KICKIN’ BACK Predictive Analytics and Fantasy Football Kicking GEORGE GREEN DSS680: PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
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
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