Fantasy Football with python

Fantasy football Drafting with Python

I spend the off season preparing to build a python program that would automatically update my draft list as players were chosen. 

I was successful. and then work got busy, so I have not had time to update this blog with any information.

I use one site for my ratings, and draft on the league site.

The future of my python draft program will include several sites, that offer free projections or rankings.

this will give me a better window of player expectations.

I also then used the ADP from the site that we draft from and meshed it with my list.

meaning if I have players 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 on the top my list and the ADP list showed that players 2,4,6,8, and10 would expect to be available by my next pick, it would not list them.

I used this method manually last year, and automated this year.

I have used the same source site for six years and have only missed the playoffs once. I have 8 playoff wins in those years including winning one Superbowl and losing one Superbowl.

No one else in my league Here is the readme on my newly started github.

know that I am not proficiant as a programer, I used Jupytor to work through each section and pulled information from google.

Next years update for 2026 I will use Claude and Copilot to improve this process.

I have some things I want and need to update this for 2026, I will blog about them as I attack them.

From github private repository

CFFL Fantasy Football Draft Tools

A collection of Python scripts to assist with fantasy football drafting in the CFFL league. These tools scrape player projections, calculate Value Over Replacement (VOR), and provide draft recommendations during live drafts.

Features

• Player Projections & VOR Calculation: Scrapes fantasy football projections from FFToday and calculates VOR rankings.
• ADP Integration: Merges Average Draft Position (ADP) data from RTSports for your specific league.
• Draft Night Assistant: Interactive GUI tool that provides real-time draft recommendations based on VOR and ADP.
• Live Draft Board Monitoring: Tracks drafted players and updates available options during the draft.

Scripts Overview

CreateDraftlist.py

• Pulls player projections from FFToday for QB, RB, WR, TE, K, and DEF positions.
• Scrapes ADP data from RTSports league page.
• Calculates VOR (Value Over Replacement) rankings.
• Merges projections with ADP data.
• Outputs a comprehensive draft list sorted by VOR.
• Run this once before the draft to prepare the data.

Draftbuddy25.py

• Interactive GUI application for draft night.
• Loads the draft list created by CreateDraftlist.py.
• Monitors the live RTSports draft board.
• Provides recommendations for the next 20 players ranked by VOR, filtered by likely availability based on ADP.
• Includes a menu with additional options for draft day convenience.
• Requires manual entry of current teams and owners with their RTSports tmId before the draft.

RTSportsADP.py

• Utility script to pull ADP data from RTSports.
• Saves the top 300 players' ADP to a CSV file (top300_raw.csv).
• Useful for analyzing league-specific ADP trends.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x
• Required packages: requests, pandas, openpyxl, beautifulsoup4, tkinter (usually included with Python)

Install dependencies:

pip install requests pandas openpyxl beautifulsoup4

Usage

1. Prepare Draft Data:

   • Run CreateDraftlist.py to generate the draft list with VOR rankings and ADP.
   • This creates the necessary data files for the draft assistant.

2. Set Up Draft Buddy:

   • Open Draftbuddy25.py.
   • Manually update the teams_df with current league teams, owners, and their RTSports tmId.
   • Run the script to launch the GUI.

3. During Draft:

   • Use the Draft Buddy interface to get real-time recommendations.
   • The tool will show players ranked by VOR but limited to those likely available for your next pick.

Configuration

• Update league-specific URLs and IDs in the scripts as needed.
• Adjust position cutoffs (QB_cut, RB_cut, etc.) in CreateDraftlist.py for your league settings.
• For next season, update the Season parameter in the FFToday URLs.

Notes

• These scripts are tailored for the CFFL league on RTSports.
• Ensure you have permission to scrape data from the websites used.
• The scripts rely on the current HTML structure of FFToday and RTSports; updates to their sites may require code adjustments.

License

This project is for personal use in the CFFL fantasy football league.