Mastering the League Dominator: The Basics

Photo: Thomas Shea, USA Today Sports

So you've drafted your team (probably with the Draft Dominator, our best-in-the-industry fantasy draft tool), and you've checked out our Rate My Team feature after the draft to see how you did. Rate My Team has estimated your chances of making the playoffs with great, good, or average in-season management. You like that "with great in-season management" estimate the best and want to ensure you hit that mark, but you're not sure where to start.

Enter the League Dominator (formerly known as MyFootballguys), the most robust and powerful league management tool on the market. Where the Draft Dominator is designed to get you the best team possible before Week 1, the League Dominator is built to help you shepherd it through to Week 16. (Or even Week 17 if you need it to.) The League Dominator is available online for free, or for purchase as a standalone mobile app through the app store on your preferred mobile device.

Naturally, a tool that's designed to do everything you need can be a bit intimidating. This article is meant to serve as a companion piece to our video series uncovering everything you need to know about leveraging this tool to your advantage.

Here's what this article covers

• Getting Started
• Importing Leagues
• The 5-Second Primer
• Setting Lineups
• Evaluating Your Roster
• Waivers and Free Agency
• Trades
• Converting from MyFBG Classic

Getting Started

The first step to unlocking the power of the League Dominator is logging into your Footballguys account. Season-long Pro members have full access to the web version of the league dominator included in their subscription. If you're not yet a member, you can subscribe here.

if you'd rather, the League Dominator is also available as a standalone mobile app that is not included in the subscription, but can be purchased on the Apple App Store or Google Play store. The mobile app contains the same features as the native web version, but the experience is optimized for smaller screens.

IMPORTING LEAGUES

Once you've logged in, first-time users will be taken to an import leagues screen. This is where you can import every fantasy league you play in. Simply click or tap on the league host (ESPN, My Fantasy League, Yahoo, etc.) and enter your login credentials for that particular site. Here's the mobile view of that screen:

From there, the League Dominator will automatically import your league settings, including scoring, team names, weekly schedule, starting lineup requirements, etc. If at any point you need to add, edit or remove leagues, select More at the top right (bottom right on mobile), and then Edit All My Leagues. From the Settings menu (located at the top left on desktop or via the draft gears icon on mobile) you will find almost everything you need to edit the settings of your leagues.

The 5-Second Primer

Once your leagues are imported, the 5-Second Primer will become the default landing page for the League Dominator app. The 5-Second Primer is designed to be a comprehensive gateway to managing your leagues; as its name suggests, if you only had five seconds a week to manage all of your leagues, this is the place to go. It contains start/sit recommendations and waiver/free agent suggestions for every league all digestible at a glance. If you're on a mobile device, this is what it will look like:

As you can see, the 5-Second Primer displays all of your teams along with who it recommends starting based not only on projected points but also on the rest of your roster and even the roster of the team you're facing this week. (More on that later.) It also lists any free agents who are projected to score higher than another player you have rostered to give you a quick list of players you might want to consider adding. From here you can quickly sync your roster with your league host (if, for instance, you've already added a new player and want to see what your team looks like now). Also, on the desktop version, there is a button next to the sync button that will take you directly to your league so you can set your lineup immediately.

Setting Lineups

With most sites, start/sit decisions are typically addressed with off-the-shelf weekly cheatsheets. The Lineup Dominator certainly has those if you are interested, but its cheatsheets are dynamic. It provides projections based on your league's scoring parameters instead of generic lists, and it automatically highlights your players and available free agents (as well as any opposing teams in your league, if you so desire). To access these cheatsheets, simply select "More" at the bottom of the screen and then "Week Rankings" (on mobile), or mouse over "Lineups" at the top of the screen and select "Week Rankings" from the drop-down menu (on desktop).

We won't spend too much time on cheatsheets because by knowing everything about your actual opponent on any given week, the Lineup Dominator can provide even better, more-tailored advice than just generic point projections. To access them, select the "Matchups" button at the bottom of the screen (on mobile) or mouse over "Lineups" at the top of the screen and select "Matchup Dominator" from the drop-down list (on desktop).

This page presents the same information you saw on the Five Second Primer alongside much more data to consider and drill down into. Not only do you see projected points, but you also see upside and floor projections (80% of the time a player's actual weekly production will fall between these two numbers), the quality of the opposing defense, how that player has performed in recent weeks, whether that player will be in a dome or playing on prime time, and a recommendation to start someone currently on your bench or bench someone currently in your starting lineup. Please note that the League Dominator automatically factors all of this information into the recommendation it makes for you, it is merely displaying all the various bits of information it is considering.

If you select the orange "analysis" button in the top right, you get a detailed breakdown of your weekly match-up. Based on simulating potential outcomes for every player on both rosters, the League Dominator estimates your chances of winning and tailors your recommendations based on those odds. If you are an underdog, the Dominator will automatically push you toward players with higher upside. If you are a favorite, the Dominator will automatically push you to players with higher floors.

Additionally, the League Dominator considers every potential player combination in every game, advising you whether you should for instance start a quarterback/receiver pair or favor two players who play in different games to minimize variance. The Dominator even considers cross-matchup combinations— whether you should play running backs that play on the same team as your opponent's starting tight end, for instance— to ensure that all recommendations are specifically tailored to maximize your chances of winning based on your team, your league settings, and your weekly opponent.

If you click through to the other tabs under Analysis, you can see how your team compares to your opponent by position, when each team is projected to score its points (e.g. whether you should expect to be winning or trailing after the early Sunday games if all goes according to plan), and even recommends available free agents that would improve your opponent's starting lineup if you want to pre-emptively add them and prevent them from being started against you.

Evaluating Your Roster

Knowing who to start in a given week is important, of course. But even more important to your success is having players worth starting in the first place. To that end, the League Dominator has a suite of tools designed to help you evaluate your roster, identifying areas of strength and weakness and addressing the latter. To get started, either select the "Roster" button at the bottom of the screen (on mobile) or mouse over "Rest of Year" at the top of the screen and select "Your Roster" from the drop-down menu (on desktop).

The Roster screen will show all of your players along with detailed information about their expected performance this season. It lists the number of weeks Footballguys projects you will start the player in question and, under "Pts+", how many "extra" points that player is worth to your team. (Think of it like this: if this player was injured today and lost for the season, this is how many fewer points your team would be expected to score this year based on the quality of your backups and available free agents.)

The "News" tab at the top of the screen displays the latest news from around the internet on all of your players. Navigating to "More" and then "Rest of Season Rankings" (on mobile) or "Rest of Year" and then "Rest of Season Rankings" (on desktop) will pull up a list of Footballguys' rest-of-season projections for every player in the league, again with your team highlighted yellow, free agents highlighted blue, and the potential to highlight any other teams in your league to compare.

Finally, arguably the most important part of evaluating your team is knowing where you stand relative to the rest of your league. Selecting "More" and then "League Forecast" (on Mobile) or "Roster" and then "League Forecast" (on desktop) will pull up a projected ranking of every team in your league. From here, you can select "Pos" or "Team by Pos" at the top of the page to get a breakdown of your starters and depth broken down by position. This feature is useful when trying to assess your relative strengths and weaknesses, and can be especially useful for dynasty teams when deciding whether to compete for this year or transition to a rebuild.

Waivers and Free Agents

When you're ready to drill down more into waivers and free agency, select the "WW/FAs" button at the bottom of the screen (on mobile) or mouse over "WW/Trades" and select "Waivers/FA" from the drop-down menu (on desktop). The landing page will take you to Sigmund Bloom's weekly Stock Up Report. Unlike the traditional Stock Up Report, though, the League Dominator will scan your leagues and only display players who are actually available on your specific waiver wire.

After you're done reading Sigmund's thoughts on available players, select the "All FAs by Value" tab at the top. This will show the available free agents along with how much they are projected to help your team based on the other players on your roster and your league's scoring system. By default, the list will be sorted by Bench+ (how many points this player is projected to improve your bench by), but it will also display Pts+ (how many points this player will add to your starting lineup over the course of the year).

Finally, knowing who to add is only half of the battle, you also need to know who to drop. If you select a player from either tab you'll see an orange "Who Should I Drop?" button at the bottom of the page with a suggestion to maximize your total roster value.

Trades

Finally, there's one last way for you to improve your roster during the season, and that is through trades with other owners. The League Dominator offers two tools to assist in making trades. The first is the rest-of-season rankings, mentioned above under Evaluating Your Roster. The rest-of-season rankings assign a value to every fantasy football player based on your league's specific scoring and lineup rules and then ranks these players. These values are designed to function as rough trade value estimates for your league.

For even more actionable recommendations, though, select "More" and then "Trade" (on mobile) or "WW/Trades" and then "Trade" (on desktop). This takes you to the Lineup Dominator's trade analyzer tool, which has three main modes of operation.

The landing page here is the suggested trade finder. The lineup dominator evaluates all trades on three parameters— how much it improves your starting lineup, how much it increases your bench scoring, and how much it increases your "bench balance" (how evenly-distributed your depth is across all positions). In the trade finder, you can specify specific goals ("improve your starting lineup by 1%" or "increase bench balance without losing more than 0.5% of total bench production"). If you then select "Search for Trades", the Lineup Dominator will compare every roster in your league to try to find you potential trade offers that meet your required parameters.

If you instead want to see a list of players that the trade analyzer recommends you try to acquire, click over to the "Targets" tab at the top of the screen. Based on your roster composition and league settings, the Lineup Dominator will generate a list of players who would improve your team for you to ask your leaguemates about.

Finally, if you have a specific deal in mind (or if perhaps one of your leaguemates has made you an offer), you can select the third tab, "Analyze Offer". Here you can enter a specific deal and ask the League Dominator to analyze its impacts on your team's starters, bench, and balance.

Migrating from MyFBG Classic

Many subscribers have been using MyFBG Classic for years to cover many of these cases, but the League Dominator was built from the ground up with the best practices and algorithms at our disposal. This means the League Dominator can do everything MyFBG Classic can do, but the reverse is not the case.

We've listened to what our subscribers love about MyFBG Classic, however, and have worked to make the transition to the League Dominator as easy as possible. For subscribers who prefer the look and feel of the old 10-Second Primer to the new 5-Second Primer, we have added a Classic view that perfectly recreates the old look. Simply toggle between the "Summary" and "Classic" options in the top-right corner of the Primer.

Similarly, we've been told how important the ability to highlight teams is, so we've made the feature quicker and easier to access than ever. When on the Week Rankings or Rest-of-Season Rankings pages, simply click the "Teams" button in the top-right corner to highlight any other teams you wish, now with multiple different colors for multiple teams.

With a full suite of tools to help you analyze your roster, acquire talent to address weaknesses, and set weekly lineups, the Lineup Dominator gives you everything you need to achieve great in-season management and match the Rate My Team's most optimistic scenarios for how your season will play out.

Migrating from MyFBG Classic

If you've been a user of the classic app, here's a video to help you move over to the new MyFootballguys.

If you ever have any questions or need more info, a blue help icon appears in the bottom-left corner of every page, or you can reach out to the Footballguys help desk at any time.