SeanDonovan's avatar
SeanDonovan
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
4 years ago

Fantasy Football Draft Kit

Football season is upon us!  If you are a fan like me, this is the time of year to get together with family and friends to participate in the annual tradition of Fantasy Football.  This mostly friendly competition allows participants to draft NFL players and manage their fantasy team. Teams are awarded points based on the actual weekly performance of their players, and at the end of the season a league winner claims the bragging rights. 

 

This year, I plan to participate in multiple Fantasy Football leagues, each with different scoring rules, so I have to go into each draft with a unique strategy to select my players.  Enter Microsoft Power BI.

 

With Power BI, I was able to:

  • Extract the stat projections from the NFL.com web site by using the built-in Get Data from Web feature.
  • Enter in the scoring variables for my Fantasy Football league by using What-If Parameters.
  • Create a measure that identifies how many fantasy points each player is projected to score this season.
  • Show a table of who I should draft in descending order. πŸ™‚

When it was time for me to participate in a draft for another league, all I had to do was change the scoring variables and the report would refresh with the new fantasy projections for each player. A great way to give myself an advantage over others in my league! 

 

Updated for the 2025 season.  Stat projections and team logos are from NFL.com.  Player ratings and portraits are from EA Sports.

Cheers,
Sean Donovan
LinkedIn | Twitter

 

13 Replies

  • jlarkin818's avatar
    jlarkin818
    Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee

    i'm pretty much a rookie on the BI front.....any way you could record a video and post it on how to set this up for our own drafts?  If not, i'm an FTE as well so if a teams call is easier i can do that too πŸ™‚   Thanks for sharing!

    • SeanDonovan's avatar
      SeanDonovan
      Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee

      Thank you.  Please feel free to send me a message on Teams.

    • SeanDonovan's avatar
      SeanDonovan
      Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee

      This page is read-only, but I can forward you the PBIX file. πŸ™‚

      • jnpb's avatar
        jnpb
        Icon for Helper I rankHelper I

        Hello Sean,

         

        What an awesome idea! Wondering if you'd be willing to forward me the PBIX as well? I could use this to help my own draft this year πŸ˜‚

  • jmiller21's avatar
    jmiller21
    Frequent Visitor

    Would love if you could forward this pbix to me as well. I have lots of fantasy football content I've been doing with PBI, but love the look of your example above.

    • SeanDonovan's avatar
      SeanDonovan
      Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee

      I've added the PBIX file to the description above.  Hope it helps!

      • jmiller21's avatar
        jmiller21
        Frequent Visitor

        This is great! Thank you. Utilizing the underlying data, have you thought about creating a draft board using PBI? I created one years ago with Excel that uses lists, combo boxes, offsets etc to make the corresponding pick in a column/row populate a draft board in a snake order. Thinking that if this can be done in Power BI, it would be much more aesthetic and probably easier to use/update. Case in point I just opened my Excel file from a couple years ago to update it, and the combobox/VBA is no longer working...

  • Sean, this is incredible! Are you able to provide the Excel docs you used? I'd like to replicate, if possible.

  • sr00's avatar
    sr00
    New Member

    Hi! So sorry to bug, but by chance could you share the excel sheets you used? Trying to make something similar to this for an NHL Fantasy League πŸ™‚

     

    Thanks!!