Fantasy football picks made simple

IOWA CITY - Fantasy football players stumped on their next pick on draft day can now turn to their smartphones for help through a tool with University of Iowa ties.

In an effort to make the draft process more simple, Jeff Ohlmann, UI professor of management sciences, cocreated DraftOpt, an application that uses a complex mathematical equation to give fans recommendations about who to choose, pick by pick, during the draft.

“Using the math you can develop a set of rules to try to optimize your selections for the draft,” Ohlmann, 35, said.

A lifelong sports fan and fantasy football fan for more than a decade, Ohlmann first discussed the concept of developing a tool to help fantasy football fans while in graduate school at the University of Michigan with DraftOpt co-creator Michael Fry, 37, now a University of Cincinnati associate professor of operations and business analytics.

“We thought to ourselves that if we were really as smart as we thought we were, we should have been able to use our knowledge to help improve our own decision making in fantasy sports,” Ohlmann said. “Now, a decade later, the idea has finally developed into this app.”

Ohlmann and Fry sketched out various ways that they could use their mathematical tool to improve their draft decisions over the years, but DraftOpt truly began to take shape after a former UI student, Matthew Gibson, took interest in beginning to code the program.

“We formed an LLC, Optilytics, and created a baseball app that came out in March,” Ohlmann said. “Matt coded the football app over the summer.”

According to Ohlmann, the DraftOpt app - available through iTunes for $4.99 - uses mathematical probability to constantly sift through remaining players and simulate the thousands of possible paths that the rest of the draft could take, all to help the user determine what decisions about specific players are the best to make at certain times.

“The best decisions in the draft depend on what's going to happen in the future,” Ohlmann said. “Unfortunately you don't know how the players are going to perform or what players the other people in the draft are going to choose, so the application uses the math to help you decide.”

Fry said that although he and Ohlmann are not expecting the application to explode in popularity this year, they hope to continue growing their fantasy baseball and football services to other sports including basketball and possibly NASCAR, golf or hockey.

Ohlmann hopes they can develop an application that can help analyze fantasy sport trading practices.

“We have ambitious business plans and would like to become the go-to source for fantasy sports applications in the future,” Ohlmann said.