Fantasy Football, Flight Score, and More

First Thing's First

Hey everyone! It has been awhile, and for that I apologize, but I want to say that I have been hard at work in the meantime. Updates have been made across the board in a huge amount of areas. The patch notes that accompany this post will be quite large. So, let's get into the big stuff.

Fantasy Football

I'd be remiss if I didn't address this first. There will be a larger dedicated dev blog post touching this directly, but we'll discuss it here a bit. First question: why fantasy football? Well, I love fantasy football, and it was also a huge request from the user base. I appreciate that the users here trusted me enough to believe in that. The other main motivation for building a new fantasy platform? I hate where the market is now. Every major player in the space has completely sold out to sportsbooks and gambling. Fantasy football has been turned from what was once a fun, community-oriented, activity with friends into a wealth extraction mechanism. This, to me, is a total perversion and corruption of what fantasy football was meant to be. So I decided to build it back myself. No gambling ever, no ads ever. I would nuke every part of this platform before selling out to gambling companies. I'm here to build the best user experience I can, because god knows I would want someone else to do the same for me. Check it out here

The Pricing Model

A quick note here. One of the things my setup does, knowingly, is put a limit on the revenue that can be generated from fantasy football. This is something I fully accept. However, this does mean I had to look for other ways to cover costs. Here is what I settled on: Your leagues that used to be free on the platforms infested with gambling and ads will now cost you...

One dollar.

That's right. A whole dollar. Not per person. Per league. If you aren't creating a league, just joining them, everything is free. So yell at your commissioner to pay that single whole dollar. The full pricing model will be explained the dedicated post, but that is the basic idea.

Leagues and Drafts

There are tons of ways to draft. The arcade modes from the main mock draft builder got brought over, so you can customize a ton. Furthermore, you've got more arcade modes now! Wacky ways of drafting and fantasy felt like a perfect pairing, so that has been done.

Season-long, weekly leagues, dynasty leagues, keeper leagues, and rookie leagues are all supported. What are weekly leagues? One shot leagues where scoring is a free for all, and the draft is the same week. There are two versions of this: a single week independent of anything else, or 18 interconnected weekly leagues/drafts where total points and winners get carried across the season.

Manager Profiles

I've always been into gaming, so I decided to build a profile system that comes from those roots. Your profile carries your record across all leagues and I have a full ELO system built-in.

League Imports

If you're a Sleeper user, fear not! With a single link and a click, you can quickly and easily import your ENTIRE league from Sleeper! I have been looking into extending this capability for other platforms, so stay tuned.

Rosters and Scoring

The fantasy platform comes a slew of preset options for scoring and roster shapes. However, if you're not feeling any of them, you can experiment! Each format is fully customizable, and you can build your own scoring or roster configurations from scratch. Furthermore, all scoring is fully auditable and traceable. No black boxes here. I'm also experimenting with ways of scoring for positions like HC and OL. OL scoring would be a first on the market system, so look for that soon.

Flight Score

If you're on here, there is no doubt you have familiarity with RAS. The much discussed metric has been around for while, and it has been revolutionary in the way people talk about prospects. Whether you think that impact has been good or bad is up to you. However, there have been a number of documented issues with RAS, many of them mentioned by Kent Lee Platte himself. So I set out to resolve them. The end result is now my own metric, which I, in keeping with the bird themes, have named Flight Score. Flight Score has a fully transparent methodology. Positional weights can be seen here:

GROUP	SIZE	SPEED	STRENGTH	EXPLOSION	AGILITY
QB	15%	25%	5%	30%	25%
RB	10%	30%	10%	30%	20%
WR	10%	35%	5%	30%	20%
TE	20%	25%	10%	25%	20%
OL	25%	10%	25%	20%	20%
EDGE	15%	20%	10%	35%	20%
IDL	25%	15%	25%	25%	10%
LB	10%	25%	10%	30%	25%
CB	10%	35%	5%	30%	20%
S	10%	30%	10%	30%	20%

The full breakdown can be read here

Other Metrics

In building Flight Score, I realized there are a number of metrics that get sometimes used blindly that have no real clarity as to how they are done (looking at you, PFF Grades). So, I will be looking into expanding this area more, building new metrics to address problems with the old ones all while keeping the math and methods fully transparent.

UX Overhaul

One of the main goals I wanted to achieve this summer was to centralize the themes and design system of MockingBoard, giving the platform a coherent and consistent look and feel across all sites, both current and future. That has been done, and the new design system is one I have cheesily named, 'Under the Lights.' It's mostly the same design language as what was already here, just refined and solidified. This has led to a complete UX pass, touching every piece of user-facing code on the site, getting the platform all into the design system.

Other Stuff

What else am I doing? Well, if you're interested, you can always follow the MockingBoard Twitter account for platform specific stuff (and also my sports takes sometimes) right here

You can also follow me personally if you have any interest. My other work is mostly in the field of ML Engineering and Research.

Finally, on a more long-term note, I have some ideas to expand MockingBoard, the overall brand, into the realms of College Football, NBA, and Sports Analytics. Those are all in early pre-development iteration stages, so expect to hear more about those when I put code to IDE.

Closing

Well, this was a long one! Thanks all for sticking with me. I am very excited for the 2026 NFL Season, and MockingBoard is poised to be bigger and better than ever.