Darren Herman

It’s that time of year when all of us football fans get excited and eagerly anticipate Thursday night’s opening game of the NFL’s 89th season.  As many of you know, I’m a Giants fan and am coming off a Super Bowl season so there is increased interest amongst many NY’ers as it’s not often we get to be ontop of the NFL.

In the office, we have a pretty rigorous fantasy football league that 12 of us are participating in and there has already been quite a bit of trash talking occuring.  This is my first year participating in fantasy football and I’m really looking forward to it.  From 1995-2002, I participated in an NHL Sim league and each year, I have the brackets filled out for the NCAA basketball, but never really participated in a full-on sports league.

Last Wednesday evening, we drafted our teams in the conference room and I came with roughly 50 pages of printouts of statistics and mock-drafts and a magazine that I had spent $7.99 on that was dedicated to Fantasy Football.  One of my colleagues sitting next to me only had his iPhone which was loaded with an app called Fantasy Football Draft Central.  No papers, no magazines, he was ready to go with just his iPhone.  Genius move.

Throughout the entire draft, he marked off who was taken and the application told him who was the best available player for his roster – saved him a lot of time and made him a ton more efficient than me who had to scramble through multiple sheets of paper which became totally inefficient at times.

I did some research after the fact (I wish I had done it prior) and came across Draft Analyzer, which is a player recommendation engine for fantasy football drafts.

Both the iPhone application and this Draft Analyzer process through thousands of players to make recommendations based on player statistics.  Are the top players recommended going to perform best?  Not all the time as you can never predict injuries, overachievers, etc – but it’s great for guidance.

Fantasy Football is a big industry.  In 2006, I wrote a posting about Fantasy Sports for Marketers and how it’s a $1.5 billion dollar industry.  Fantasy Football alone, as a search term has 71,400,000 results in Google.  Google AdSense has filled all paid search results around the term and I imagine it’s hyper competitive.

What’s most interesting to me here is the use of technology in a Moneyball like setting for fantasy sports.  I didn’t use it for my work draft but will test it for my league with my buddies from my home town.  Lets see if it works.

There’s even a Social Media league in which some of my friends including Joseph Jaffe and David Knox are playing in.  You can read an updae of their draft over at David’s blog.