Yahoo! Sports

'''Yahoo! Sports''' is a sports news website launched by Yahoo! on December 8, 1997. It receives a majority of its information from STATS, Inc., employs various writers, and has team pages for teams in almost every North American sport. (Before the launch of Yahoo! Sports, certain elements of the site were known as Yahoo! Scoreboard.)

Sports covered
The United States edition of Yahoo! Sports covers many sports, including NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, College Football, College Basketball, NASCAR, golf, tennis, FIFA World Cup, Arena Football, Boxing, CFL, Cycling, IndyCar, Major League Soccer, Motor sports, Olympics, NCAA Baseball, NCAA Hockey, NCAA Women's Basketball, WNBA, World Cup, Track & Field, Cricket (UK), Figure Skating, Rugby (UK), Swimming, Mixed Martial Arts, and Horse Racing. Yahoo! Sports also previously covered the now defunct ABL and WUSA.

Writers
Yahoo! Sports employs a deep bench of award-winning reporters, which as of December 2012 includes Pat Forde, Adrian Wojnarowski, Dan Wetzel, Greg Wyshynski, Jason Cole, and Jeff Passan among others.

Key dates in Yahoo! Sports

 * December 8, 1997: Yahoo! Sports is launched.
 * January 17, 2003: Yahoo! Sports launched the first major redesign of the website.
 * February 8, 2006: Yahoo! Sports launched the Yahoo! Sports Blog.
 * May 8, 2006: Yahoo! Sports starts streaming free live NHL games.
 * May 30, 2006: Yahoo! Sports launched the Yahoo! Sports Beta website.
 * January 30, 2007: Yahoo! Sports puts the following on its sports homepage: "What if your favorite sports site got even better? The all new Yahoo! Sports. Coming soon."
 * February 1, 2007: Yahoo! Sports launched the current homepage.
 * February 1, 2007: Yahoo! Sports Beta website was taken offline.
 * June 21, 2007: Yahoo! Sports acquires Rivals.com.
 * January 11, 2011: Yahoo! Sports combines with SportsFanLive.com. to begin producing ThePostGame.com, a daily online magazine.

Yahoo! and NBC Sports Group
On December 9, 2012, Yahoo! and the NBC Sports Group announced a content and promotional deal combining Yahoo! Sports’ original reporting expertise, coverage of big events, Rivals’ college content and popular fantasy sports products with NBC Sports Group’s growing digital assets, and significant television promotion and integration.

While Yahoo! Sports and the NBC Sports Group will continue to maintain separate sites and editorial control of their respective newsrooms and digital properties, they will collaborate on premium sports news and events coverage both online and on the air. Yahoo! Sports’ popular products will also be included in the NBC Sports Group’s digital assets.

Key features of the alliance include :

Editorial Depth: The combined talent roster of Yahoo! Sports and NBC Sports features a deep bench of award-winning reporters and commentators, such as NBC’s Bob Costas and Mike Florio; Yahoo! Sports’ Dan Wetzel and Adrian Wojnarowski. Yahoo! Sports’ renowned investigative reporting will be featured on NBC TV, giving fans multiple-platform delivery.

Original Video Programming Concepts: Yahoo! Sports and NBC Sports will work together to develop original made-for-web video programs that will appear on both Yahoo! Sports and NBCSports.com featuring fan favorites from among the award-winning editorial teams’ rosters, including:

NBC Sports host and Emmy Award-winning commentator Bob Costas: video sports news interviews and editorials Football Night in America’s Tony Dungy & Rodney Harrison: video segments during NFL season

Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk on NBCSports.com: daily, weekday NFL web show, Pro Football Talk Live

Rivals on Recruiting: weekly college recruiting show with Rivals and NBC Sports talent.

Live Streaming: Yahoo! Sports will link to and promote the NBC Sports Live Extra video player. Fans will be able to watch live streams of some of NBC’s biggest events, starting with Sunday Night Football and NHL Game of the Week. Live content from NBC Sports Network will continue to be distributed through NBC Sports Live Extra on a TV Everywhere basis.

Fantasy Sports: Yahoo! Sports, the leading fantasy platform, will become the exclusive fantasy game provider of NBC Sports’ Rotoworld, the premiere fantasy news and information site. This will include Yahoo! Sports’ fantasy experiences for football, baseball, hockey, soccer, College Bowl Pick’em and Tourney Pick’em.

Rivals.com: The college sports destination will power recruiting and college sporting news for NBCSports.com and the NBC Sports Regional Networks.

NBC Sports Regional Networks: The authentic, local sports properties will serve as Yahoo! Sports’ preferred content provider in relevant markets, and integrate Yahoo! Sports’ team pages, fantasy experts and sports talent.

NBC’s Alli Sports: Providing youth-focused, action-sports video and other content to Yahoo! Sports.

Yahoo! fantasy football website crash
On Sunday, November 11, 2012 Yahoo! Fantasy sports experienced an outage. By Monday, November 12 the problem had been identified and service was re-established. The following letter from Ken Fuchs, Head of Yahoo! Sports – including an FAQ for consumers - was issued to users on Wednesday, November 14. See below:

Dear Yahoo! Fantasy Users,

As I mentioned in my earlier email, Yahoo! works hard to provide great experiences for our users every day. For you, we understand that Fantasy is a core part of your daily routine during this time of year. On Sunday we experienced technical issues which caused the Fantasy experience to be inaccessible. We're sorry. Our entire team worked tirelessly to re-establish the service - however, we had a significant outage. We know this created inconvenience and frustration for millions of our fans, and we feel we owe you an explanation.

So what happened? At Yahoo!, we have giant machines called "filers" that process a lot of the real-time data and stats for us and for you. We do millions of calculations every hour for our games, and normally our machines can handle this with no problem. Recently, we discovered a hardware issue in one of the filers that caused the other one to overload. We replaced some hardware, re-configured the setup, and did some testing. However this Sunday - at approximately 12:15 p.m. Eastern - the new configuration failed. This created an overload on storage capacity and took the Fantasy part of our site down.

We had dozens of engineers from various teams working together to try to determine the cause and fix it. One option was to fall back on another data center, but that would have meant shutting the game down and losing scoring data. We wanted to avoid that at all costs. Ultimately, we were able to move our mobile apps to a back-up data center, free up storage to get the PC version of the game working, and get the mobile apps up in a "read-only" state - meaning you could see scores and data, but you still couldn't set lineups and interact.

We spent Sunday night and most of Monday looking at dozens of potential causes. Monday afternoon, we stress-tested our system. Everything seemed to be in working order, so we turned on all our mobile app functions in time for Monday Night Football. Everything performed as expected and continues to do so. We'll have all hands on deck this coming Sunday to closely monitor performance and ensure we can respond quickly in case of any abnormal activity.

We know many of you have questions about your leagues and games, so we've also set up a FAQ here that will explain how we are going to handle various scenarios.

Finally, we know we failed you this weekend, and there's no way to fix that. As a token of our appreciation for your patience and continued support, we wanted to give something back. First, we're offering a complimentary football weekly Scouting Report for the remainder of the year. Hopefully this will help you down the stretch. The report includes weekly expert analysis, rankings and news to help you make smart decisions. Second, we are offering all our users a 20% discount for the rest the year at the Yahoo! Sports Store.

For any updates, we will keep you informed on @YahooSports and facebook.com/yahoosports.

We won't stop working to provide you with new and improved features that help you enjoy your Sundays.

Thanks again for playing and for your patience.

Best,

Ken Fuchs Head of Yahoo! Sports

The Street published a story about this incident, telling readers that the twitter account of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!'s new CEO, was flooded with complaints and that Yahoo! responded by emailing an apology to its users. .

Notable accomplishments

 * In 2006 it was revealed that "Fans spend more time on Yahoo! Sports than any other sports site" according to comScore Media Metrix.
 * Before the 2006 NFL Draft, Yahoo! Sports revealed the allegations that Reggie Bush accepted gifts from an upstart sports marketing firm in exchange for his patronage. They have since issued several updates on the story.
 * On August 16, 2011, Yahoo! Sports broke the story of a massive scandal involving the University of Miami, based on over 100 hours of interviews with former Hurricanes booster and convicted fraudster Nevin Shapiro.