Fantasy football fever, today, has topped temperatures of yesteryear–and growing furiously each season. The three major players of Yahoo, CBS, and ESPN comprise what’s a $1.5 billion industry, per research firm IBISWorld.
The internet, virtually since its inception, spurred the stunning interest and growth of fantasy football’s fan-driven participation. The NFL, for their part, helped drive this forward by building a real-time, in-game stats system in the late 1990s, which provided instant data to the leagues that so many fans were joining. These fantasy leagues have enabled fans to, in effect, operate as general managers and head coaches themselves; they can make decisions that impact player acquisitions and starting lineups akin to what’s done by professionals on Sundays.
The upstarts of FanDuel and DraftKings have turned the football season into 17 one-week seasons, giving fans a fresh start to take part and more quickly. Both of them have individually secured close to $300 million in financing, which, in turn, has resulted in a competition over ad space. There’s 28 out of 32 NFL teams procuring sponsorship deals from them in the range of $6 million to $7 million, per research firm IEG.
Innovation from the fantasy sports market is propelling continual growth, opening opportunities for new startups to enter this alluring mix…
When Chris Tanck joined the NFL in 1997, he tells SportTechie that he was committed to creating a consolidated and connected data architecture, which would provide easy access to information for the business and football divisions of the league. Such efforts led to the implementation of analytic applications that united player performance (statistics) and contracts, enabling GMs and coaches to more effectively build their rosters and manage their salary cap.
As development continued, the analytic systems dug deeper into the data, starting to merge player statistics to the video of each play that created the stat. This advancement proved to be a valuable recourse to the pro scouts for free agent evaluations as well as to the coaches for game planning. Analytical services went on to be spread into other areas of the business, including ticketing, TV ratings, and support for negotiations in the 2011 CBA. Not to mention, NFL analytic services are showcased on the NFL’s “Mind Blowing Stats” segments nowadays.
That said, Tanck along with his partner Elvis Pereymer, formerly the NFL’s Director of Analytics and Data Products and the NFL’s Senior Database Developer, respectively, have founded Top Dog Stats. With their combined unique experience and expertise in sports-based analytic platforms, they’re tapping into that to identify an entirely new segment to fill a vacuum in support of the fantasy sports sector. While they’re totally self-funded at the moment, it may change, as they are planning for a funding round in the near future.
“An executive or a GM doesn’t have the time or patience to sift through information delivered in large grids or complicated spreadsheets. We found they wanted to see analytical information presented in bite-sized chunks that they could easily understand and use to make informed, effective decisions,” says Pereymer, Co-Founder of Top Dog Stats, with regards to the vacancy in the fantasy football landscape they want to address–that’s equivalent to what actual football executives go through.
Up until now, fantasy football users have had to utilize analytical services composed virtually entirely from Excel-esque formats. The presentation of the intel hasn’t been modernized much, at least aesthetically. Top Dog Stats wants to deliver a different experience, where the fantasy GMs is in control of their respective information. They can zero in on key decision factors instantly using visuals, which illustrate the data in easy to understand charts that compare only the players they care to know about.
“Although data visualizations are replacing complex spreadsheets at the executive level in corporations, there has been no real effort to bring the power of data visualization to fantasy sports,” Pereymer states.
“Top Dog Stats delivers the power of visualization to every fantasy fan, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Fantasy GMs will use the visualization to quickly compare player performance in virtually any statistical category. The visualizations can be included and saved in a dashboard that will continue to update automatically after each game,” added Pereymer.
By leveraging this medium, fantasy football users could be able to identify patterns, trends, and correlations more easily. These “smart” visuals enable fantasy players to quickly observe opportunities and outliers in their respective leagues, no matter the level participating in.
This YouTube video sheds some light on Top Dog Stats’ customizable platform:
They have already launched a beta program, with the goal to introduce their visual technology to fantasy football fans everywhere. Top Dog Stats’ built-in social capabilities functions to disseminate their message rapidly through various fantasy leagues. This kind of opt-in can enable them to build a large population of registered users, then refining the site based on the feedback and needs of their consumers.
From a monetization standpoint, Pereymer mentions that they want to create sponsored ad branding for each chart and report. Such ad placement won’t be like typical banner ads, though. They don’t want to bombard users with standard advertising links, as that would take away from the platform’s quite clean and user-friendly experience.
Instead, Top Dog Stats will angle to have sponsors of the week. For example: Budweiser sponsoring the rush yards report.
Moreover, one of the unique benefits for advertisers would be the fact the user-produced dashboards that are shareable, these will possess their logos tied to the screenshots that are being shared. Thus, this kind of engagement would be a key campaign towards driving brand awareness for these corporate entities.
Beyond this advertising facet, Top Dog Stats figures to add a predictions and projections model to its platform, requiring a subscription-based model. They’re currently working on ways to devise a mode that will have a higher accuracy rate than other fantasy prediction outlets.
This prediction formula, Pereymer says, “will not only be able to answer questions such as, ‘who do you think I should start this week?, but we can also visually answer the question of ‘why?’, using our visuals.”
It should be noted, though, Top Dog Stats as a startup enters the fantasy sports space in a time when another startup, numberFire, recently has been acquired by FanDuel.
Nigel Eccles, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FanDuel, told TechCrunch that he envisions his company to be “less as a fantasy sports business,” but, rather, more all-encompassing, in light of its acquisition.
While numberFire’s analytics will be integrated to FanDuel’s product, an opportunity lies in “educating sports fans”–whether they’re active fantasy users or not–on top of numberFire serving as an independent operator of fantasy sports recommendations. The challenge is to present users information that’s relevant and useful for their personal needs. Nik Bonaddio, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of numberFire, mentioned that they intend to phase into a “tech-driven approach” from producing articles based on gleaned data.
“The acquisition of numberFire by FanDuel illustrates the importance of analytics serviced to the providers and users of the fantasy leagues,” states Pereymer.
“FanDuel saw an opportunity to make their product more attractive by including numberFire’s analytics services as an integral of the FanDuel product. Top Dog Stats will provide similar analytical service, but also delivers the power of our visualization technology to provide a better experience for the user,” Pereymer continued.
Top Dog Stats, as a platform, recognizes all of the major fantasy providers’ scoring rules. The users select the scoring appropriate for the leagues they are participating in. Eventually, Top Dog Stats will look to expand into other sports, including MLB and NBA, for their respective 2016 seasons.
These former NFL data analysts have devised a visual makeover for fantasy football, making it crystal clear for fantasy players to empirically know what’s their next best move.