Improving Fantasy Football Odds with Monarch
I never was an expert when it came to Fantasy Sports, and always heavily relied on the autodraft feature. Unfortunately, autodraft does not consider that a fantasy team doesn’t need more than 1 kicker and 4 substandard running backs. My teams were never successful…that is until I arrived at Altair during the 2016 Company Fantasy Football Draft.
I leveraged the autodraft in fantasy sports because I never knew whose “expert” opinion to trust. Since my laptop had a Monarch license, I decided to experiment. The marque product at Altair is the Monarch data preparation software. It is widely used across industries and departments including finance departments, revenue cycle management in hospitals, marketing analysts, human resources professionals and business intelligence analysts, but I had a different idea. I knew the basic premise of data prep was to extract data from a wide variety of sources, including the internet, but I didn’t realize right away how much more value it could provide until I started using it myself.
I will preface this by saying I am not in product development or a solutions architect, but rather a recent college grad who is starting his first sales gig. I began gathering data by searching for NFL fantasy draft advice. Lists from Michael Fabiano from NFL.com, Jamey Eisenberg from CBS, and the infamous Matthew Berry from ESPN, all coming from online data sources.
I opened Monarch on my laptop and decided to drag in these lists. Sure enough, CTRL + A and a simple drag left me with the lists populated in Data Prep Studio. From there, I used the “Combine Data” section where I joined the tables by name, but kept the rank from the original tables so I knew where the different experts had ranked the players. I then quickly changed the names of the columns to match the appropriate Fantasy Draft Expert. Suddenly the lists did not look so drastically different. I could understand where a certain RB would fall, who the top 3 first picks would potentially be, and highlight the sleepers that would impact my team I could pick up later in the draft.
Now, I wish I could say that I came in first and took home the trophy. Due to injury (of my players), I lost in the first round of the playoffs, but without Monarch, you can bet that I wouldn’t have made it that far.
I leveraged the autodraft in fantasy sports because I never knew whose “expert” opinion to trust. Since my laptop had a Monarch license, I decided to experiment. The marque product at Altair is the Monarch data preparation software. It is widely used across industries and departments including finance departments, revenue cycle management in hospitals, marketing analysts, human resources professionals and business intelligence analysts, but I had a different idea. I knew the basic premise of data prep was to extract data from a wide variety of sources, including the internet, but I didn’t realize right away how much more value it could provide until I started using it myself.
I will preface this by saying I am not in product development or a solutions architect, but rather a recent college grad who is starting his first sales gig. I began gathering data by searching for NFL fantasy draft advice. Lists from Michael Fabiano from NFL.com, Jamey Eisenberg from CBS, and the infamous Matthew Berry from ESPN, all coming from online data sources.
I opened Monarch on my laptop and decided to drag in these lists. Sure enough, CTRL + A and a simple drag left me with the lists populated in Data Prep Studio. From there, I used the “Combine Data” section where I joined the tables by name, but kept the rank from the original tables so I knew where the different experts had ranked the players. I then quickly changed the names of the columns to match the appropriate Fantasy Draft Expert. Suddenly the lists did not look so drastically different. I could understand where a certain RB would fall, who the top 3 first picks would potentially be, and highlight the sleepers that would impact my team I could pick up later in the draft.
Now, I wish I could say that I came in first and took home the trophy. Due to injury (of my players), I lost in the first round of the playoffs, but without Monarch, you can bet that I wouldn’t have made it that far.
-Randy Lynch, Business Development Representative at Altair
