Fantasy Football Player Recommendations

This app displays the best NFL players for users to pick for their teams during their fantasy football drafts. First, I used Beautiful Soup to scrape the most important stats for each position (QB, RB, WR, TE, D/ST, K) into CSV files. Then, I used these stats to calculate a "recomendation rating" for each player–each statistic is assigned a certain weight based on their importance for fantasy points and then I divided the sum of the weighted values by the sum of the weights to normalize the result. This ensures that the combined rec_rating is within a reasonable range and reflects a weighted average of the individual percentages.

Players are displayed to users from those with the highest to the lowest recommendation ratings. Note: the calculations are simplified and not based on those used by actual fantasy football sites.

Research

My calculations are based on the research I did using these links: Quarterbacks, Running Backs, Wide Receivers, Tight Ends, Defense/Special Teams, Kickers

Demo

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnlI7SXFZvk

List of what I used

• Python
• Flask
• Beautiful Soup
• Pandas

How to set it up on your local machine

To run this app locally, first clone this repository to your local machine...

git clone url-to-this-repository

... and then do the following:

Set up a Python virtual environment

This command creates a new virtual environment with the name .venv:

python3 -m venv .venv

Activate the virtual environment

To activate the virtual environment named .venv...

On Mac:

source .venv/bin/activate

On Windows:

.venv\Scripts\activate.bat

Install the dependencies into the virtual environment

The file named, requirements.txt contains a list of dependencies - other Python modules that this app depends upon to run.

To install the dependencies into the currently-active virtual environment, use pip, the default Python "package manager" - software that takes care of installing the correct version of any module into your in the correct place for the current environment.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Run the app

1. define two environment variables from the command line: on Mac, use the commands: export FLASK_APP=app.py and export FLASK_ENV=development; on Windows, use set FLASK_APP=app.py and set FLASK_ENV=development.
2. copy the file named env.example into a new file named .env, and enter your own MongoDB database connection credentials into that file where indicated.
3. start flask with flask run - this will output an address at which the app is running locally, e.g. https://127.0.0.1:5000. Visit that address in a web browser.
4. in some cases, the command flask will not be found when attempting flask run... you can alternatively launch it with python3 -m flask run --host=0.0.0.0 --port=10000.