2023 DraftKick Football is Live

I haven't plugged it much, but I switched DraftKick from baseball to football near the end of last week. What's new this year?

First off, some history: I started DraftKick in July 2022 and built a basic version for rotisserie baseball. Obviously, July isn't great timing for baseball season. So, I spent some time in August 2022 cranking out a football version. Also not great timing, as it was kind of late for football drafts. (But, I did sell two copies!)

Working fast last year meant that I didn't really try reuse the same football and baseball code. So that's one of the things I did this time around: I'm using the baseball codebase and expanding it to also handle football. That means that all of the baseball features are already implemented for football. One of those worth highlighting:

Custom projection weighting (completed)

For the baseball version, I was pulling in lots of projections and ADP on my own, mapping everything to common player IDs. For football last year, I was able to give a real quick projection aggregate pulled from FantasyPros. But I knew that was an area that I wanted to improve for 2023, in order to allow users to choose their own projections and weighting.

So, for football 2023, you can currently choose from ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, Sleeper, and FFToday projections. (And I'll probably add more as I find them.) As with baseball, you can also weight them however you like, e.g. counting CBS as 3x and Yahoo as 2x.

Sleeper is interesting, as it is actually just the RotoWire projections. It turned out to be a nice way to get a premium projection for free.

There are also some features that I am currently thinking about:

Weekly projections and improved standings (to do)

One major wrinkle for fantasy football that doesn't apply in baseball is the weekly schedule. There is a lot of week-to-week fluctuation in player performance, and at least some of that can be predicted based on the opponent's strength. There are also bye weeks, which you can think of as a very large variation (-10 or -20 points) that is very predictable (i.e. 100% certain).

If you had weekly projections, you could even do stuff like target players in the draft who had the best schedule for the fantasy playoff weeks.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any good sources for weekly projections available in the preseason.

So my thought is to develop some basic measure of opponent strength. Then, I can take each player's season-long projection, divided it into weeks, and bump each week up or down. I can calculate each team's projected points week by week, using their optimal lineup for each week.

I think this will give some interesting data for the "Live Standings Gain Points." Currently, for points leagues, the Live SGP isn't that interesting. It was really a feature for rotisserie baseball, where you need to weigh trade offs in drafting speed vs power.

But, with these improvements, the Live SGP would warn you against drafting backups with the same byes as your starters. Factoring in strength of schedule may be

Improvements on replacement levels (to do)

Unlike in fantasy baseball, your bench in fantasy football plays a bigger role on your team. That bumps up the value of some bench players (especially RB and WR), which also raises values all the way up those positions.

I already have a way to set custom replacement levels for each position, which gets maybe 80% of what I'd like it to do. But I'm still not completely happy with it.

Draft sync (to do, maybe)

I thought about this for baseball but never got it done. I think it might be worth a shot for football this year.

I've done quite a bit of the mental work for it; it's just a matter of implementing it.

Predictions/Goals

I've said it before, but I was really happy with how DraftKick baseball turned out, and the reception I got from it. But football is different, for a lot of reasons:

• Fantasy football has maybe 4x as many players as baseball. It is a much bigger market, which is obviously a positive.
• But the market for fantasy football tools is also more crowded. I doubt that I'm just going to quadruple the baseball sales based on market size.
• The football game is also simpler and a bit less strategic. Compared to baseball, the draft has a lower impact and the waiver wire a greater one. Also, there's no rotisserie football, just points. Do people want or need a draft tool for football?
• Alongside that last point, football projections seem much more basic than for baseball. I haven't seen the rigorous back-testing like is done for baseball. There's a lot more unpredictability in football, so ideal projections are less important.
• I haven't dug through the stats, but I think a lot of people used DraftKick baseball for fantasy auctions. Auctions are much less common for football than baseball.
• But that can be flipped, too: Maybe the football auction audience is an underserved niche right now. And, even with a lower percentage of auctions compared to baseball, the massive size of the fantasy football market may counteract that.
• I have built up a bit of an audience from building baseball tools for ~14 years. That helps my baseball product, but I may not have the same connections in football.

You can see that I really have no idea what is going to happen.

I would be very happy if DraftKick football did 1.5x to 2x the sales of baseball. My fear is that it will actually do worse, but I think I'm being irrational.