Fantasy Football Central

Background

My friends and I have been part of a fantasy football league for many years and it is something I look forward to every year. We have always used Yahoo as our league provider and recently began doing live, offline auction drafts. This app is a tool for us to assist with the draft process and to provide helpful insights throughout the fantasy season.

Inspiration

The idea for this project stemmed from me wanting to improve our draft experience — I’d like us each to be able to input our picks from within the app and at the end of the draft, easily upload all the picks (as a csv or the like) to our league within Yahoo.

I did not expect this project to be such an arduous journey, but it has been a good test of my patience, ingenuity, and resilience. I know I’m making this sound like a trek through the desert, but it really was quite a challenge.

The Project

The Yahoo Fantasy Sports API leaves an astronomical amount to be desired, as its documentation is visually difficult to sift through, has information gaps galore that you have to painstakingly try your best to bridge, typos, omissions, and is overall outdated. At least at the time I was working on this (2023), I don’t believe much, if any, of this API has been updated in over a decade.

It took me nearly a month just to set up Yahoo OAuth authentication in my app and begin querying the Fantasy Sports API. Once I got somewhat of a handle on things, I was able to start building out different features. I’ve yet to tackle my original goal of draft management, but have begun to build out a nice platform with league and team tracking, matchup analysis, roster breakdowns, and more.

This app is still very much a work in progress. I hope to one day complete it, when it can be used not only by my league, but by any other fantasy footballers looking for a new tool.

Feel free to check out the live site, though you'll need a Yahoo fantasy football account to login and explore.

View the code on Github.