It can be addictive to track live game stats on a Sunday during football season. When you’re in multiple leagues, nearly every play counts for or against you.

While most league hosting websites offer free live stats, Yahoo still charges for them with their StatTracker product.

Fortunately, if you don’t feel like paying for live stats, there is an alternative. It is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox called Yahoo Fantasy Football Free Stats. This is part of a screen shot from my team yesterday using the Free Stats program:

The upside is that it’s free. The downside is that it doesn’t calculate fantasy points. It just displays raw stats. That’s one big advantage StatTracker has. Still, it’s better than clicking on every game score within your team list and searching for their stats.

To use this program, you need Firefox with the Greasemonkey add-on installed. This program is not supported by Yahoo (or Fantasy Football Calculator).

If you’re a Firefox user who has decided not to buy StatTracker, give this program a try. It’s guaranteed to save you time every Sunday.

When I’m drafting, there’s typically three things that I want to know about a player:

1. What were his previous stats?
2. What’s happening with him lately?
3. Can I draft him in a later round?

Typically I go to these sources to answer those questions:

1. Pro-Football-Reference
2. Football Guys News Blog
3. Fantasy Football Calculator ADP (yes, shameless plug, but it’s true)

Whether it’s a slow email draft or a live draft, I want to get the information as fast as possible.  Since I use Firefox, I wanted a way to put the first two sites as custom search engines in the Firefox toolbar.

After some searching, I found the Add to Search Bar add-on.   It’s really easy to use, and here is how I used it to add PFR and FBG to my search toolbar:

1. Install the add-on
2. Go to Pro-football-reference.com
3. Right click on the search bar at the top right
4. Select “Add to Search Bar”

Then edit the name or just hit enter and you should see PFR in the search box!  Go ahead and search for a player and you’re taken directly to their career stats page.

Then you can go to Football Guys News and do the same.  My search bar now looks like this:

Obviously, if you have other sites you prefer to use this will work for any of them that have search boxes.  I’m not associated with PFR or FBG at all.  Just sharing a tip that I’ve found useful.

For Internet Explorer users, this link should help you do the same thing: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx.  It only works for IE7 though; IE6 doesn’t have a search bar.  I don’t use IE7 so I haven’t tried it myself.

Give it a try!  I think you’ll find it easier to look up player information during those precious few moments during a draft.