Fantasy Football Team Sync - Preseason Toolkit, User Guide and Tutorial

August 15, 2024

Learn about RotoBaller's team sync with a tutorial walkthrough regarding fantasy football tool features such as Draft Assistant, Cheat Sheets, Custom Rankings, and In-Season Tools.

This is a tutorial for RotoBaller NFL Team Sync Preseason Tools. If you are interested in the Tutorial for NFL In-Season Tools, click here.

Howdy, RotoBallers! We’re happy to see your interest in our exclusive Team Sync tools! If you're here, it's likely because you want to improve your fantasy football results. Team Sync is an industry-leading bundle of tools to help you win your fantasy football drafts and dominate your leagues. It provides plenty of advanced features -- automatically customizing all projections, rankings, and tools to your specific leagues, settings, scoring rules, and rosters.

Team Sync allows you to link an unlimited number of your fantasy football leagues from popular platforms such as ESPN, Yahoo, Underdog, DraftKings, NFFC, and many more. We’ve got you covered whether you play best ball, redraft, or dynasty. Syncing your leagues allows you to get ready for the upcoming season with mock drafts, cheat sheets, and projections, while you can take advantage of in-season tools and reports tailored specifically to your league, roster, scoring, and matchup settings.

The following Tutorials and User Guide will help you get up and running with the Team Sync platform, and put you on the path to winning more! For a more detailed video tutorial, check out our Video Tutorials on Youtube.

Loading Up The Team Sync Tool

Starting from Step 1, you're already here at RotoBaller so head to the Premium Tools vertical under the NFL menu on our top site banner. You will then select “Team Sync Tools” to get started.

Once you click through on RotoBaller’s premium tools dropdown, where you’ll be presented with “Your Leagues,” “Sync New League,” and “Manage Best Ball Leagues.”

Let’s start with Sync New League, where you’ll pick which platform the league is hosted on. Once you’ve done this and selected the league, the system will sync your matchup, roster, and scoring settings to provide an experience tailored to you. Platforms currently supported are ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, Fantrax, NFL.com, Sleeper, Fleaflicker, Real Time Fantasy Sports (RTFS), MyFantasyLeague (MFL), FFPC, and Ottoneu.

And guess what? Now you can select "My Platform Isn't Listed" and proceed with most of the tools operating as if it were included after some additional user input to maintain league settings, rosters, and so on.

We'll cover the best ball section later, but the platforms supported there as of August 2024 are FanDuel, DraftKings, Underdog, Yahoo, FFPC, BestBall 10s, Fantrax, NFFC, and RT Sports.

Some of these sites require a browser extension to work, such as ESPN and CBS. Click through on each of them to see the respective process for each spelled out. Other sites, such as Yahoo, will ask you to sync your Yahoo account to load your leagues and teams.

Once your league is synced, you will have a litany of draft/preseason tools available on the League Dashboard. Use our preseason projections and your know-how to set the table with cheat sheets, mocks, and more. Let’s dive into that.

Cheat Sheet Central

Before you draft, you’ll want to consider building a cheat sheet for your draft-day needs. Whether you play redraft or dynasty, our RotoBaller ranks help fuel an easy-to-use formula that gives you winning advice. Dynasty players can utilize a toggle that brings in age considerations and career trends, and those in dynasty keeper leagues can select them ahead of entering the draft setup.

Then entering the Cheat Sheet tool gives you drag-and-drop capabilities with an autosaving function with a notes section that shows up in the draft tool. Users should take advantage of color coding as well, whether you like to denote tier, key targets, fades, and so on. See this example of the top-12 players below:

Any notes written on the sheet will be visible from the "Expert Picks" section when using the Draft Assistant/Simulator as well. This helps you keep your thoughts extremely organized as the picks fly.

Be sure to name each Cheat Sheet and confirm your settings with up to 500 or 750 players, with scoring settings ranging from classic defaults (non-PPR, half-PPR, full PPR) or your custom league’s scoring. A fun addition for 2024 is that you can copy and paste a list of players to kick off a Cheat Sheet.

Then export through four different methods for offline drafts or if you simply like having a hard copy in front of you during your online draft to mark up. Your options for exporting are copying (to be pasted elsewhere), an Excel file, a CSV file, or a PDF for printing. Users can filter by team or position.

Those who play in Salary Cap formats will love the Draft Value Generator tool, which will provide default settings based on our intel that you can tweak as you see fit. Then you can adjust as you want with the same four export options.

Preparing To Use The Draft Simulator/Assistant

Before you enter the mock draft/draft assistant tool for real, be sure you check and confirm your league and roster settings. There is also a “Draft Settings” page to confirm your draft type and team order, with the ability to toggle dynasty rankings, dynasty keepers, and a favorite: position weighting.

Does your league tend to hammer wide receivers early and leave quarterbacks for the late rounds? Maybe no one ever drafts a kicker or defense until the very last rounds (if at all)? Why settle for a simulator that doesn’t let you account for that? Tweak all of that here!

And then the fun begins, as you’ll be able to stress test those cheat sheets in a Mock Draft Simulator setting before the real deal. Veterans of the tool can hop right into the Draft Assistant with live sync capabilities depending on the platform.

After your actual draft is complete, be sure to fire up the Position Evaluator, Projected Team Rankings, and other fun projections based on drafted stats and league schedule.

Use League Defaults section → for each league you can go to Draft Settings from the league home page and set defaults so that each time you can have pre-selected options checked off.

Set your draft order, rules, starting cheat sheet, auction values, dynasty keepers if needed for drag & drop to respective rounds by team OR use league rosters.

Position weighting for capturing leaguemate tendencies (QB heavy room set QB to 9, etc.) to inform AI drafters.

Pick Trading allows you to do those things as needed before the mock begins. Those will be reflected by a trade icon on the mock/assistant draft board page as well.

Using The Draft Simulator/Assistant

So you’ve confirmed your league and roster settings are ready to rumble. You’ve loaded up cheat sheets and have salary cap values if needed. Let’s use the Draft Simulator/Assistant to familiarize ourselves with the software tool. It effectively operates just as the Live Draft Sync/Assistant. Here are the exciting features available to users:

The suggested mock draft setup is to set the AI picks on “Quick Simulation” and change the time for your pick to match your league’s timer, or pick 90 seconds if you want the most time to deliberate. (You can pause the mock engine at any time during your picks.)

Then the picks start flying and the fun begins! Your view of the board can tab between Expert Picks, which lists top options by your specific “Team Needs” and “Overall Value” in side-by-side columns. Each player widget lists their overall rank, positional rank, ADP, Bye, projected stats, and last year’s stats. Click "Load More" if you want to see more players.

Additionally, you’ll see “Need” or “Overall” scores that help orient you in comparing players in a way beyond ordinal rank. Finally, there is an “ANP” percentage that shows the estimated probability that said player will be available by your next pick. Hide any player by toggling the eye with a slash line through it next to their name.

Other tabs at the top show even more data! There’s the Results page, which shows projected results within your league and how you stand compared to others. Projections show all players’ projected stats for 2024 in several notable categories. Cheat Sheet pulls up any sheet that you put together to assist in your drafting. And what would a war room be without a draft board tab?

You can select players from the default screen or by starring players to place them in your queue, where you’ll also find a “Draft” button when it’s your turn. Do you want to follow the recommended picks? Stick to your Cheat Sheet? Try it all and tweak your master plan as needed, checking the projected results as you go down each path. You can view raw projected stats or ranks in each category, with the total team or starters only being graded.

Once you’ve made your final draft pick then you’ll be taken to a “Draft Analysis” page, which shows five tabs. First comes “Ranks,” which displays your standing amongst leaguemates based on fantasy points. You may select certain positions or “Starters Only” to be displayed. Results illustrate more detail with projected statistics by category, showing you exactly where your projected points are coming from.

Breakdown presents that data by position, rather than by category. Rosters show each team’s ending squad for positional comparisons. Then there’s the Draft Board, which not only shows the draft in all of its glory but also color-codes each pick, with green denoting a good value and red showing a reach.

If you’re in an auction environment, you’ll see the current nominated player in the top left, with the top right showing Team Bid and Max Budget. The Bidding tab is the default with other tabs nudged down by one (Expert Picks, Results, Projections, Cheat Sheet, Draft Board).

Here you see the bidding in action of Christian McCaffrey.You can see how easy it is to track the action coming from each team on the player and our news appears below CMC to be sure you've got the latest intel when drafting.

When viewing the Player List, you'll see rank, predraft $, Player, Need Score, the Queue star, and a Nomination denotation. Click into a player and see the Team Competition tab, similar ADPs, News Feed, 2023 Stats, and 2024 Outlook. You can bid but also skip certain players for the mock for time’s sake if you aren’t interested. And it can always reset back to any pick point in time. Under settings, you can enable Inflation as well.

Use all these to determine how you approach the draft and then let ‘er rip! If at any point you decide you want to try divergent strategies, you can play out the draft with Strategy A before reverting the picks to say, Round 5 or a certain nomination, and then making a different decision and seeing where that leads. If you flex this tool’s true muscle then it’ll be extremely difficult to be caught off-guard on draft day.

At the mock’s completion, you’ll receive a roster breakdown after the draft, color-coded by position for relative strength whether you view it by roster or your board. You can go back and analyze it at any time but a fun feature allows you to clone it for a new mock as well.

Best Ball Drafts

It’s 2024 so you know we support Best Ball as well! Head to the Team Sync home page and you’ll see “Manage Best Ball Leagues.” Let’s briefly list the supported platforms as of early August:

*FanDuel, DraftKings, Underdog, Yahoo, FFPC, BestBall 10s, Fantrax, NFFC, RT Sports

There is support for both football and baseball at this time, with our current interests taking us down the football rabbit hole. You can view and manage your current configured leagues, hop into the draft simulator/assistant, and click into another Cheat Sheets hub.

There isn’t a live sync with best ball but you can manually go along with the draft assistant, with each platform’s settings selectable under the League Emulation dropdown. Choose pick speed, your draft slot, position weighting, and two exciting BB exclusives: Upside Potential (Volatility) and Best Ball Stacking.

Set values between 1-9 for each, just as you would for position weighting if you want to bump up/down more “boom-bust” types with Upside Potential. Increasing or decreasing the stacking value will be reflected in teams going out of their way to pair up players from the same team (typically seen as QB/WR and QB/TE).

When you enter the draft room you’ll see a similar layout compared to the other draft assistant, except now you’ll see an “UP/VOL” bar graph by each player. For a top pick like CeeDee Lamb, the value will be relatively low. Someone with a sky-high UP/VOL value is Zamir White, who could go off as a workhorse for the Raiders all year long or be this year’s Alexander Mattison.

As the picks roll in, you will also start to see “Stacking Opportunity” icons pop up below some names with a wave of green. If you don’t want to miss an opportunity then you’ll love this! And if you’re done with a certain stack or want to skip a player who is being artificially bumped up by the stacking tool, you can just hide them with the little eye logo to the right of their name

Once you complete your draft then you’ll get the same array of Ranks, Results, Breakdown, Rosters, and Draft Board that comes with the other drafts. Users will enjoy many of the same features, such as having the picks highlighted in green or red depending on value. Sharpen your strategies and take down a tournament with us!

Finally, let's give a brief overview of the fun in-season tools and league reports available to users.

In-Season Tools

Enjoy further insights and fun with in-season management tools. There are 10 key tools that you can run. The tools are:

1. Category Results - Breakdown of applicable scoring categories, with access to per-period trends and how you compare to league averages.
2. Injury Report - A multifaceted report that shows injured free agents with return dates and rest-of-season projections, as well as injuries on each team in your league.
3. Free Agent Finder - View a report showing the top available free agents by lineup slot for your league based on our projections.
4. Lineup Optimizer - Maximize projected points with our start/sit recommendations, which include free agents who would improve your score.
5. Matchup Analyzer - This tool previews your upcoming matchup(s) with win-loss projections.
6. Roster Experiments - Play out "what-if" scenarios and witness the consequences of add/drops or trades on your roster.
7. Weekly Newsletter - AI-generated newsletters in the voice of famous commentators, drunk uncles, and more make for fun banter.
8. League Standings - These are straightforward standings and relevant data for each team's scoring thus far.
9. Scoreboard - Look at current and recent matchups, as well as each team's top-performing players.
10. Playoff Primer - See if you're projected for the playoffs with matchups, NFL team schedules, the best free agents, and more.
11. Bye Week Guide - Avoid any bye-week blues with your roster's bye outlook and the best free agents who can help step in.

League Reports

On top of those useful in-season tools, we offer plenty of reports to aid your quest for knowledge and leverage:

1. Trade Analyzer - Uses your league settings to compare trades of up to three players per team, providing an analysis of winners and losers.
2. Who Should I Start - Supplies a detailed analysis of who to start and who to bench between two players.
3. Roster News - Get our RotoBaller news tailored to your players.
4. Projections - Stats projected for your league with each scored category, with different intervals available.
5. Statistics - Detailed stats for players based on your league settings.
6. Top Performances - Want to see which efforts stood out?
7. Role Changes - Highlights players who have seen a change in usage.
8. Defense Rankings - Color-coded report to help you find those DST targets.
9. Weekly Schedule - Easy way to see your league's schedule, with the strength of schedule color-coding.
10. ROI Report - See which players have provided the best (and worst!) return on investment given their draft slot and stats.
11. Missing Teammate Impact - Learn about how a player's absence impacts the rest of the team.
12. Sleepers/Busts - Monitor which players are doing notably better and worse than preseason projections had hoped.
13. Consistency - Analyze how often a player scored above or below a customizable deviation percentage of their average points per game.
14. Home vs. Away - View player splits based on venue

Support

For additional Team Sync support, or any specific questions or issues, please email [email protected].