Do You Have Your Fantasy League Draft Positions?
Football season is just around the corner, meaning that the popular fantasy leagues are starting up again. Every year, over 10 million players from all over the world participate in fantasy football leagues. Many sports analysts provide their projections on each player’s performance for the year to help others prepare for their upcoming draft. A good draft is the first and most crucial step in claiming the crown for your fantasy leagues.
Why is it hard to succeed in fantasy football leagues?
Relevant data on fantasy football players are stored in different data sources. During the drafting process, participants are only provided with a grand summary of statistics and projections. Participators who go the extra mile by reviewing data sources such as Depth Charts and Injury History may give themselves a competitive advantage. However, this can be a very time-consuming process having to study through multiple spreadsheets.
Typical leagues only give an hour’s notice on position on draft. This makes it difficult to strategize a league-winning team. For online drafts, users have under a minute to decide the best-fitting player for their team. For offline drafts, your friends and colleagues will pressure you to make your selection as fast as possible to minimize the time to their next pick.
Team Schedules/Matchups dictate the game flow and amount of touches for players to accumulate stats. For example, running backs on weaker teams will be less likely to reach double-digit attempts per game if their team is always falling behind early in the game. Younger quarterbacks may also struggle to throw to their star receivers since they lack the experience of facing a professional level of defense.
Trying to find patterns, connections, trends, and outliers in data? Sounds like this would be perfect for Gemini Explore.
How would you like to improve your chances of winning fantasy football?
Using Gemini Explore, we were able to merge and aggregate several relevant data sources into one “canvas” for visualization, exploration, and analysis.
This produced a number of node categories, such as Players from each Position with backups and reserves, Injuries, and Teams. This all came from a total of 16 different data sources.
Selecting any node will provide more specific details, as shown in the profiler panel. Notice for Patrick Mahomes, we can see Durability rankings [1-5], Favorable Schedule [1-5], projected points, and attempts per game that would all be useful to know before drafting.
Searching is easy. Filter on a number of player attributes to narrow down the key players that will potentially be available within your draft turn.
The user-friendly search makes it a breeze to sift through player attributes, helping you pinpoint potential star players right for your next pick.
For a taste, consider the first round’s top contenders: Justin Jefferson, Christian McCaffrey, and Ja’Marr Chase. Our platform reveals Jefferson’s injury risk juxtaposed against his schedule difficulty, compared with the other two. Interesting find? While McCaffrey seems to have a season advantage, he’s also more injury-prone.
Here is Christian McCaffrey:
And Ja’Marr Chase:
Select any of the injuries to open the profiler panel with further details.
Filter by time to see the latest injuries of recent seasons.
Do you have a favorite team?
Start your draft preparation by selecting and isolating your favorite team:
Then by isolating, drill down on your favorite team to view players and the attached ‘projected round’ – shown in green nodes with numbers – that they are predicted to be drafted in.
Add player’s bye weeks – shown by pink nodes near the top – to avoid selecting too many players that will not be playing the same week. The goal is to set yourself up for success every week to give you a fighting chance.
As the NFL Draft Day dawns, arm yourself with the comprehensive insights of Gemini Explore. Dive beyond the surface, understand the connections and relationships, and draft your way to fantasy football dominance.
Happy drafting!
Data sources used: FantasyPros, FantasySharks, ESPN, Yahoo! Sports, and CBS Sports