Analysis of the ESPN Fantasy Football Auto-pick Selection Tool and Alternative Suggestion
Open Access
- Author:
- Malley, Justin
- Area of Honors:
- Economics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- John M Brauer, Thesis Supervisor
James R. Tybout, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Fantasy football
Opportunity Cost
Economics
Sports
Football
NFL - Abstract:
- In this paper, we will consider fantasy football, an extremely popular online game that is based on the performances of players from the National Football League (NFL). Per the Fantasy Sports and Gambling Association, over 59 million people played fantasy sports in 2017 in the United States and Canada, 78% of whom—a total of 46.5 million—took part in fantasy football. Most fantasy football participants host their leagues on three major media websites: ESPN, Yahoo!, and NFL.com. Each website has a team of analysts that focuses on reporting NFL news, providing preseason player rankings, specifying fantasy football draft opinions, and calculating weekly fantasy football players’ points totals among a host of other duties. Despite the mass popularity of fantasy football, the tools that ESPN, Yahoo!, and NFL.com provide users to assist in player selection during the fantasy draft remain elementary. This paper sets out to analyze the default drafting aid provided by ESPN, one of the most popular platforms for fantasy football, and provide an alternative selection method that can out-perform ESPN. The alternative selection tool will consider ESPN’s preliminary draft rankings, each player’s position, the remaining available players, and current roster to generate teams with advantageous roster compositions. The goal of the alternative strategy is to identify weaknesses in the ESPN-provided draft assistant while simultaneously assisting fantasy football participants by bolstering their draft selection choices. This paper primarily considers the opportunity costs that arise at each draft selection, making it unique insofar as previous literature analyzing fantasy football drafting employs alternative player projections and/or highly computational methods to identify strong draft picks. This paper’s provided alternative strategy gives managers more balanced rosters with more effective distributions of valuable players at the 4 most important positions, suggesting that ESPN’s auto-pick selection tool must be revised to improve the competitiveness of fantasy football drafts.