I’m participating in the Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Pro Football Pickem with some family and friends. I don’t regularly play fantasy sports, but I was coaxed into donating money to the pool during a family trip this summer. I blame the beer and port.
For the uninitiated, each week you must pick a winner in all 16 games, assigning a confidence weight from 1 to 16 to each game. If your pick wins, then you are awarded points equal to the confidence weight that you assigned to that game.
Now that my money’s in, I want to make a solid showing. My strategy is to leverage the gambling lines, mapping the point spreads and over under lines to my picks and weights.
I threw together a little Python script to parse the Yahoo odds web page. For each game, the script averages the point spreads and over under lines. The favored team is selected, and the picks are ranked according to point spread, with wider spreads getting a larger weight. Ties on point spread are broken by the over under line, with a larger over under line mapping to a larger weight.
Now I’m wondering how to improve this simple algorithm. I might break ties by giving a smaller over under a higher weight. The reasoning would be that smaller over under lines will have less variance. Surely there are other ways to improve the rankings.
Here’s the table that my little script prints out.
weight | winner loser spread o/u
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16 | Minnesota Vikings over Detroit Lions -9.83 45.17
15 | Washington Redskins over St. Louis Rams -9.58 37.00
14 | Green Bay Packers over Cincinnati Bengals -9.08 42.00
13 | Tennessee Titans over Houston Texans -6.50 40.92
12 | Atlanta Falcons over Carolina Panthers -6.08 42.50
11 | Buffalo Bills over Tampa Bay Buccaneers -4.42 42.00
10 | New England Patriots over New York Jets -3.42 46.17
9 | Jacksonville Jaguars over Arizona Cardinals -3.08 42.50
8 | Indianapolis Colts over Miami Dolphins -3.08 42.17
7 | San Diego Chargers over Baltimore Ravens -3.00 40.33
6 | Denver Broncos over Cleveland Browns -3.00 38.83
5 | Kansas City Chiefs over Oakland Raiders -3.00 38.50
4 | Pittsburgh Steelers over Chicago Bears -2.92 37.50
3 | Dallas Cowboys over New York Giants -2.75 45.00
2 | San Francisco 49ers over Seattle Seahawks -1.10 39.58
1 | New Orleans Saints over Philadelphia Eagles -1.00 46.08
