SMJ Solutions

Fantasy Football Team Names

August 10th, 2006

I am a big fantasy football guy. I have been playing fantasy football since 1998 and have done pretty well over the years. However, at the beginning of each season I struggle to find a team name worthy of my future league champions.

Try it now!

Because necessity is the mother of invention (and because I’m a geek), I started a project to build my own fantasy football team name generator using PHP. I wouldn’t consider myself a programmer of any particular merit, but it was a pretty easy task even for a beginner.

The key to the generator is populating several arrays, each holding a list of words to build the name of our fantasy football team. $adj holds mainly a list of adjectives, $noun holds mostly nouns, and $pnoun holds mostly plural nouns.

Then we simply take a random word from each list and put it together to form the fantasy football team name.

$first = $trim($adj[rand(0, sizeof($adj)-1)]);

Repeat the random selection from the $noun and $pnoun arrays and put the selections together to get the final $generatedname and display that to the user.

I added several additional features to my Fantasy Football Team Name Generator. First, I put it in a loop to display more than one value, which can be set by the user via a form. Also, I allowed overriding the random selection from the $adj array with your name so the result “Hungry Death Monkeys” becomes “Seth’s Death Monkeys”. I also added an option to limit the output to 20 characters to comply with Yahoo leagues.

If you have any questions, or generate a particularly enjoyable fantasy football team name, just let me know by adding a comment below. I hope you find a name worthy of your future league champions. Enjoy!

Entry Filed under: Software,Web