Fantasy Football Draft Analyzer

What is fantasy football?

A competition in which participants select imaginary teams made up of players in the NFL and score points according to the actual performance of their players on a week by week basis. Some fantasy league have fees to play and provide prize money to the winners.

Key Objective

Our key business objective was to create a dashboard that would help fantasy football participants make a more informed decision as to which player to draft for their fantasy team. The initial target was to create a dashboard with 3 tabs that would show the following:

• Tab 1: Provide ability to compare two players of the same positions

  

• Tab 2: Provide parameters that users could adjust to view the top players that fit those parameters

  

• Tab 3: Provide a place for users to store the position, name, and salary/purchase price of the players they have drafted

  

Data

Initially Targeted

• Data on all players, for several previous seasons, and per game
• Fantasy salary / purchase price
• Data sources - Kaggle, Sportsdata.io, Fantasydata.com, and FantasyFootballNerd.com

Found and Utilized

• We used data from Pro Football Reference

• NFL stats metrics used for the dashboard

Challenges

• The NFL has a large amount of data points given, but needed lots of work to be cleaned
• Different fantasy football leagues use different scoring methods
• Web scraping
• API
  • Free APIs gave limited data
  • Paid APIs were too expensive
• Difficult to find defense by team instead of by player

Tools used in this project

• Python3
• Pandas
• Panel and Panel Interact
• Plotly and HvPlot
• Webscrapping
• Linear Regression