Before the football season began, I wondered if there were any alternatives to the major fantasy platforms, Yahoo, ESPN, etc. There were more platforms dedicated to fantasy than I thought. Undeterred, I decided to give them a shot, one per season. This fantasy football season, I decided to try Sleeper. If you missed my initial review, you can find that here.
It’s right about the halfway point for most leagues in fantasy football, so I wanted to give a mid-season update on my experience with Sleeper.
Communication
According to their website, facilitating communication is one of their cornerstones and they deliver. Sleeper does a great job of giving fantasy updates as well as making updates to the app itself. The most recent updates included a delay option for game day updates because the push notifications were coming in faster than the games were broadcast.
At the end of each week Sleeper generates a sleek report recapping the week and announcing the winners of various awards, ie., best/worst manager, biggest/closest game, high/low scorer, etc. What I really like is that Sleeper posts this report in the league chat for everyone to see, unlike Yahoo, which sends individual reports to each player. Sleeper, not only keeps the league informed, but also helps generate conversation by letting it be known what achievements your league-mates are wracking up.
I also enjoy the Trade Center interface on Sleeper. Managers can add players on the trade block for all to see. This is much easier than having to text everyone in your league to find out who they are willing to trade and what they need. This is a feature that all platforms should incorporate. The waiver wire setup is extremely easy to use and you can seamlessly see what players are trending as each day goes. Yahoo has a good setup but you need to navigate through a few layers to see who is trending.
Interaction
Another thing Sleeper tries to do is make the fantasy experience more interactive. A part of setting up your team is choosing your mascot. These mascots are pretty cool and pummel each other on game day. Sleeper offers a small set of free mascots and a rotating set of legendary and epic mascots that you can buy with cookies. There are a few ways to obtain cookies. Inviting friends to mock drafts and starting new leagues. After that, you have to purchase the cookies.
The in-app purchases are Sleeper’s main source of income. Which means that there are no ads invading your screen and blocking your view. This also means that the Sleeper platform is fast and smooth despite all of the added bells and whistles.
I respect their business model but I think if they were able to add mini games or unicorn benchmarks that can earn your team a golden cookie that would add a fun incentive to increase interaction. To prevent it from eating into their revenue stream, they can also implement the loss of cookies for teams who underperform, or integrate it into the trading system. Who wouldn’t take a few cookies to sweeten the deal?
Overall, this app is pretty cool, but like anything else, there are pluses and minuses. I do think it is well worth a try especially if you are new to the fantasy scene. In the next update, we will focus on the playoffs and how Sleeper runs its postseason.
Sleeper offers a variety of mascots for cookies. 
The week’s recap report is posted in the league chat. 
The trade center shows what players have been put on the trade block by team managers.