I wrote a tool for our fantasy football league that checks the rosters twice a week and sends out emails if you having anyone starting a game who is injured, on a bye week, or just questionable. That, along with lots of effort from each coach, has made our league pretty good in terms of starting full rosters every week.
I started playing around more with the Yahoo API and realized that I could download stats for every game. Not just that, I could download stats for all nine seasons that we’ve had this league! Give a data scientist a fun data set like this and see what happens. None of the stuff I did is very complicated in terms of real “data science”, but it sure was fun!
First of all, I have some corrections to make to the table of records. One of these is due to a stat correction from Yahoo and the other is because Yahoo’s online interface didn’t let me go back far enough to see the old record. Here is the updated table with changes in bold. It turns out that Tim didn’t break the record for highest score in a game or the highest player score in a game.
| This Week | Season | All-Time | |
| Highest Team Score | Ben had 151.18 | Tim 200.51 (Week 3) | Tim had 206.94 in 2008 |
| Lowest Team Score | Andy had 75.31 | Andy had 41.29 (Week 14) | Andy had 41.29 (2015) |
| Biggest Blowout | Luke beat Andy by 42.02 | Ben beat Dad by 111.43 (Week 8) | Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010) |
| Closest Win | Austin beat Logan by 16.44 | Ben beat Andy by 2.46 (Week 7) | Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012) |
| Highest Scoring Player | Kirk Cousins had 40.20 as a free agent. | Drew Brees had 58.30 on Tim’s bench (Week 8) | Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy (2013) |
| Longest Active Winning Streak | Austin has a 4 game winning streak. | Ben had an 8 game winning streak (Week 8) | Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak |
| Longest Active Losing Streak | Jim has a 4 game losing streak. | Andy had a 8 game losing streak (Week 14) | Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011) |
Ok, but that’s pretty boring. What else can we answer? How about who had the most points on their bench? Instead of just counting the total, let’s look at the percentage of the total team’s points that sat on the bench. This stat is mostly just a curiosity. You could have a lot of points on the bench because you started the wrong people or because your team was really strong.
| Tim Scherschel | 36.0% |
| Dallon Martens | 32.4% |
| Ben Martens | 32.3% |
| Logan Brandt | 32.1% |
| League Total | 31.7% |
| Luke | 31.2% |
| Jim | 30.9% |
| Austin | 30.0% |
| Andy Daniels | 27.6% |
Which positions produce the most average points in a game?
| QB | 22.3 |
| WR | 13.2 |
| RB | 11.4 |
| DEF | 10.7 |
| TE | 10.1 |
| K | 8.3 |
I broke the all time record for most points in a season. But how does it compare to everyone else over the past seasons?
How does the average number of points per team vary by year? Does it all average out or is there more scoring in some years?
Which players have generated the most points since 2007 in our league?
| Drew Brees | 3089.66 |
| Tom Brady | 2940.34 |
| Aaron Rodgers | 2825.2 |
| Peyton Manning | 2602.78 |
| Philip Rivers | 2300.68 |
| Tony Romo | 2106.5 |
| Ben Roethlisberger | 2061.72 |
| Adrian Peterson | 2026.62 |
| Eli Manning | 1969.96 |
| Matt Ryan | 1900.98 |
Who were the top 3 players at each position in our league this year?
| Tom Brady | Ben Martens | QB | 410.94 |
| Russell Wilson | Luke | QB | 377.18 |
| Cam Newton | Austin | QB | 376.46 |
| Antonio Brown | Austin | WR | 296.93 |
| Julio Jones | Logan Brandt | WR | 287.70 |
| Odell Beckham Jr. | Ben Martens | WR | 264.00 |
| Adrian Peterson | Jim | RB | 232.40 |
| Devonta Freeman | Ben Martens | RB | 205.60 |
| Doug Martin | Dallon Martens | RB | 201.50 |
| Rob Gronkowski | Austin | TE | 216.94 |
| Greg Olsen | Tim Scherschel | TE | 186.30 |
| Tyler Eifert | Logan Brandt | TE | 152.40 |
| Stephen Gostkowski | Dallon Martens | K | 167.00 |
| Steven Hauschka | Tim Scherschel | K | 127.00 |
| Mason Crosby | Logan Brandt | K | 116.00 |
| Arizona | Dallon Martens | DEF | 200.86 |
| Denver | Ben Martens | DEF | 196.94 |
| Seattle | Tim Scherschel | DEF | 180.70 |
Who has had the easiest schedule for the history of our league?
Tim. Dad has had the hardest schedule. But really, they are all very similar. Nobody deviated more than 2% from the mean.
Who had the most close wins in the last four years? This is a count of the number of times that each person won by less than 10 points.
| Jim | 8 |
| Andy Daniels | 8 |
| Logan Brandt | 7 |
| Tim Scherschel | 7 |
| Dallon Martens | 7 |
| Austin | 5 |
| Ben Martens | 5 |
| Luke | 5 |
There are so many more questions on my list to answer, but frankly I’ve been spending a lot of late nights digging through this. Hopefully if I get this post out, I’ll stop for a while and go to sleep!
If you’re interested in this dataset, let me know. I can either ship it to you in Excel or I can give you access to the SQL database and you can run your own queries. I hope to keep it running next year as the season progresses. I think I’ll also be able to use it to generate the Weekly Awards table each week which will make my blog posts easier.
Thanks to everyone for a great season! Go Seahawks!