Tools of the Trade: Fantasy Football Edition

The latest newsletter from KCSN Sports Data Scientist, Joseph Hefner

For this weeks installment of Tools of the Trade, I’m going to dip a bit into Fantasy Football, which I haven’t done on here before. First off, I know that different people use different sites for their fantasy football information, and everyone probably has one or two “secret” sites they use that the rest of their league-mates probably (hopefully) don’t. I’m not planning on exposing those to your buddies.

Instead, I want to put out a couple of lesser known websites that a couple of my football analytics coder friends have made. All of these sites use publicly available NFL data, nothing that is behind a paywall. They model expected player output, and give predictions based on team, opponent, stadium type, and so many other factors.

First up is a website by probably the best coder and modeler I know, Tan Ho (@_TanHo on Twitter). He is one of the founding members of the nflverse, and I literally would not be writing for KCSN without his massive contributions to public NFL data and analytics, as well as his personal contributions to my own coding knowledge and ability.

He created a website called Dynasty Process. This website shows the outcome of his ffopportunity model (if you are a coder, you can generate this data, and even set it to your league rules using the {ffopportunity} package he created). It calculates offensive skill positions only (QB, RB, WR, TE), and it is a standard 1 point Points Per Reception (PPR) model. When you navigate to the site, you can see the list of players, and both their predicted and actual outcomes for the season to date.