The Last Mile Problem - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 10

average in a season. Is this a new and troubling trend? Should you trade? A
little research might reveal that he matched up against one of the league's top
cornerbacks, or his quarterback was knocked out of the game, or perhaps he
tends to perform poorly in cold weather, away games. These environmental
factors make a difference with respect to outcomes. Performance data cannot
be understood in isolation—context matters.
So how did fantasy football create legions of fans who have developed a
specialized dialect of data fluency? It has been a combination of education,
effective data presentation, common data conventions, and incentives. Fantasy
football owners have been taught how to use data to their advantage through
the efforts of the NFL, ESPN, Yahoo!, and a cloud of other websites dedicated
to football analyses. Organizations like Football Outsiders built new media
businesses around data modeling and projections of player performance.
Leading online fantasy football sites like ESPN and Yahoo! have been aggres-
sive in pushing data and data visualizations to their users. These sites include
trend charts for every player, drive charts, player comparison graphics, and
predictive models for estimating game outcomes.
The educated fantasy football community is also highly engaged with the sport.
The community loves football! The fantasy league has provided a whole new
(and rewarding) dimension to its fandom. No longer is it tied down to rooting
for a single team—instead, the whole league becomes fodder for its atten-
tion as it picks and chooses players from
each of the 32 NFL teams. In addition, the
fantasy football industry has coalesced
around consistent formats for leagues,
points, and key metrics (Figure 1-2).
Terms like PPR, running back by commit-
tee, waiver wire, and flex are well under-
stood, facilitating conversations among
league owners. And with $1.18 billion bet
in fantasy football leagues annually and a
passionate fan base, fantasy owners have
huge incentives to make informed deci-
sions. When money or bragging rights are
on the line, individuals invest time and
energy into developing the skills and abili-
ties to become data fluent.
Figure 1-2 Yahoo! Sports fantasy football game status page