Aaron VanSledright

Tag: fantasy football

  • Fantasy Football & AI – Week 3

    Week 3 is here. I started late yesterday by getting a full analysis of the team and any targets for free agency and waivers.

    Most important was to get a better Tight End as the predictions for last weekend were incredibly wrong. This is my fault and reinforces the idea that giving bad data to AI will just result in bad output.

    Here is the updated selection to get Juwan Johnson. This makes a lot more sense than picking Hunter Henry last week.

    The second thing I looked into was getting a good defensive matchup. Currently I have the Rams on the roster but they play the Eagles this week and that matchup is not going to favor the Rams.

    Here is some output from our friendly AI Dan Campbell:

    Alright, coach! Here's what I'm seeing for Week 3 defenses that can help you bite some kneecaps and put up points:

TOP WEEK 3 DEFENSIVE MATCHUPS:

1. Green Bay Packers DST (7.6 projected points)
- Only 45% owned, so there's a good chance they're available
- This is their highest projected week of the season!
- They're facing a matchup that should generate turnovers and sacks

2. Buffalo Bills DST (7.5 projected points)
- 65% owned but worth checking
- Solid Week 3 projection and they're consistent all season

3. Kansas City Chiefs DST (7.5 projected points)
- Only 12% owned - this is a STEAL if available!
- Same 7.5 projection as Buffalo but way less owned
- Championship defense with a great matchup

Now, looking at your current situation - you've got the LA Rams DST starting right now. Let me tell you something, coach - any of these top 3 options would be a significant upgrade for Week 3!

MY RECOMMENDATION:
If the Kansas City Chiefs DST is available, that's your move right there! Only 12% owned with a 7.5 projection - that's championship-level value sitting on waivers. If not them, grab the Packers at 7.6 points projected.

The Atlanta Falcons (7.1 projected, only 1.3% owned) are also a sneaky good play if you want to get really aggressive on the waiver wire.

These defenses are gonna feast in Week 3, and you need every advantage you can get to dominate your league! Go get 'em, coach!

    I made a claim for the Packers. I would prefer not to pick them because of my love for the Detroit Lions…

    One other waiver selection that I made was at the kicker position. Here is AI Dan Campbell’s suggestions:

    Alright, let me tell you what - you've got Chase McLaughlin right now, and he's been solid, but let me break down the kicker landscape for Week 3 like we're game planning for the playoffs!

Top Week 3 Kicker Options:

Brandon McManus (GB) - 8.2 projected points
- Only 14% owned, so he's sitting there waiting for you!
- Green Bay's offense has been moving the ball well
- This guy's got ice in his veins and a leg like a cannon

Tyler Loop (BAL) - 8.0 projected points
- Baltimore's offense creates plenty of scoring opportunities
- 65% owned though, so he might be taken in your league

Parker Romo (ATL) - 7.8 projected points
- Only 1.4% owned - this is a diamond in the rough!
- Atlanta's been getting into the red zone consistently

Jason Myers (SEA) - 7.9 projected points
- Seattle's offense with Sam Darnold (who you've got as your OP!) creates opportunities
- Only 10% owned

Now here's the deal - Chase McLaughlin has been putting up decent numbers for Tampa Bay, but if you want to maximize your Week 3 scoring, I'd be looking hard at Brandon McManus. The Packers offense is humming, and McManus has that veteran reliability. Plus at only 14% ownership, there's a good chance he's available.

Parker Romo is my sleeper pick - less than 2% owned but projected for nearly 8 points. Atlanta's been moving the ball, and sometimes you gotta take a swing on the unknown soldier!

You comfortable rolling with McLaughlin, or you want to make a move? In this league, every point matters, and kickers can be the difference between victory and going home empty-handed!

    I picked up Parker Romo for the team. I thought it would be fun to test out the “sleeper” pick.

    And finally, our starting lineup, barring any injuries or set backs during the practice week:

    I think we’ve got a good matchup this week. Most of our opponent ranks are pretty low. Barring injuries we should maybe, hopefully, get our first win of the year.

    Tune in next week for our results!

  • Week 2 – AI Plays Fantasy Football

    We lost again. AI is 0-2.

    For the most part I agreed with the picks that AI made last week. Except for one. The tight end. It felt a little weird picking Hunter Henry up off waiver wire and boy did I found out why. More on that later. Here are the results from the week:

    There are definitely some misses on wide receiver but that is always such a hit or miss position. What shocked me the most was Josh Allen only get 11 points. Also, J.J. McCarthy was injured in his game. Not a single player hit their projection except for the Rams’ defense. If we take a look at the bench there are definitely some better picks we could have made strictly from looking at points for the game. However, even if we had selected all the better preforming players the team would have still lost as our opponent had 164 points this week.

    Anyway, that’s enough football for this post. Let’s talk about some tech. I mentioned earlier that I was questioning the waiver acquisition of Hunter Henry and I wish I had done some more debugging as to why that pick was selected.

    I added a chat feature to the overall application so that we can identify waiver picks and other things faster rather than having to get a full weekly analysis every time. In that code there is a function that generates a recommendation score. I’ll admit, I vibe coded some of this with some prompting of how this should be determined.

    # Penalty for high ownership
        #ownership_penalty = float(waiver_player['percent_owned']) / 10  # Convert to float
        #score -= ownership_penalty

    You can see here that we lowing our recommendation score because of “high ownership” this is because the reverse engineered ESPN Fantasy API doesn’t identify if a player is on a teams roster or not when I pull the players. So a player with a 100% ownership would likely never be recommended. So a player like Zach Ertz, who had 18 points this week was not suggested as he had approximately 80% ownership across ALL of ESPN’s fantasy platform. Well… this problem has been fixed.

    Anyway, I also added chat. And I programmed it to respond only as Dan Campbell. Here is some output when I asked “What do you think of my team?”

    pounds table

Well I'll be damned, you got yourself a HELL of a roster there, chief! This team's got some serious bite to it - let me break it down for ya.

Your Strengths - These are STUDS:
- Josh Allen - That's your franchise quarterback right there. Guy's a warrior and puts up points like it's going out of style
- Saquon Barkley & Josh Jacobs - Holy smokes, that's a one-two punch at RB that'll knock people's teeth out! Both these guys are workhorses
- Breece Hall in the FLEX - Are you kidding me?! Most teams would KILL to have Hall as their RB1, and you got him as a flex play. That's championship-level depth
- DK Metcalf - Big body receiver who can take the top off any defense
- Your bench depth - Terry McLaurin, DJ Moore, Cooper Kupp, Keenan Allen?! That's four WR1/WR2 caliber guys just sitting there!

Areas that need some attention:
- George Kittle on IR - That hurts, but Hunter Henry's a solid fill-in for now
- J.J. McCarthy at OP - Kid's got potential but he's still unproven. Might want to consider streaming that spot based on matchups
- Marvin Harrison Jr. - Rookie receivers can be boom-or-bust, but the talent's there

The Bottom Line:
This roster is LOADED, especially at RB and WR. You've got championship potential written all over it. The depth is ridiculous - you could probably trade some of that bench talent for upgrades at TE or find a more consistent OP play.

You're sitting pretty, but don't get comfortable! Keep grinding, keep looking for those edges. That's how you win championships!

What specific position are you thinking about upgrading, or you want me to take a look at some waiver wire options?

    And here is an architecture diagram update to include the chat elements:

    So, I’ll be back tomorrow with a new lineup. Hopefully week three treats us better!

  • AI Loses Its First Matchup – Fantasy Football Agentic AI

    Straight to the point. AI lost is week one matchup by 2.28 points. I watched as many of the games as I could so that I could give a slight bit of commentary.

    First a re-cap. If you haven’t been following along, I have built and am continuing to improve upon an Agentic AI solution for drafting and managing a Fantasy Football team for the 2025 season. The team is entirely AI selected and you can see its predictions for week 1 here.

    There was a couple of concerns that I had looking at the lineup. Most notably Sam Darnold in the superflex (OP) position as I thought some of the other players might have break out games and boy was I right!

    Here is the results from week 1

    Now, let’s comment on a few things. George Kittle left his game with an injury and is likely to miss a few weeks. AI can’t predict in game injuries, yet. DJ Moore was the final hope Monday night and he was either not targeted when he was open or Caleb Williams simply didn’t throw a good ball. AI, can’t predict in game performance, yet.

    Now, the Agent did hit on Josh Allen with his amazing performance against the Ravens. Breece Hall was also a great pick beating his projections.

    What’s Next?

    So we have some clear things to work out.

    1. Injuries – the AI Coach needs to understand that Kittle is likely out for a few weeks.
    2. Waivers – Now that we have an injury we need to replace a player. Engram is on the bench but is he the best tight end?

    With these clear needs in mind I am actively working on building out a waiver wire monitoring tool to grab available players from the ESPN Fantasy platform. Because ESPN doesn’t have a native API this has been particularly challenging. I added in a Lambda function that will run daily and update the other teams rosters in a DynamoDB table so that we could potentially compare lists of players from other sources. This would give us a subset of “available” players. I also will be adding in an injury parameter that will help assist the Agent in determining the next lineup. Finally, I am scraping out the fantasy points earned per team and storing them as another data set that the Agent can use to help make predictions.

    Current architecture diagram:

    I’m also looking heavily into how I can structure all the data more efficiently so there is less infrastructure to manage. Ideally, it would be nice to have a single table with the player as the primary key and all of the subsets of data underneath.

    I think the AI is close to dominating the rest of the league! I will be posting its predictions for next week sometime on Thursday before the game!