Tony Cutillo
The stage was set.
The opening kickoff was in our sight.
Players all over the world, young and old, were getting ready to set up their day of football festivities. This usually consists of greasy food, alcoholic beverages, side tray snacks, and the constant barking at the screen as the red zone zooms in on your guy getting stuffed at the goal line, reminiscent of Barry Switzer and his ridiculous premonitions of scoring on 4th-and-1.
Every fantasy player’s routine differs on Sunday, but one thing that remains constant is the website that hosts their league.
Well, in the golden era of technological advances and development, ESPN dropped the ball this weekend leaving millions of fantasy football players in the dark!
The company’s fantasy football app went down on Sunday and left players scrambling to find a solution. ESPN acknowledged the problem around 2:00 P.M. EST, nearly an hour after all of the early games kicked off. For many players, it was already too late. After receiving numerous phone calls, they realized there was a problem. Here was the tweet they sent out:
Just one year ago, the same thing happened and ESPN swore it would never happen again. I wouldn’t hold my breath. Third time’s the charm and there’s always next year.
The outage extended from the mobile fantasy app to the online site itself. This isn’t just a crash that impacted the fantasy football world, but one that also created a fury of emotions for players in the prime playoff season for fantasy baseball, too. [Editor’s note: I stopped paying attention to my fantasy baseball team a long time ago, but I can’t imagine the outrage this would’ve caused had it happened in Week 14 of the NFL season.]
ESPN seems to be the preferred fantasy provider, while maintaining a slight edge over Yahoo!. In October of last year, the company said it had 7.1 million unique users of its fantasy football app, and that number continues to grow.
The key word in all of this is free. Can we all really be upset with a site that offers its services for free? Do they have a responsibility to their users to maintain a bug-free zone? In the grand scheme of things, will it really chase players away? The truth is, many fantasy leagues have money at stake, and even though ESPN offers their services for free, they still owe it to their users to make sure this doesn’t happen.
There are many other sites out there that charge for their services, like CBS Sports, but none are perfect when it comes to the inevitable crash either. Last year, they shared the same issue and left their owners in the dark as well. Luckily for some leagues, the commish can jump in and offset some of the changes that should have taken place.
We all realize the perception of a fantasy player is similar to that of a homebody that lives on PBR and an insane amount of beer nuts. However, there are real-life human beings that take this hobby seriously while still rocking their team colors and sipping on a Corona. I am by no means trying to pin a debate between the best beers to drink on Sunday, but instead want to open the eyes to the public about how important these stats really are.
If this impacted your score in any way we want to hear from you. Did Gronk make it out of your lineup in time? How did you cope with the lack of updates? Did you use the any other sites to fill in? Share your story from the ‘Fantasy Crash of 2016’!
As always, you can stop by my Facebook page (Fantasy Sports Addiction) or tweet me (@TCutillo23) for questions or some nice fantasy debates. I can also be heard weekly via the internet stream live at WENG RADIO every Monday at 4:00 P.M. ET for a weekend sports wrap. But most importantly, you can catch me here at Pi!
For Fantasy purposes, all my article are predicated upon a PPR-based system.