing the net? You will often find the word “subscribe” somewhere close to it. Don’t be scared of that word. I think that we are conditioned from the old magazine days to think that “subscribe” means that you are BUYING a subscription. Nope…this is a FREE deal.

These images, or the test “RSS Feeds”, are invitations for the site to send you its content. Where are they sending it? You're right; we need to hook you up with an RSS Reader.

Often sites that offer RSS Feeds will also offer emails updates. This is the easiest form of subscription. Enter your email address and done. You get content sent to you. Want more control without sifting through your inbox? You need an RSS Reader then. The above-mentioned Fantasy Football Goat found this great tutorial that is easy to follow.

This is really a great video that, like the title, puts RSS in Plain English. Well worth the three minutes it takes to watch it.

The Fantasy Football Goat takes the Google reader example a bit further here.

About.com gives a Top 10 of RSS Readers HERE. Personally, I use Google Reader. I already use Gmail, and with that account, Google Reader is one of the things you have at your disposal. Plus, you don’t have to download anything.

If you want a quick start with a reader that already has some football feeds built into it, you can try downloading the American Football News Reader. Earlier in the year I was asked to take this for a test spin, and I still have it. One of the upsides to downloading a reader is that they often have a setting to notify when new content comes in. With this, I got a little pop-up in the bottom right of my screen when there is new news.

Once you have your reader, you have a little work to do by adding feeds (how to do so is explained in video above). Don’t feel like you have to jump on this right away. You can do it as you do your everyday surfing...just look for the site's invitation for you to subscribe.

Applying What We Have Learned to Fantasy Football

Those of you already familiar with RSS can join us again. How can you use this to your fantasy football advantage? Many serious fantasy ballers don’t just take the word from the Mainstream sites as to what is going on. They go check out the local papers for the teams, right (By the way, you can get the links for those in our team Pages in the menu bar above).

As you know, there are a lot of local papers to check out if you want to keep up on everything. Many of the teams have several papers that follow them. We have learned so far that it would be much easier to have that come to us, right?

What is the big deal here; why not just go to ESPN?

The local papers are going to have access to the people that cover that team alone. It’s all they think about. Many of the journalists have blogs they do within the paper that give a little more in depth analysis of what is going on locally.

Not all of the local papers have a feed, sadly. You will have to visit each to find it. Sometimes you won’t even be clued in by the image in the address bar either. You have to search a little bit. Here is an example...

If you want the local stuff on the New Orleans Saints, you go to The Times-Picayune site. When I get there, I don’t see that image jumping out at me in the address bar. If it’s not there, one of the first places I go is the bottom of the page. Ah ha! There it is, worded down at the bottom.

After looking back at the top, I did notice that you can find it there as well. Over time, I have found that they hide them at the bottom for some reason. Why? Only thing I can think of is they want to offer it but there is a chance they will have less actual visitors to their site if they are getting the content sent to them.

Now, by clicking on that I get options for every section of the paper. Clicking on one of these takes me to the Google Reader subscribe page like in Corey’s video above.

The mainstream sites like ESPN, CBSSportsline, Fox Sports, and Yahoo are going to give you several options to choose from.

Many of the fantasy football websites that you already visit likely offer feeds as well. Check out what they have on your next pass through.

A very handy fantasy football feed is the Player News from RotoWorld. They go out and find all the news then give a summary to you with links in your reader. Cool, huh?

We could go on all day with sites to subscribe to. I have one more tip for you here. What about if you want news on a particular player? FF Goat gives more video examples HERE. On this subject, there is one in there on how to use Google Alerts to get player news...make some folders customized to your fantasy teams!

We will wrap this up now. If your still reading all the way down here, thanks for toughing it out.

So go get that Reader! Once you have it (or if you already have one) test it out by clicking on some of these below…

Subscribe to all the Jabber

This is the one if you don’t want to miss any of the Jabber. You, my friend, are a Jabber-head through and through.

Subscribe NFL Content

NFL content, hence the name. NFL Draft info will also fall under this.

Subscribe Fantasy Football

Just the fantasy football stuff. Often this will go with NFL Jabber if you have that as well.

Subscribe NCAA Content

Just the Saturday game you say? Click on that one.

Some other great Fantasy blogs you should subscribe to include The Fantasy Football Goat, The Hazean, and The Fantasy Football Librarian.