Football Monster?

#6959  7/13/2013 7:47 AM

Any plans to dive into Football season?  Love the tool for basketball and baseball thus far.  Football is a bit simpler but values can change depending on ppr, td values, size of rosters etc.

Sorry for placing it here not sure where to ask

ken_admin  7/13/2013 10:18 AM

We're currently concentrating on baseball and basketball, but we'll think more about football before the season.  There won't be any projections before the season, but we'll likely do something each week helping users pick their lineups.

andrewfr  7/14/2013 9:30 PM

I was looking for football monster earlier this week...seems a lot easier to put together than baseball or b-ball, but would be a good tool to have...would def. be interested.

puntfreethrows  7/16/2013 5:40 PM

I was thinking about this post and went to check on the FootballMonster& BasketballMonster websites when I came across the RotoMonster link...

I'm definitely drafting this Oscar Robertson cat next year!

shoemosher  8/6/2013 11:38 AM

Is there such a thing? I see a 'test' site from last season. If you guys aren't doing a football site, are you aware of any loosely similar sites doing what you do for baseball/basketball, but in football? Thanks.

mbuser   8/6/2013 11:48 AM

Football doesn't lend itself as well to our particular brand of analysis as the other sports. But of course there are a zillion sites to go to for projections and rankings.

descender  8/6/2013 1:58 PM

If this is not OK to post here then you can totally delete it and I apologize.  Since you guys don't seem to have much interest in football, I thought I might help out some of our fellow Monster members :)

To fulfill my monsterless football drafting needs, I use the "Draft Predictor" software from FantasySharks.  It's pretty intense, predicting players for 2 full rounds ahead of your pick to watch for drop-offs in positions.  Here is a writeup on their projection system PAVT.

http://www.fantasysharks.com/apps/bert/planner/articles/pavt.htm

During the season, I use the composite rankings on fantasypros.com.  A purely "wisdom of the crowds" approach, they collect and average weekly rankings for each position from 50+ football "experts".  

Both of these tools have brought me great success in some very competitive leagues.

andrewfr  8/7/2013 7:29 PM

Agreed with fantasy pros site descender, it really takes most of the bias and favoritism that some experts show for certain players... and if their is an expert u dont care for you can remove their opinion from the rankings which is useful.

mbuser   8/7/2013 7:31 PM

Thanks for sharing, we certainly don't mind. I'm sure we'll eventually look to expand our football offerings, it just won't be this season.

liam4  8/8/2013 6:31 PM

I know all the focus will go into basketballmonster, but man, I could use some help figuring out how to draft in my two QB, non-standard scoring league.  I can wait til next year but one vote for footballmonster!

kenjlev18baseball  8/11/2013 3:23 PM

Has anyone used this site? I've read some good reviews of it.

http://footballguys.com

So-Tex   8/19/2013 7:50 AM

Has anyone used this site? I've read some good reviews of it.

 

http://footballguys.com

I'm actually more into basketball (of all things, coming onto a baseball forum, discussing football, but playing mostly basketball... )...but I have used this site a few times. One thing I did do, and I couldn't even remember how I did it cause it's been several years now, was to sign up for their email newsletter. I still get it to this day. It's not spam, nor is it chock full of a bunch of ads for other stuff (if anything, you might see ONE ad, once in a while, for their own tourneys and contests). Their daily emails give you some pretty good info, including their own takes on football news. And they'll even send out "hand's on" corrections from time to time...meaning, there seems to actually be someone writing this stuff instead of just news gleamed from some other site.

I don't know if anyone else has ever had a bad experience with them, but I sure haven't. Good stuff, quite honestly.

fffu_zipper_kitty  8/20/2013 4:40 PM

I call bogus on that site. It said my team has a 91-99% of making the playoffs.

Considering only 40% of teams make the playoffs, that seems insane.

Just entered my other team and it said 94-99% of making the playoffs.

Yep, this football guys is BS!!!!

mbuser   8/21/2013 12:19 AM

So you are saying that there's no way that you drafted that well?

descender  8/21/2013 11:34 AM

Or everyone else drafted that poorly? :p

nathan_oake  8/21/2013 2:27 PM

Ive been looking all summer for football guya too- i hope we see it next year. Re Football Guys: Haha- that's funny. I love footballguys.com but it doesn't do quite what baseball and basketball monster do. You're speaking of the free "rate my team" section, which is just clearly an auto summary of the guys on your team That their writers like, then some sort of ranking. It also says "with great management ...x% chance to make playoffs, with average management y% chance to make playoffs , etc. meaning you clearly need to watch the waiver wire and stay active Footballguys does have a draft app which I've found interesting- called the FBG Draft GM. You can place your league specifics (IE some of mine are unique such as 2QB, PPR, etc ) then pick your draft spot if you know it and run a customized mock draft based on your format. Minimally- FBG gives you the daily email summary which is helpful if you're not glued to Rotowire, and they have some good articles from a slew of different writers. Ok- enough on that... I'm wondering if anyone has used fantistics.com I heard a Sirius-XM interview and it sounded a lot like what Matt and Ken do here. The guy is supposedly a financial guy in former life and sounded like it was all numbers and regression analysis based. Anyone ever try them?

fffu_zipper_kitty  8/21/2013 9:17 PM

It said with average management 94% chance & with good management 99%.

Regardless of how you draft, you shouldn't have a 90%+ of making the playoffs.

And my teams are far from perfect.

Even if you get the top player at every position 90% is still insanity (for football).

Injuries happen, plus there breakout players & duds every year.

descender  8/24/2013 11:37 AM

I actually use that footballguys website for their schedule making tool.  Yahoo is terrible at balancing schedules.

Never signed up or looked at their rankings though.

Rapierman   8/25/2013 7:16 PM

Buser:  What about league setups (like we're doing now with our normal guys from your previous site)?

mbuser   8/26/2013 12:20 AM

A few football leagues were organized on the hoops side, but there wasn't a tremendous demand.

liam4  8/29/2013 9:36 PM

Matt and Ken -- I went about taking football projections from fantasypros (four selected sources) and computed z-scores.  With regards to the z-scores, what number of players would you suggest using -- in a 10 team league with two QB's, would you use the top 20 QB's to set the average and STDEV?  The top 30?

Also, we're running an auction draft.  I've previously used the auction draft suggested $ values from basketballmonster.  Any suggestion as to how to calculate those myself using my z-scores?

Lastly, I need to figure out how to compare positional value... but I suppose I'll need to figure that out on the fly.

Happy to share my excel if anyone wants it.  Points in my league are based on custom settings, but that can easily be adjusted.

ken_admin  8/30/2013 7:10 AM

If you're using 20 active QBs, I would use that group to calculate your STDEV.  For the auction values, once you've calculated your STDEV, find the lowest of that group, and subtract that value from all players (this makes the worst QB a 0.00).  Then total all of the player's new values.  Then figure out the % each player takes of that total. Then determine the total $ you're committing to QBs and use the % to figure out their estimated cost. Hopefully that helps.

kenjlev18baseball  9/1/2013 12:23 PM

Decided to use http://www.rotowire.com. Ken and Matt, the technology you offer to integrate your software with Yahoo, so you don't need to set Pre-Draft Player Rankings is so superb! I've spent hours on this today. PLEASE give us Football Monster next year!  

liam4  9/7/2013 7:16 AM

Thanks ken, appreciate it.  The ranking strategy worked amazingly well, great draft.  If only I knew Peyton was going to throw 7 td's a game...

kenjlev18baseball  9/11/2013 10:57 PM

Now using http://www.fantasypros.com/. Much happier with it, due to Yahoo integration.

drw3722  9/17/2013 3:53 PM

Please please please do a fantasy hockey monster there is nothing out there for projections for hockey. I would love to help you get it off the ground if you're interested I played hockey my whole life and love the nhl.

mbuser   9/17/2013 8:23 PM

Hockey is definitely under-served, no question. I believe we'd also have Hockey Monster in an ideal world, but we may still be a ways away from that ideal And we'd also have to negotiate with whoever currently owns the hockeymonster.com domain...

drw3722  9/18/2013 1:20 PM

I have emailed the domain owner and have made them aware that I'm ready to negotiate. It looks like its a used hockey equipment web site with minimal traffic. I checked godaddy and the current bid for the domain is $15,600 with zero bids and 6 views.

WillF  7/13/2015 2:56 PM

I would like to put another vote in for Football and Hockey Monster. Baseball and Basketball Monster are amazing!!

I think HockeyMonster could be especially useful for DFS. I know this hasn't been discussed in this thread for a couple of years, but I still find hockey projections on the net to be poor (unless I just haven't found the best ones). Two years later, and assuming there won't be Football/Hockey Monster this year, does anyone have updated suggestions for the best DFS Football/Hockey tools?

ehrenberggreg  7/13/2015 3:21 PM

I have always used vegas lines to create football projections and have found them pretty reliable 

Clown Shoes  7/13/2015 4:55 PM

I would like to see them as well but only if they are done right. Basketball monster is A+ Baseball monster is a C - It has the same name but the two are not even on the same planet in terms of quality. I love hoops especially the daily tool, but I have been disappointed with the offerings here at Baseball monster. Anyone coming from Hoops to Baseball has to feel the same way.

DIAMONDKING  7/15/2015 8:22 AM

I agree 100% with you clown shoes....I'm not here to bash but the quality between basketball/baseball monster is night and day. I find myself rarely even coming here lately because it's just not the same type of quality and active community compared to basketball monster. If the same effort isn't going to be put forth, then it should cost as much. Just my 2 cents. Thanks. 

Clown Shoes  7/16/2015 11:02 AM

Not trying to pile on, but I do want to voice my displeasure the product. I was expecting more coming from hoops and with the bigger price tag. I hardly come here anymore.

ehrenberggreg  7/16/2015 2:14 PM

To make this productive this could be a good place to discuss what would make the product better. The one thing I like more about basketball is that there is a more active community although I am not really sure how I would go about making the baseball boards as active as the basketball boards. Overall I do disagree with Clown Shoes just because I love the product and have been using baseball monster and had a lot of success with it for a couple years now. 

Clown Shoes  7/16/2015 6:41 PM

Do you use the daily tool?

tomm0  7/16/2015 6:52 PM

I have zero complaints about this site over the last few years.  Since 2011 (the year my 12 team h2h points league started) I have finished 1st, 1st, 3rd, 2nd, and currently sit at 12-2 this season.  I joined a 13 team 6x6 Roto league last season and finished 3rd while sitting in 6th so far this year.

Basketball Monster obviously has a lot more content, but the tools offered here are simply nonexistent elsewhere (at least in terms of season long leagues).  I don't know what I would do without the Team Analysis tool, or the ability to look at ROS projections for my team along with all available players.  Being able to sync directly with our leagues saves so much time and effort.

The addition of HoopAdvisors on the Basketball side definitely brought along some added, high quality content along with an additional community.  I do wish the forums here were a bit more active and that there was some new content, but it does seem like Ken is running the show on his own here and has been doing a great job.  

As for the actual topic, www.fantasypros.com My Playbook is a great in-season tool that is somewhat similar to the BBM sites.  You can import all of your teams and also have a nice view of your players Weekly and ROS projections along with available/taken players.  In the past I've tried FantasyGuru, 4for4, The Huddle, Football Guys, and FFChamps.  It's hard to recommend any over the others.  I did use the FootballGuys Draft Dominator app last season, but had some mixed results.  Pro Football Focus is the one site I haven't tried yet and might give them a shot this season.  

ehrenberggreg  7/16/2015 7:21 PM

Yes I have been using the daily tool and season long tool for both baseball and basketball for a while now.

DIAMONDKING  7/16/2015 7:50 PM

There are definitely things I appreciate and like about this site, my thing is that there is clearly a drop off as far as active content/active community forums from basketball to baseball. So just don't charge the same price....

ken_admin  7/16/2015 9:37 PM

The baseball price was a little less than basketball ($35 rather than $40). It probably could have been $30 without all of the content, but baseball tends to be harder to manage since you have a ton of hitters and pitchers along with all of the minor league call-ups (maybe justifying the extra $5!) 

Basketball is a bit more straightforward with a mostly-static set of players meaning about 300 players that need to be managed. Football (the non-DFS part) would likely be even less expensive with a fairly small group of players to manage and only one game per week.

Clown Shoes  7/17/2015 12:46 PM

I paid 70 bucks... 

ken_admin  7/17/2015 12:50 PM

I was talking about the Roto/H2H portion since we were discussing the difference in content (which is all Roto/H2H). You are correct that the DFS package price is the same for basketball and baseball.

blitzology  7/19/2015 11:17 PM

The daily tools for baseball is worth a lot more than $70

carrotts91  7/21/2015 9:16 PM

I love both sites and use them both for DFS. But back to the original question, any football monster coming soon?

Cameron1Turner  7/22/2015 4:31 AM

I just wish the projections were better. I've now tracked the pitcher accuracy of 6 sites for 3 months and BBM is by far the least accurate. I only use the site now for building lineups. 

ken_admin  7/22/2015 7:44 AM

If you don't mind, feel free to send me what you've found: kslight@baseballmonster.com. Thanks

descender  7/22/2015 12:23 PM

I'd love to see what you are doing to track projection consistency like that too... could you just post it here?

Obviously interested in what seeing site you found to be the most accurate and why.

Cameron1Turner  7/22/2015 8:44 PM

Yeah Ken I'll send you an email.

It's currently 1673 rows in Excel so posting everything in the forums isn't really an option. I've been tracking BBM, Rotogrinders, Numberfire, FantasyPros, Razzball, and PureStatsFantasy. Each site has projections or rankings of pitchers from 1-30 (assuming full slate). At the end of the night I go back and enter where the pitcher actually finished (1-30) based on FanDuel scoring. Then I just subtract the ranking vs actual to see how much each site was off by using absolute value. So for example if BBM had a guy #1 and he finished 14th they would be off by 13. My results so far in terms of average of 1670 records for how much each site has been off by:

Razzball 7.53

PureStatsFantasy 7.56

Rotogrinders 7.57

FantasyPros 7.57

Numberfire 7.62

BBM 7.77

ken_admin  7/23/2015 8:06 AM

That looks like a reasonable estimate, and thanks for sending the spreadsheet.  I'll give it a look and likely send you some questions.

descender  7/23/2015 10:45 AM

I'm not sure I could call the 3% gap in your results 'significant'... but BBM is obviously behind as you said.  15 would be the baseline (randomly assigning all pitchers ranks), so these sites are all basically 50% better at picking your pitchers than if you picked their names out of a hat.  They also are roughly 25% "wrong" with every rank every day.  I find it hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from something that inconsistent.

Have you done this for other seasons or just this year?  You might get more useful results if you could track actual points vs projected points rather than the ranks (point difference between pitcher 1 and pitcher 10  can vary drastically from day to day) but I do understand what you are doing there.  I have done something similar to that for football in the past (thread irony lol).  

In reality you would probably need to track the accuracy of each individual contributing stat for each site.  Simplifying it to "fanduels points" fails to uncover the part of the projection that BBM is actually "getting wrong" or that other sites are excelling in.  Knowing whether they are inaccurate with IP, Hits, K's, or ER's would make a big difference in figuring that out.

Cameron1Turner  7/24/2015 2:01 AM

Yeah I hope to make it more complex next season. I'm working with some Excel experts right now to help me create a model for NFL and then my plan is to have one for NBA and MLB eventually. This season I've been able to create a weighting using the 6 sites that is only off by 7.13. I know 7-8 places seems like a lot, but baseball has a ton of variance especially with pitchers this year.

For football I use projections and do it by position, but with MLB there is a lot less time as lineups sometimes don't even come out by the time contests lock on FanDuel. 

madchuck  7/25/2015 10:48 AM

do you plan on making Football monster?

ken_admin  7/25/2015 10:50 AM

Nothing formal this season but maybe something simple as an experiment with the hope of a real site for next year.

mwarner  7/25/2015 2:07 PM

Awesome, hope to use it if you make this!   I just joined a league that has defensive players as well and immediatly thought of your site as something that could help me if you had football.  

callahan  7/25/2015 5:32 PM

The positives of this site are the BBM factors analysis, the pro advice, latest news, as well as other managers' thoughts such as on the up and down.  I will continue to invest in both BBM products.

It's my first year with fantasy MLB and thought MLB would be easier to win in terms of DFS because of complexity, but am reassessing right now (It's more difficult than I thought and time consuming to sort through the data and put out a lineup ready to produce and be unique enough to win). 

What makes BBM difficult is there are no instructions on how to use it.  I had to rely on reading some of the threads here and reading other sites.  Yes, I had to go to other sites in order to figure out what was being presented in the data and being discussed.  Maybe it's better to form a little consortium together in order to win GPP with the bankroll involved, sort of like Ocean's 11 ;).

Also, I ended up buying an older version of Microsoft Office just to get Excel. 

I will invest in any product or pro advice that will help cut down the time to put out a lineup.  Basically, it is to help sift the data and find some key factors that I can use.

I don't follow football, but would be interested in Horse Racing.

J/K about horse racing ;).

willy18t  7/25/2015 8:47 PM

yay football!!!!!

Keep up fellas...

Vicksdoggydaycare  7/31/2015 4:32 PM

Would love to see the experimental football version!  Hope you're serious!

liam4  8/19/2015 1:52 PM

Anyone have suggestions for best fantasy football sites to help with draft strategy/rankings, without a full monster site? I've used fantasypros composites (not that reliable) and run excel z-scores in the past, and I've also done it the Neanderthal way and eyeballed ESPN and Yahoo rankings. But would love a resource akin to BBM, or just a most insightful ranking...

mroberts91  8/19/2015 6:16 PM

Razzball has free rankings and even have a "War Room" program that is somewhat similar to the draft tracker, though not as polished and automated. It's a good (quite funny) site in general as well for all sports.

liam4  8/19/2015 7:33 PM

Is there a site though, or group of sites, generally considered to have the best rankings?  Without Monster I don't know which to trust.

descender  8/19/2015 8:14 PM

I still use the fantasysharks software, draft predictor... their default projections are kind of meh, but if you build custom cheatsheets for it... it's really impressive.  

You use a tool on their website to build VBD or PAVT sheets (those are 2 draft value theories that you may want to read up on) for the software.  I usually make them from a few free ranking sources, import them into the predictor software and then mock draft with them incessantly until I decide which I like the most that year.

If all you are after is projections/cheatsheets, Footballguys.com writers are always hovering around the top of the fantasypros accuracy ratings.

Draftshot  8/24/2015 12:04 PM

4for4.com is an excellent source for your dfs needs

short_stack  8/25/2015 1:48 AM

I would absolutely love it if there would ever be a footballmonster site but until then I totally agree that 4for4.com is a great site and footballguys.com is the most comprehensive fantasy football site from everything you could possibly want that I've seen. Another newer site worth checking out is Jonathan Bales' site fantasylabs.com.

jhardt53  6/5/2016 12:05 AM

tbh I've been reluctant to buy back in for baseballmonster. basketball obviously still a GOAT. How have the pitcher rankings/ projections fared thus far in comparison to other sites? 

The BBM layout/ daily tool/ format is by far my favorite .the UI is simple, clean, form, function, etc. It's perfect. It's just the projections for baseball I found to be a little behind the the rest, and not as quick to adapt to the lineup changes/ call ups, etc. which are crucial. 

Any feedback on that front? 

Also, for football, Footballguys and 4for 4 are super great. And if you're willing to fish and use the best apps around and want advanced analytics, you're crazy if you're not subbing Rotoviz.com. http://rotoviz.com/author/jhardt/ 

If you do sign up, would appreciate you signing up through the above link. :) pound for pound, there really isn't a better vaue out there in the industry for your money. 

balogunad123  7/20/2016 3:49 AM

kslight/mbuser

Long-time Basketball Monster user here, first year using Baseball Monster and just started playing DFS in February. I think the Baseball Monster site works very well. I can easily identify potential value picks and identify who has the best chance of getting Homeruns. the addition of wOBA, ISO and the other advanced metrics are critical to my analysis. So to answer the questions out there I think the BBM projections have likely improved over previous years (However this is my first year). I've won a pretty good amount of money playing basketball. I am pretty much even playing baseball (mostly because I just started watching so I can play DFS and I just learned what wOBA and ISO were a month ago). Needless to say, I love both sites.

I decided to chime in here because I would love to be a beta tester for Football Monster. You guys have two products that have served me very well in the past for traditional fantasy sports, but now for DFS. Is there any chance you will be developing Football Monster? If not what is the impetus and what can the monster community do to help?  

ken_admin  7/20/2016 5:20 PM

There won't be a full-blown football site this season, but we'll do some experimenting and should have rankings at least.  What we need is a good NBA strike to free up some time!