Breaking Down 365 Fantasy Sports Point Cap Structure
Breaking Down 365 Fantasy Sports Point Cap Structure
We recently had the opportunity to talk with David Lowitz of 365 Fantasy Sports about how they implement their point system into the wide-variety of Daily Fantasy contests they offer. The following is a summary of what he told us, and should prove very useful when participating in any of the contests that 365 makes available.
At 365 Fantasy Sports, we choose to use the phrase “Point Cap” instead of salary cap as our points have nothing to do with player salaries, just with their performances. We use the same formula across the board for all sports and it is very easy to follow. Let’s use football as an example:
Pretend that after week 1 of the season, Drew Brees was the top performing scorer (based on our scoring system) in the league. For the sake of easy math, let’s say he blew up that day and scored 50 fantasy points. Remember, he was the highest scoring player in Week 1. As such, he becomes our “benchmark player” and gets assigned a score of 100 (just like on a test in college, if you ace it, you get a 100 and you can’t get any higher). Next, let’s say Brady had a great day and rang up 45 fantasy points. Since 45 is 90% of 50 (Brees’top score), Brady’s cost is now set at 90. Frank Gore had a decent day with 25 points, so (you guessed it) since 25 is 50% of 50, Gore’s cost is set at 50.
Every day, 365 Fantasy Sports re-ranks the daily sports Point Costs for baseball, basketball, and hockey players; and 365 updates player Point Costs weekly for football and NASCAR.
This formula continues on throughout the year. Let’s say that after Week 3, Brees is still the benchmark player (the highest scoring player after 3 weeks) with 150 points. In this situation he will still be ranked at 100. Meanwhile, Brady has gone on to rack up 120 points (80% of Brees’ points), so he is now ranked at 80 (down from 90). Let’s also say that Gore has earned 100 total points during this time which would have him ranked at 66.7 (up from 50).
Now we all know, that injuries and suspensions have a large effect on Daily Fantasy Sports, so 365 has built-in a feature to manually adjust for these occurrences. Each player gets ranked based on the number of games he has played. Continuing with our example, let’s fast forward to Week 8 of the season: Brees is still the man (our benchmark guy) with 320 total points, which is also equal to 40 points per game. Then let’s say we look at Wes Welker, who had a great first four weeks of the season but then he gets hurt and misses the next four games. Say he had scored 120 points in his first four games (30 points per game and 75% of Brees’ score); he is then ranked at 75. This way, when he comes back in during Week 9, his ranking is still in line with where it should be. If this allowance wasn’t made, then Welker would have a ranking of 37.5 (120 points / 8 games = 15 PPG to Brees’ 40)…a game-breaker bargain and an inaccurate representation of his true value.
The other tweak we make is to set a minimum number of games played. This doesn’t come into play as much in football, but it could with baseball, hockey and hoops. Let’s say its the beginning of September and the Dodgers call up a new rookie pitcher from AAA and he lights it up in his first and only appearance. His average PPG would be based just on that one start, and could easily be skewed. He could easily become the benchmark player which would completely mess up the values of the guys who we know and love throughout the season. To prevent this, we generally set a rule that a player must appear in 10-15% of the average number of games played. So, by game 100 of the MLB season a player would need to have played in 10-15% of them in order to break into our rankings. We downgrade the percentage number as the season goes along; we begin with 15% and gradually decrease the percentage until it reaches close to 10% at the end of the season.
Because 365 has such a wide variety of offerings that don’t require Point Caps (such as: “Pick A Pair”, “All Pro Challenge”, “Threesome”, “QB Shootout”, “Run Forest, Run”, “1:00 Tick Tock”, “Afternoon Delight” and “Night Owl”), we are able to hold off on offering Point Cap contests until around Week 3 or 4 of the season at which point we have a decent enough sample size of the current season’s data to formulate accurate player rankings.