Like many of you hardcore fantasy footballers out there, I wasn’t ready to wait until next summer to begin thinking about fantasy football again. Nope. How could you, when there’s so much more fantasy to be played in fantasy playoff leagues? So you could imagine my excitement when I was invited to play in two leagues in NFL.com’s Fantasy Playoff Challenge. Hey, it seemed like everyone was doing it and that it was the most popular playoff game.

Practically speaking, however, the user interface has been a gross disappointment. It is very rudimentary and the format is confusing. For instance, you have a different login for the fantasy game than your traditional login for the NFL.com site. What is that? The most disappointing aspect by far is that it takes a full three days for NFL.com to update the points and standings for the leagues (the site has not updated standings until Wednesdays). You are left to wonder until midweek how well you did in relation to everyone else and your position and points in the standings.

I understand the site is free and NFL is under no obligation to provide a quality game. But coming from the league, and understanding that they want to help promote fantasy football (and yes, they’re obviously aware that fantasy is helping their ratings and bringing in more fans) you would think they would focus and commit more to the game they are trying to promote. It definitely takes some fun out of playing the game. If some of you recall, even Yahoo! learned last August (problems with drafting on their fantasy football site) that one mistake or glitch on their site can cause many to question the quality and think about switching allegiances to other sites. It goes to show that fantasy owners are focused on quality, reliability and user interface when deciding which fantasy league hosts to go with. And that can be an expensive lesson for fantasy sites to learn, both from a reputation and usage perspective.

What say you all? Thumbs up or thumbs down?