Okay, so today I wanna talk about setting up my own fantasy football player standings. First off, I grabbed a dataset from this online source that had player stats for the past season. It was a bit of a mess, with way too many columns and stuff I didn’t really need. So, I fired up Python and used pandas to load the data. My first job was to clean it up.
I started by dropping columns that were irrelevant to fantasy football, like player IDs and some obscure stats nobody cares about. Then, I renamed some columns to make them more intuitive. For example, “Avg” became “PointsPerGame”, which is way easier to understand. I also had to deal with missing values. Some players didn’t have data for certain stats, so I filled those gaps with zeros, figuring if they didn’t record a stat, they probably didn’t score in that category.
Calculating Fantasy Points
Next up was calculating fantasy points. I used a standard scoring system, but you can tweak this based on your league’s rules. Here’s the basic formula I went with:
- Passing Yards: 1 point per 25 yards
- Passing Touchdowns: 4 points
- Interceptions: -2 points
- Rushing Yards: 1 point per 10 yards
- Rushing Touchdowns: 6 points
- Receptions: 1 point (for PPR leagues)
- Receiving Yards: 1 point per 10 yards
- Receiving Touchdowns: 6 points
- Fumbles Lost: -2 points
I wrote a few lines of code to apply these calculations to each player. Pandas makes this pretty easy—you can create new columns based on calculations from existing ones. After running the numbers, I sorted the players by their total fantasy points to get a clear ranking.
Displaying the Standings
Finally, I wanted a nice way to display the standings. I decided to create a simple HTML table, ’cause who doesn’t like a good table? I used a Python library called `tabulate` to generate the table from my pandas DataFrame. It’s a neat little tool that spits out HTML code you can directly plop into a webpage.
I also added a bit of styling with CSS, just to make it look less boring. Nothing fancy, just some colors and borders to make it easy on the eyes. And there you have it! A neat little webpage displaying the fantasy football player standings, all generated from raw data. It was a fun little project, and it’s cool to see how you can turn a messy dataset into something useful and visually appealing with just a bit of coding. It’s not rocket science, trust me. If I can do it, so can you!