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Meredith Hassett
Meredith Hassett

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This app will win me my fantasy football league

Or at least I hope it will :)

In Week 1 of my Fantasy Football League, I lost bad. Like 2nd lowest score in the whole league bad. Only 1 other person did worse than me. 🤣

Fantasy week 1 scores

And this got me thinking, I really need some better players (plus my defense did NOTHING). By random circumstance, I found the ESPN has an API for getting league and team information, and lightbulb, let me build a webapp that can help me win my fantasy league.

The documentation definitely needs some work as ESPN actually provides none, and a nice fellow dev Mike Kreiser was kind enough to help us out. If you want to learn more about working with the ESPN API that is available via an npm package, check out his documentation here.

Digging into the source code, you learn a little bit more about what is available from this API, and one of the endpoints is to your league's free agent list. I thought to myself, this could be helpful.

Free agent function declaration

So I started playing around with the API and trying to figure out exactly how this could help me. I am not fantasy football expert, and I noticed one of the fields returned is a Percent Started. This percentage is based on how many other leagues started this player. So while I might not be the best, maybe a lot of other people playing know what they are doing. This got me thinking, I could start looking for free agents in our league with high percentages and scoop them up.

Free Agent's table

I started working an app where I can see all the available players, make sure they aren't injured or not a team (and therefore won't be scoring any points), and then use this list to make better decisions for my team.

So far, I have the table up and running, and next up is for filtering and sorting. Stay tuned for progress and to see if it did help me win 😁

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