EA Sports Fantasy Football Commissioner Review

by James Pierce

EA Sports steps up to the plate year as they unveil their version of fantasy football. From what I've seen, they haven’t disappointed. I signed up for their fantasy football commissioner, which was designed to rival CBS Sportsline and ESPN’s similar products.

Setting up my account and logging in was a breeze. Immediately, I was walked through the steps of setting up my league with some basic questions such as league name, roster sizes and limits, draft dates, etc. Here are some positives and negatives of my experience so far:

I really like their league front page. It’s set up to look much like the CBS Sportsline league home pages. You’ll see all the info you need on one page! If you want to get more in-depth, just click on the handy navigation bar.

They provide several drafting options including a live draft, automated draft, and even an email draft, something which many other services do not have. Other cool features, which appear to be modeled after CBS’ product, are power rankings and standings breakdowns.

I'll come right out and say I don’t like their finance capabilities. If you need to keep track of in-depth finances, and winnings, this is not the service for you. It doesn’t track team winnings at all. It does an adequate job of tracking league fees.

Another negative is that when you’re setting up the league, the scoring setup for defense is confusing, with sentences such as “From ____ to ____ award ____ points for every ____ yards allowed.” To me, it looks as if you’ll have to use decimals in there somewhere to form a complicated equation.

Also, don’t expect to be able to try before you buy. There's no free trial. This makes me a bit leary because I don’t like to plunk down $99 without knowing the product. If I was going to recommend one change, it would be to offer a trial period through the first couple of weeks of the regular season.

Of course, I haven’t been able to test some of the essentials like live scoring, automatic waivers, and the actual draft itself, but if EA Sports can handle the server load, and deliver what they promise, this service looks like a promising start..

Here is how I’d rank the major commissioner services at the moment: 1. CBS Sportsline $149 ($129 early bird) 2. EA Sports Commissioner ($99) 3. ESPN ($99) 4. Fanball ($50) 5. Yahoo! (free)

Basically, you get what you pay for. CBS Sportsline still blows everyone else out of the water, but for under a hundred bucks, EA Sports Commissioner can’t be beat. That’s less than $10 per owner.

Go ahead and give it a try. I expect EA Sports to be able to handle the load of users since they already host a number of online games.

Click below to try it for yourself!