How To Make Fantasy Football Even More Fun
Note: If you want to check out the tool first, here it is! https://tweetbombs.com/
The Pursuit of Better Banter
It’s hard to identify the one thing that makes Fantasy Football so fun because there are so many aspects that make it riveting (read: addicting). Fantasy Football allows anyone to pretend to be an NFL GM: you prep and dominate draft day by drafting sleepers, you orchestrate trades to improve your team utilizing shrewd negotiation skills, and you snag players on the waiver wire before anyone else and look like a genius. It’s an incredible combination of skill and luck spread out over 16 weeks where you are competing against friends for prize money and pride. The list could go on…
But I think my single favorite thing about fantasy football is the camaraderie… The chirping… The smack talk… The banter.
Banter is fueled in many ways: proposing trades, negotiating deals, blowing up the league group chat with Josh Gordon memes, roasting league members for making terrible trades and making “press statements” in the league Facebook group or league group chat following a big loss, a big win, or a big trade.
But I wanted better banter.
My league has a Facebook group and I wanted something different from a “text-based post” in the group. Something different from a “text message” in the group chat.
I wanted better banter.
A new way to build hype.
An innovative way to talk smack.
A different way to drop news bombs on the rest of my league… news bombs…
… this led to a 💡moment: The NBA has Woj Bombs… What if I could create Woj Bombs for football, specifically fantasy football?
Woj Bombs
“Woj” is ESPN NBA Insider Adrian Wojnarowski’s nickname. Wojnarowski regularly posts his scoops on Twitter, with important transactions he reports referred to by his followers as “Woj Bombs.”
Woj has an uncanny knack for getting the first scoop and breaking the biggest NBA deals on Twitter before anyone else.
Forget all of the deals made at the NBA trade deadline. The true winner Thursday was ESPN insider Adrian Wojnarowski, who reported pretty much every trade first. His main competitor, Shams Charania, only tweeted six times Thursday and beat Woj to just one trade scoop — James Ennis to the the 76ers.
Woj Bombs really do seem to come out of nowhere and the Urban Dictionary definition + example sentence using “wojbomb” is spot-on:
So if I wanted to create “Woj Bombs” for fantasy football, who would be my “Woj”?
The first name that came to mind: Adam Schefter, a Senior NFL Insider at ESPN.
Hello Inspect Element
The first solution I thought of was “Inspect Element.”
I knew that I could use Inspect Element to edit the HTML on any website. In plain English, this means I could “appear to edit the text on any website” (if you're curious, here’s a quick guide on how to do this courtesy of wikiHow).
I gave this solution a try — I went to Adam Schefter’s twitter, ctl+clicked on a Tweet, selected “inspect” and started to create my own Schefter “Tweet Bombs.”
I would click inspect on the tweet text and update the text to my liking. I’d then repeat this process for the Tweet date, Tweet time, Tweet like count, and Tweet retweet count. Lastly, I’d screenshot the Tweet, post it in my league Facebook group or league group chat and wait to see what happened.
Eureka! (With some problems)
I posted a few Schefter bombs in the league Facebook group and… it worked!
- It was immediately a nice change from the usual “Facebook post.”
- I even sent some of the Schefter Tweet Bombs to friends who weren’t even in my league and despite not understanding any of the league specific inside jokes, they thought it was hilarious.
- But the best part was some people in my league asked me to start making tweets for them.
The tweets were used for everything from manufacturing trade interest to announcing trade deals to purely talking smack.
Here are a few of my favorite examples with a bit of added context (I definitely went over 280 characters in some of these).
Eureka: Tweet Bomb Gallery
#GolfGate — Someone asked me to make a Tweet calling out Henry for bailing on plans to watch football together so he could go golfing:
Manufacturing Trade Interest — I’m in a keeper league and with the keeper trade deadline approaching, I wanted a way to manufacture trade interest. I tweeted out a list of all my available keepers to let the league know I was ready to deal:
CMC Blockbuster — The previous Tweet worked 😂. After teasing potential fireworks I made this trade for Christian McCaffrey. Note: the “4 quarters for a dollar” line is pure smack talk and is nothing against Todd Gurley, Malcolm Brown, Chris Herndon, or Tyler Boyd.
Big Loss — I lost the following week and Tweeted out “leaked” audio from a “team meeting” I “held” where I quoted Archilochus and my middle school basketball coach. Oh, I also put myself on the hot seat:
Bulletin Board Material — A friend asked me to make a Tweet guaranteeing victory next week (for the record, he lost 😂):
Problem: There has to be a faster + easier way
Even though the Inspect Element solution worked, there were two related problems:
- Time: It sometimes took me 5–10 min to make a Tweet Bomb. This is because if I accidentally pressed a link on the page, or refreshed the page, I would lose all my progress and I’d have to start all over. I also had to inspect multiple times to edit the tweet, the time, the date etc. Furthermore, the editing process was cumbersome. I wondered: is there a way to make a Tweet in < 1 min?
- Scalability: This was a “good” problem to have and is an extension of problem #1: friends were asking me to make Tweets now. I wondered: is there a way to “scale myself” with a tool where anyone can quickly create their own Tweet Bomb?
I also did some searching on Google and came across a few tools (prankmenot, zeoob, faketweeter) but the main downside of these options was that the Tweet designs were outdated. However, despite the outdated design, these existing options could have absolutely worked for my use case (a new form of banter).
But at the end of the day, I was up for the challenge in building a solution so with the above in mind, I asked myself:
What would be the fastest and easiest way to build something which solved both of the above problems?
Hello Bubble.io
After building a social fitness app using a no-code mobile tool called Glide (blog post here if you’re curious) I started to look into the top no-code web tools. I stumbled upon Bubble.io.
Unrealized ideas have potential energy. This potential energy is released when an idea is implemented (built). No-code tools allow anyone to not just build, but to build inside their heads. You don’t need to be a coder to build software.
Bubble.io is a code-free programming language that lets you build and host web applications without engineers.
But the thing I like most about Bubble is its drag and drop builder which gave me the power to build pixel-perfect designs. In this case, pixel-perfect meant I could get very close to the “wow this actually looks like an inspect element created Tweet!” threshold.
I wanted a faster solution and I got one in Bubble. I was able to build https://tweetbombs.com/ in a few hours.
Now, I will caveat this by saying I had spent at least two days going through the Bubble.io lessons to learn how to use the tool and if you’re interested in learning Bubble I’d strongly recommend doing that. But after this “flat learning curve” period, the real reason I was able to go from idea to finished product so quickly was because of the speed of iteration. Because Bubble is an easy to use (read: visual programming) higher-level language, building and modifying a web application is extremely fast. I was able to iterate on the product in a matter of hours, and therefore test the tool live every step of the way. I could make a change, click preview and boom, right away I could see what the finished product would look like.
This gets at what I believe is the power of no-code tools (inspiration from this tweet and this essay by Paul Graham):
No-code tools level the playing field by giving anyone the ability to hack. What this tangibly means is the process of generating ideas and testing them on people can happen inside your head. The reason this testing process can happen inside your head results from the fact that the learning curve for no-code tools is incredibly flat (vs steep). This means once you’ve learned the tool, you can take any idea and in your head map out exactly how you’d build it. It allows anyone to scratch their own itch. Unrealized ideas have potential energy. This potential energy is released when an idea is built. No-code tools allow anyone to not just build but to build inside their heads. This is incredibly powerful.
What’s Next for Tweet Bombs?
I love working on and building things I want because it creates what I like to think of as “the ultimate hedge” where there are only win-win-win scenarios:
- If I am the only person who uses Tweet Bombs, great: I’ve built a tool that I can use during the fantasy season that will save me time, and I’ve improved my Bubble.io skills.
- If a few people in my league use Tweet Bombs, fantastic: I’ve built something that other people find enough value in to use.
- And if 10s or 100s of people use Tweet Bombs, then I would be ecstatic.
Therefore, in true “build what you want” fashion, I have a few ideas for how to improve the site:
- Add in the ability to change the Tweeter: In the NFL I could add Ian Rappaport or NFL Beat Writers. I could add NBA Insiders Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania and drop Woj Bombs or Sham Bombs on friends before playing pickup basketball. I could even add entertaining sports personalities like Stephen A Smith, Bill Simmons, Colin Cowherd or Skip Bayless to mix things up.
- Dark mode Tweets: Because I’m a big fan of Dark mode
However, if you have feedback, feature requests, or any comments in general on the site please do let me know as I would love to hear; you can leave site-specific thoughts here.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post. If there are any other questions you have whether it's related to fantasy football, no-code tools, tech in general… or really anything else that comes to mind, the best way to reach me is on Twitter but you can also email me.
