KICKIN’ BACKPredictive Analytics and Fantasy Football Kicking

GEORGE GREEN

DSS680: PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS

INTRODUCTION

• Recent popularity of fantasy football

• Use of kickers in real life

• Fantasy scoring

• Only thirty-two kickers, usually ten to sixteen team fantasy leagues

• Not a position considered important enough to risk using a draft pick

ASSUMPTIONS

• Kickers don’t tend to move around the league a lot

• The lone exception being if they become inconsistent, they can be replaced relatively easily and very cheaply

• Another play after a TD not involving the kicker was ignored. It has low usage and is usually only successful half the time

• Missed extra point attempts, worth 1 in both real life and fantasy scoring, were not considered due to the extreme rarity.

Consistent | Unemployed

-180 points total-4 50+ FGs-High 21 points-Low 2 points-11.25 AVG-Tied for most points with consensus #1 preseason kicker

‘11 – 120 points‘12 – 106 ‘13 – 116 points‘14 – Out of the league.

Also missed an extra point attempt. Will never be forgiven for it.

Variables Used

• Target Variable: Fantasy Points per Game

• Points Per Game

• Defensive Points Per Game

• Yards Per Game

• Plays Per Game

• Field Goal %

• Dome (Binary)

Cleaning the Data

• 5800+ Rows

• Data for entirety of game in one row for both teams

• Had to combine into Offensive Yards

• Copy and Paste after Splitting

• Creation of fantasy point statistic

Stat Explore

• Input Correlation

•

• FG_ 0.66133

• PPG 0.53455

• YPDS 0.34832

• PlaysPG 0.24472

• DPG -0.13547

Variable Selection

Dome Rejected!

• Kind of surprising!

• .002233

Model ComparisonModel Model Node Model Description VASE TASE

Y AutoNeural AutoNeural 5.68388 5.75652

Boost Gradient Boosting 5.97723 6.02730

Neural Neural Network 6.00761 6.15125

Ensmbl Ensemble 6.02437 6.07232 .

Neural2 NeuralVar 6.08551 6.11350 .

Reg Regression 6.71333 6.74621 .

Reg2 Stepwise 6.71333 6.74621 .

Reg3 StepwiseVar 6.73230 6.75552 .

Tree Decision Tree 7.42829 7.31521 .

Importance of Variables

• Variable Importance

•

Obs NAMELABEL NRULES IMPORTANCE VIMPORTANCE RATIO H

•

• 1 FG_ 36 1.00000 1.00000 1.00000 0.020536

• 2 PPG 53 0.64015 0.64545 1.00828 0.022600

• 3 YPDS 7 0.13057 0.14258 1.09198 0.001611

• 4 PlaysPG 12 0.12535 0.06431 0.51302 0.001041

• 5 DPG 11 0.10921 0.00000 0.00000 0.000496

Future Research

• Other data in the set such as wind speed and direction

• Other positions

• The significance of the insignificance of the dome

Questions? No?

Awesome, next victim!