Alright, guys, let’s talk about something I’ve been messing around with lately – building a Fantasy Football Player Ranker. It’s been a fun little project, and I figured I’d share my process, bumps and all.
Getting Started: The Idea
First things first, I needed a reason. I’m in, like, three different fantasy leagues, and every year, I’m scrambling through different websites, spreadsheets, and expert opinions. I wanted something that pulled all that together, customized to my league’s scoring settings.
The Data Hunt
This was the first big hurdle. I needed player stats, projections, and ideally, some expert rankings to blend in. I started poking around, looking for free data.
- NFL’s official stats:These have lot of historical data.
- Fantasy Data Sites:Lots of these out there, some free, some paid. I found a few that let me scrape some basic projections without *, I know!
Building the Thing (aka Coding… Sort Of)
I’m no coding wizard. I know some basic Python, so that’s what I used. I figured it was good enough to grab data, crunch some numbers, and spit out a ranked list.
I used these libraries I found:
- Requests: Used to grab that web data from the sites.
- Beautiful Soup: This is the tool and it helped me pick out the specific stats and rankings from the HTML of those websites.
- Pandas: Super useful for organizing the data into tables, making it easier to work with.
The Ranking Logic: My Secret Sauce (Not Really)
Here’s where I put my own spin on things. I didn’t just want to average expert rankings. I wanted a formula that considered:
- Projected Points: Obviously, the big one.
- Consistency: I tried to factor in how likely a player was to have a good week, not just boom-or-bust.
- Positional Scarcity: This is kind of my thinking, gotta find the players who have the best performance.
I came up with a weighted formula, played with the numbers until it felt right(totally scientific, I know).
Putting It All Together
After writing a bunch of messy code, I had something that worked… sometimes. I would run my script, it would pull data, calculate my rankings, and print them out.
The Result: Good Enough for Me!
It’s not perfect, not even close. The data scraping breaks sometimes, my formula is probably flawed, and it’s not pretty to look at. But, it gives me a customized cheat sheet for my fantasy drafts, and that’s all I really wanted. Also the data is not very accurate sometimes, but that’s the resources limit, what do you expect.
This project taught me a bunch, and it’s something I can keep tweaking year after year. Maybe one day I’ll turn it into a fancy website, but for now, it’s my own little edge in the cutthroat world of fantasy football.