A Call, A Plea, An Idea
I’ve played with this concept for some time, but I’d like to throw it out formally and see what happens. I’m climbing under my Fair Use fire blanket here, so to make it clear to men in black helicopters what I’m talking about here would be totally non-commercial and not open to the public by any means.
I have never done fantasy football, so me writing this is kind of like me writing an opinion paper on a magic system in Sigma. But, I know my statistics and Python, so maybe that’s enough. I’ve found sports.yahoo.com to be a most excellent target for screen scraping. Enough to get post-mortem statistics sufficient, as far as I read, to set up a basic fantasy football scheme.
My question is: what features are missing from current fantasy football implementations? Not really interface features (like real time updating, of course, or even dragging and dropping players or something), but more like in the ability to score points and make interesting choices. I can almost guarantee anything I might create would have a substandard interface.
My idea (don’t know if I’ve ever shared it before) is to somehow neatly implement the ability to make hedging side-bets. Like, let’s say you have the QB for the Vikings playing, but you assume if he has a bad day Adrian Peterson (woot) might perhaps have a good day. Or, that a bad day for A.D. might mean lots of stuffs from the defensive line.
But, I want this to look somewhat like option/swap theory in Finance. So, just like any form of insurance:
- It must cost the beneficiary in accordance with the average likelihood of the bad event actually happening
- It’s not insurance unless you have a corresponding oppositely-directed position in an asset (it’s Vegas if you don’t, do you get that now AIG?)
I feel like #2 there is not worded right, so I’m saying you need to be “long” something (rewarded for good performance), if you’re going to take a hedge that is ultimately “short” the asset.
In fantasy football, if you don’t have a rule #2, you end up just allowing people to have multiple players at the same position. Stupid.
Of course, rule #1 makes sure the thing doesn’t become a free for all.
Without going into any detail on possible implementations of this concept, my question is: would this be interesting, helpful, sensible, worth playing around with an implementation?
Even if not, I propose that any interested persons should get into some kind of free league together this year.