Inspiration
Fantasy football is a popular hobby (reaching almost 60 million players across platforms) that allows a user to serve as general manager of a virtual professional football team. Yet, all existing platforms currently terminate their fantasy leagues once the regular season comes to a close. This prevents users from being able to engage with their community for almost a month's worth of games when the NFL's stakes are at its highest. Thus, we aim to fill that gap in the user market. By designing a web application that works around the complexities of Postseason NFL, we created a platform where users can extend their fantasy seasons into specially designed playoff leagues.
What it does
Our web application scrapes data from live box-score analytics to receive statistics on every active player in the NFL playoffs. This data is then used to power our backend in calculating respective scores for each player. Users are then able to see on the frontend live updates of their team's performance and where they stand in their respective league.
How we built it
We created a custom Selenium web crawler to gather and store player and team analytics. All analytics are stored in a persistent, scalable relational database. In sync with the database, we developed a Flask application with several API endpoints. Our dynamic frontend web interface queries the Flask API to generate a platform on which the user interacts.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge that we faced was being able to accurately collect data on all players and their teams. Due to large paywalls, we had to manually scrape the web and had to crawl across poorly designed webpages not intended to be scraped. As a result, we developed a more complicated web scraper through selenium component interactions. It was also challenging to find a scalable yet reliable database option for the backend of our platform. This involved implementing different relational databases with our application to determine the best functioning option.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the web crawler to gather and store the data in the backend. We are also proud of the front-end interface that was designed for simple interaction while providing the user with maximum data.
What we learned
We learned how to design and develop a full-stack application with supporting database and tools.
What's next for Talkin' Bout Playoffs
Future development plans for our application include developing a draft mechanic for users to initialize leagues on the platform, as well as improving database management and communication with frontend.
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