Fantasy Football Draft Kit

[SeanDonovan]

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. 🙂

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 2023 season.  Stat projections and team logos are from NFL.com.  Player ratings and portraits are from EA Sports.

Cheers,
Sean Donovan
LinkedIn | Twitter

[sr00]

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 🙂

Thanks!!

[kahnailee]

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

[jmiller21]

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]

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

[jnpb]

Hi Sean, 

Downloaded the PBIX you added - what a great implementation! 

One thing I'm struggling with is with adapting this to our league's scoring system. I can't seem to figure out how to add a Kick20Points (0-19 FGs in our league are 2 pts, 20-39 are 3). Any advice on how I could make this change? 

Disclaimer: have only been using PBI for a very short while, so am stumbling my way through it. 

Thank you in advance for any insight you might be able to offer!

[SeanDonovan]

A new "What-If" parameter (Kick20Points) will need to be added to the report first.  Once that is created, the "Fantasy Points" measure will need to be modified to account for the additional scoring rule.

I was able to make the change and attach a modified PBIX file from the post above.

[jnpb]

Sir, you've been incredibly helpful and generous with your time - thank you so much for this!

[jmiller21]

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...

[TerryGore]

Where do I download it?  🙂

[SeanDonovan]

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

[jnpb]

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 😂

[jlarkin818]

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 🙂   Thanks for sharing!

[SeanDonovan]

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