How to Participate

1. Each individual or team entering the competition should consist of 1-5 people. Please email any of the organizers listed below your group name and contact information (name, affiliation, email) for each group member.
2. Create an account on DraftKings (for free, no credit card information is necessary). This is important. Make sure your chosen user name matches the group name you email us.
3. Familiarize yourself with the important dates, example data and tutorials, and competition rules.
4. (Optional) Participate in the practice competition on Sunday (link to competition lobby is here: https://www.draftkings.com/draft/contest/75705293), September 8th (we will provide the link to the competition lobby once we can set up the contest, approximately one week before the contest).
5. Enter lineups for the actual competition before 10am local time on Sunday, October 20th!

Important Dates

(Optional) Practice competition date: 9/8/2019

Last day to register a group for the competition: 10/13/2019

Last day to submit lineups on the DraftKings website: 10/20/2019, before the start of the games in which you choose players

Game day: 10/20/2019

Trophy presentation at the SpORts evening meeting (venue TBD): 10/20/2019

Player Data for Competition (contest details file): To be provided approximately one week before the competition (i.e., when DraftKings releases it)

Example Data and Tutorials

Here are some links to resources that can help you create your own models and put together lineups for the competition:

Fantasy Football 101: Here are beginners' guides by ESPN and the NFL.

The Bare Minimum: This blog post has a step-by-step explanation of a simple optimization model that takes as input player projections and finds the lineup that maximizes the the total points scored under a fixed budget for player acquisition (a knapsack problem with side constraints). It includes a fully functional Excel Solver spreadsheet. This won't be enough to create truly competitive lineups, but it's a place to start. See if you can make it better.

How FiveThirtyEight's NFL Predictions Work: This post on Nate Silver's web site provides some insights behind their NFL prediction models. This can be an inspiration for interesting ideas.

Three Useful Websites:

• Awesemo.com: This site has several useful resources, such as primers on projecting player performance and lineup diversification.
• Fantasycruncher.com: Another good collection of resources, such as week-specific core plays and cheat sheet, WR, TE and Defense targets, etc. Check out their NFL subpage.
• NumberFire.com: This site has, among other things, a page on NFL news and analysis and player point projections. A free sign-up is required.

Contact Information

For questions about the competition, feel free to email any member of the organizing committee below:

• David Bergman, University of Connecticut, david.bergman@uconn.edu
• Ben Grannan, Furman University, ben.grannan@furman.edu
• Jason Imbrogno, University of North Alabama, jimbrogno@una.edu
• Tallys Yunes, University of Miami, tallys@miami.edu

We are looking forward to a competitive and fun event. Register your teams and start early!

The First INFORMS Fantasy Sports Competition

The use of Data Science and Analytics in sports has been steadily growing over the years, with a wide range of applications such as scheduling, drafting, game strategy, player evaluation, arena/stadium management, ticket pricing, etc. Creating strategies for participating in fantasy sports, a projected 33 billion dollar market by 2025 [1], is another very rich application domain. In fantasy sports, participants choose a roster of actual players who participate in live sporting events, subject to position and budget constraints. The performance of the players on the field is translated into "fantasy points," and the goal is to choose a roster of players which scores more fantasy points than other rosters.

With the goal of bringing together academics and practitioners in a fun and challenging competition, as well as showcasing how interesting and complex the problem of fantasy lineup creation can be, the INFORMS Section on OR in Sports (SpORts) is organizing its first Fantasy Sports Competition to take place during the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle.

In this first year, the focus will be on fantasy football, with a free-to-play competition hosted on the DraftKings website (no money involved). The participating individuals or groups are invited to use their favorite OR/Analytics approaches to come up with one or more rosters for the competition. When the actual football games are over on Sunday, October 20th, the team with the highest score (as calculated by DraftKings) will be declared the winner. And, yes, there will be a trophy.

Contest Format: NFL Classic Competition; each competition group can submit up to 10 different rosters

We plan to have a live watching session at the conference on Sunday afternoon where participants can stop by to follow the live action during the games (10am and 1pm local time) and check how their lineups are doing. In the evening, we will meet at an outside venue (TBD) to celebrate the winners. This meetup will coincide with the usual INFORMS SpORts Business Meeting at the annual meeting.

Reference:

[1] https://www.orbisresearch.com/reports/index/global-fantasy-sports-market-size-status-and-forecast-2018-2025