Fantasy football fanatics who are hungry for a more advanced and nuanced platform may be in luck.
A few former Philadelphia Eagles employees have created a new fantasy game that is just a few steps shy of allowing its users to be actual NFL GMs.
The platform is called Reality Sports Online, and the brains behind it are Matt Papson and Stephen Wendell.
Among other cool new features, Reality Sports Online offers an amazing new free agency auction room in which owners must bid on players through a computer algorithm which acts as an agent. The program weighs other offers, age and injury concerns in selecting the best deal. No word on whether the algorithm also takes into account pressure from Jay-Z to steal its clients.
"Everything we did, we started with the NFL rules and worked backwards," Papson told CNN. "At its roots that was what fantasy was supposed to be about. There was a fork in the road where fantasy sports became its own thing. We're trying to converge them back together."
Papson worked as a junior salary cap analyst for the Eagles, so he knows a thing or two about the managing a roster. While some fantasy football GMs are OK with simply setting their roster every week and then stepping away from their computers, Reality Sports Online is aiming for a more stats-focused crowd.
The nature of the platform will require close monitoring and is tailored to a certain type of fan.
"I think the Wall Street guy crunching numbers can apply that to fantasy football," Wendell told CNN. "With this, you can say 'I won because I'm smarter than you.' Wall Street guys like being able to say that."
The service currently charges fans $9.99 per team and Papson and Wendell figure that they need about 17,000 players to break even with the initial $400,000 launch funds that they compiled from investors.
