I was borderline shocked to learn that Yahoo released a fantasy football tracking app, Yahoo! Fantasy Football ‘09. For those of you out of the loop, MyFantasyTeams Pro (and others, such as Fantasy Football Live) have been available for some time and do basically the same thing.
The key word there is basically. While the MyFantasyTeams app is devoted to bringing as much as possible from the Yahoo website to your iPhone, Yahoo! Fantasy Football is more of a stat tracker… and that’s about it.
Case in point, while you can add and drop players through the app, you can’t trade players. In fact, you can’t even view other team’s rosters unless you are playing them that week.
You can’t edit your smack talk or view the league message board. So, while Yahoo! Fantasy Football will be great during the games, it’s pretty close to useless the rest of the week.
There are some positives with the app. It looks fantastic, though quite a departure from the website’s look. Also, on the opening page you can watch the latest ‘Fantasy Football This Week’ video featuring the Yahoo experts. This is the one wrinkle they put in the app, and I do love it.
Then there’s the fact that Yahoo! Fantasy Football is a free app while MyFantasyTeams Pro is $3.99. I’m a big fan of MyFantasyTeams Pro and Yahoo! Fantasy Football ‘09 did nothing to change my feelings.
If this a first step for Yahoo, there’s enough here that I’m excited for future versions of the app. But until I see more features, I’ll spend my money on the more complete app.
