Fantasy Football Linear Programming
I go through the analytics records for this website from time-to-time just to see how people get to my site or what search terms are popular. Today, while going through, I found I’m getting hits for:
1- “How Tough is Mas-Colell”. Answer: Tough but feasible. See my previous post on the standard microeconomics textbook for PhD students.
2- “Fantasy Football Linear Programming”. This one is interesting. I run a mailing list (that has no activity), where people can talk about fantasy football analysis techniques. However, nobody on the mailing list has used linear programming (to the best of my knowledge). I wonder – are people using linear programming to determine a fantasy football roster? If so – awesome.
For those of you who don’t know – linear programming is a technique in optimization. In words, it is something like this: You have something that you need to maximize (or minimize), like profits for a company or points for your fantasy football team. You have a set of “constraints” – i.e. limitations on this maximization. Things like, for a company, you can only produce a limited quantity of some good or producing one good decreases the production of another good, and so on. I’m not sure how this would go back to fantasy football, though – like what would this constraints look like?
My best simple formulation of a linear program for fantasy football is something like this:
Maximize Potential Points!
Subject to:
- Limited number of positions (i.e. only 2 quarterbacks)
- Players are taken by other teams in the draft.
- Different Bye Weeks. (i.e. you don’t want all players with the same bye week, usually)
- Potential injuries and/or players with chronic injuries (I’m looking at you, Clinton Portis)
Perhaps there might be a way to develop some optimization technique that uses linear programming. The formulation of this program is feasible – but I’m not sure about:
- Computational limitations. The calculations for this optimization may be unreasonable – i.e. this may be an “NP Hard” problem. I’m not sure about the complexity, yet.
- Points calculations. This is what I’ve been mostly working on the past two years – developing a good prediction algorithm that can account for variation in performance. I’m up to about 50% but this needs to be improved.