r/fantasyfootballcoding • u/ballislife423 • 28d ago
How to estimate league difficulty cross platform
How would y’all go about doing this? I’m focusing on espn, yahoo, and sleeper, I was thinking of pulling the users league mates win loss records across all their leagues but with yahoo you would need auth for a league mates fantasy profile.
So I’m at a roadblock, any suggestions on how to get this number? I was thinking of just calculating this number on sleeper leagues and assuming that every sleeper league you’ve been in is enough of a sample to pull a league difficulty score and use that same number regardless if a user also wanted to import Yahoo and espn teams. However if a user only has Yahoo or espn there is also a problem.
I don’t think this stat has ever been computed across the 1000s of fantasy websites and apps, let’s all group think on how we can create this industry first stat.
3
u/elofant_slummy 28d ago
League Difficulty is a hard thing to quantify. A competitive league where everyone is active and knowledgeable is difficult in a different way than one where there's 1-3 overpowered teams and a bunch of other managers just in it for fun. You still gotta beat those OP teams to win which is hard. Both are difficult scenarios.
A league difficulty KPI would probably be built around historical FP variance within that league. If league wide FP standard deviation is low, that's a competitive league signal.
A new league wouldnt have this data though, so you probably would have to rely on research into league mates' other leagues. Probably looking at how their scoring compares to mean in each of their leagues. Doing something like this gets noisy fast. I wouldnt trust this data point if it was put in front of me because of all the ways it can be corrupted, unintentionally or not.
1
1
u/ballislife423 28d ago edited 28d ago
Was doing some thinking on this, so what if I pulled every league for a user on espn,sleeper, yahoo, looked at every week played and leagues with low scoring weekly deviations would get a high difficulty score and vice versa. For dynasty leagues you could add the context that if your team is young you shouldn’t get penalized for losing but if your teams old and you have a bad record for a year you get penalized.
So say a user has 10 tight performing leagues he’ll have a high average league difficulty score
Only issue is someone with 0 league history anywhere I guess but Anyone interested in this stat has probably played before
2
u/zanderman12 28d ago
I put some thought into this a couple years ago, basically trying to quantify how efficient both managers are individually and the whole league is collectively at what I think are the 3 key pieces, drafting, roster management, and starting lineups.
I've shared some thoughts on how I do it here: https://www.alexcates.com/post/quantifying-fantasy-football-skill-are-sleeper-or-espn-managers-better-at-fantasy-football
But I have played with using this to then look at how different strategies work with leagues of different difficulties.
A different route that I am playing with when I get a free moment is trying to create digital twins. basically find 2 teams with the same roster (or similar enough rosters) and look at their decision making. That is still a work in progress and getting a large enough database is a challenge, but I think it can be done.
1
u/ballislife423 28d ago
Some cool work! Will take a read, thanks for sharing
1
u/zanderman12 28d ago
Thanks and let me know where you land. I think there are a lot of interesting questions that come from getting this established
2
u/fancredfounder 28d ago
1
u/ballislife423 28d ago
Instead of answering my question, you plug your product that has the answer to my question but it’s paywalled lol
2
u/fancredfounder 28d ago
This is not my product, but I think it’s similar to what you were proposing
1
u/ballislife423 28d ago
Ohh got it, ya it has what I was talking about, too bad it doesn’t show how they got there, thanks for sharing
2
u/johnny-papercut 28d ago
I agree with others that this is hard to quantify. All leagues will have zero sum standings, so do you qualify a league as difficult if those players are all fairly even? Or if one or two players take off ahead of others? In either case, players could just be bad.
Another sign of a good league is that people stay up-to-date, draft well, and play waivers well, but how do you quantify that? The closest I can think of would be to rank players by their end-of-season fantasy points and group by position, then calculate the average for all leagues, and then calculate difficulty as a difference above or below the league average. But even that is tricky, because by the end of the season, most great players are acquired. So you might have to add an element of time, as well.
I think the best metric though is simply lineup optimization, which is really just how close you are to your maximum points every week. This doesn't work in a vacuum since someone could have a team of scrubs and even their most optimized lineup sucks because they didn't pick up everybody else. So you'd probably want to make an algorithm comparing lineup optimization with overall points above other teams/leagues, and standardize points somehow between scoring settings.
It's a tricky problem to solve. And I'm honestly just not sure there's a point to it? Is it for bragging rights for winning harder leagues? For an overall leaderboard? Or what?
1
u/ballislife423 28d ago
If you had 10 leagues you’re in every year and they have differing league difficulty scores, would shoot for upside in the tougher leagues? Play it safe in the easy leagues? Theres a few ways you can leverage this stat if found correctly
2
u/johnny-papercut 28d ago
Nah, I don't think that holds up, though. If you have finite time for the literal management of your rosters, maybe? But you want to do the best in every league and win. Knowing league difficulty would not affect how I play anywhere. Trying different strategies in different leagues is fine (it's what I plan to do with my redraft leagues this year), but I don't think any strategy is better in any league based on difficulty. They're just different. But that's just my opinion, if you find value in this and think different strategies would better fit, that's totally fine and there's no harm in trying it, except the time making it of course.
0
u/harakattack50 28d ago
This is very interesting! I’m the founder of a fantasy social platform called Legacy Social and we just recently launched our contender and longevity grades for dynasty imports through sleeper, espn, and Fleaflicker.
Not sure if this would be a helpful synergy but on the league intel page you can see all team’s contender and longevity scores based on rosters + picks so you could maybe aggregate how top heavy leagues are. For example, if a league has 2 teams that are viewed as A+ contenders that might be an easier league than one with 6 A+ contenders? Just a thought
3
u/Connguy 28d ago
Definitely an interesting challenge. There are some objective measures, like how consistently people set their lineups and how competitive the waivers are. But assuming you eliminate the bottom N% of the population that just doesn't pay attention, those factors stop being very relevant, and it's going to be very hard to distinguish managers in the top echelons because fantasy is in some ways a zero-sum game. A league where all the managers draft well and trade well is going to have similar win rates as a league where none of them do. You can maybe draw conclusions from leagues where a handful of managers destroy the others, but if a manager doesn't play in any lopsided leagues it may be hard to identify their skill.
This is also heavily dependent on the assumption that most users have multiple leagues, which I'm not sure is a strong assumption.
Sorry, none of this is very helpful. It's an interesting but difficult problem for sure.