Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

What's DFS?

Daily Fantasy Sports. There are a few hundred thousand people that play DFS football during the NFL season, and it's growing at a tremendous rate.

Jeremy Crowhurst wrote:The PFRA doesn't compare well to SABR. SABR's focus is much more broad, encompassing the field of rotisserie baseball, whereas the PFRA really doesn't have a place for fantasy football or DFS. In that respect the PFRA is really limiting its membership to at most a few thousand people, where SABR's upper limit is in the millions.

Good points, but it wasn't meant to be an apples to apples comparison. What I'm saying is SABR has found a way to effectively tap into interest, build excitement, create product, and have fun.

The PFRA has that potential but, for some of the reasons I've mentioned and probably others, we're not there yet.

And, like in anything, you have a few people who view change as a bit of a threat. Let's leave it at that.

TodMaher wrote:
Well, The Coffin Corner is biggest expense. Just stop printing and mailing the thing.
Personally, I would just get rid of the whole paid membership/Member's Only. The website costs next to nothing to run and could be paid by a small number of donations.

Both excellent ideas, particularly the latter. It hinders new membership, and it creates a circle the wagons insiders vs outsiders mentality where some view themselves as superior to others. Just look at the amount of wasted time spent defending the "rights" of paid members in these posts. It's ridiculous, and dysfunctional.

Veeshik_ya wrote:

Jeremy Crowhurst wrote:The PFRA doesn't compare well to SABR. SABR's focus is much more broad, encompassing the field of rotisserie baseball, whereas the PFRA really doesn't have a place for fantasy football or DFS. In that respect the PFRA is really limiting its membership to at most a few thousand people, where SABR's upper limit is in the millions.

Good points, but it wasn't meant to be an apples to apples comparison. What I'm saying is SABR has found a way to effectively tap into interest, build excitement, create product, and have fun.

The PFRA has that potential but, for some of the reasons I've mentioned and probably others, we're not there yet.

And, like in anything, you have a few people who view change as a bit of a threat. Let's leave it at that.

I think we're in complete agreement here.

I get the purist view, and have some sympathy for it. pro-football-reference.com and footballoutsiders.com could increase their yearly revenue by a quarter-million dollars if they charged a modest fee for access to in-season statistics, while keeping past years' numbers free. The daily fantasy players live off of DVOA from the latter and the weekly data from the former. But....

As for the PFRA, well, who am I to say what we should or shouldn't be doing?

TodMaher wrote:Well, The Coffin Corner is biggest expense. Just stop printing and mailing the thing.

Yup. I personally like to have a physical copy but could easily just print out the online version. Doesn't have to be an all or nothing issue either, can leave room for a handful of issues to be printed out and mailed to whoever to "spread the word."

Jeremy and V_ya are absolutely correct - at least if I'm reading them right - in basically saying that the way for a football site to make money and/or increase membership is through fantasy football/statistics.

Though I'm not sure why making the PFRA "for profit" would need to be a/the goal? Plus I like to think of this group as a little more football educated than needing to devolve into eventually making up meaningless statistics. Which brings up why are we even compared to SABR?

Baseball is completely different, it's a game built on statistics, stats have some meaning in baseball. Not the same in football. Plus fantasy football has little relevance to actual football, since the majority of football stats - especially individual stats - are largely irrelevant. Thus, taking one largely irrelevant stat, combining it with one or more other largely irrelevant stats, sprinkling some math dust on it to make up a completely new 'advanced' largely irrelevant stat, wouldn't really be doing anything. Any made-up stat relevant to fantasy football would have no relevance to actual football. Football isn't baseball. If you do find football stats that are of any importance, a majority are team stats - because it's a team sport. Of course I would be interested in reading articles and research on defensive passer rating, but there's very few 'stats' like that and only so many that can even be close to being considered meaningful. Of those many are common sense. Not going to break ground publishing something on turnover margin, for example.

I definitely think the PFRA can grow, but I'm content in knowing that there's a ceiling, that being the point where you gather all the people that care about football history, which is only so many people, unfortunately.

Reaser wrote:Though I'm not sure why making the PFRA "for profit" would need to be a/the goal? Plus I like to think of this group as a little more football educated than needing to devolve into eventually making up meaningless statistics....

If you do find football stats that are of any importance, a majority are team stats - because it's a team sport. Of course I would be interested in reading articles and research on defensive passer rating, but there's very few 'stats' like that and only so many that can even be close to being considered meaningful. Of those many are common sense. Not going to break ground publishing something on turnover margin, for example.

I definitely think the PFRA can grow, but I'm content in knowing that there's a ceiling, that being the point where you gather all the people that care about football history, which is only so many people, unfortunately.

I tend to agree with this. I don't think making a profit should be a goal of the PFRA, and I wouldn't like to see the organization waste time trying to appeal to fantasy football enthusiasts.

I also wanted to second the idea that most of the interesting "new statistics" in football are team-oriented. For instance, I remember the one Todd Pence created last year; I might be remembering it wrong, but I think it compared offenses based on yards (or maybe points) a team produced per possession. I thought that was one of the best ideas I've seen in years. Just wanted to mention it again.

I enthusiastically support Ken for President. One goal I'd like to add is for a highly motivated individual or committee to attempt to recruit football writers. I'm thinking primarily about those who write books but we should also see about bloggers and print and electronic columnists as well. Look at the football section of your library. My guess is that no more than 10% of the authors of the books you own belong to the PFRA. In many ways they're one of our most obvious constituencies, yet many don't even know we exist. The problem with such a project is that it's labor intensive and the number who join would undoubtedly be less than the number who pass. I spent some weeks about ten years ago doing it, though, and the results were pretty good.

The officers would gladly provide anyone interested with a list of current and past members so you would only be approaching new people. Contact for many such writers is sometimes available on-line, especially for those who blog and write for websites; for those who work for print publications, we can often reach them that way. The time-consuming part is when contact info is not so readily available. Then we're often left to contacting them through their publishing companies, which are usually very helpful. If they're not or if they've lost contact, then we'd have to try other means. My approach was to also ask those writers I reached about contributing articles for The Coffin Corner. One other approach we might try is to see about running excerpts from one of their books; that way, we're able to draw them into our circle and they're happy because their work gets that much more exposure.

I and other officers will gladly assist anyone willing to take a stab at this. Either post something here or send a pm to one of us.

Bob Gill wrote:
I tend to agree with this. I don't think making a profit should be a goal of the PFRA, ...

Especially as we have legally been defined as a "not-for-profit" entity.

John Grasso » Thu Feb 12, 2015 8:23 am

Bob Gill wrote:
I tend to agree with this. I don't think making a profit should be a goal of the PFRA, ...

"Especially as we have legally been defined as a "not-for-profit" entity."

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Please allow me to remind you, John, that the Religions of the world are "not-for-profit," and the citadels of learning are "not-for-profit," and most medical institutions are "not-for-profit," and we won't even mention the honoraria consumed by so many political entities.
While I firmly oppose fantasy, those are reality.
Where there a shill, there's a way.