I spent some time thinking about different math or modeling projects I could do for fantasy football, but the problem was that so much of those predictive modeling and projections only mattered during the initial draft (and subsequent waiver wire pickups and trades, but these are fairly infrequent). However, I was recently watching TV and noticed that there were approximately 18 commercials per night for various weekly fantasy football contest websites. These are sites like FanDuel and DraftKings where you are given a hard salary cap and access to every NFL player. Your goal is then to draft the best possible team for that one week under the constraints that the total salaries payed to your 9 starters must fall below the designated cap.
Perfect! This is exactly the kind of situation in which predictive modeling and mathematical optimization can be applied on a weekly basis, and this time we only have to worry about a single weeks worth of match-ups. Additionally, we have same-season games to base our models off. Nobody predicted Trent Richardson would be traded to the Colts on draft day, but now we can use all this information on a week by week basis.
So now I have finally defined my next project: come up with one (or a few) optimal lineups based on various rankings and projections for each week. My next post will provide an overview of the methodology of the optimization process, and then I'll hopefully be able to provide some not-terrible analysis and predictions!
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