That's his third 20-yard reception of the game, and this one is gonna go for a touchdown! You got
number 88 on your fantasy football team, you've got to be loving this game right now.
Chris Anthony uses math to predict the future, albeit in a different way. He writes a column for the
National Football League's website. He is obsessed with fantasy football.
I have a natural love of football. I was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin,
so it just kind of is in my blood, and also as a professional, I work with data all the time,
and building FantasyOmatic was my ability to converge the two together. About 10 years ago,
I wanted to figure out a way that I could beat my friends and family at fantasy football and I
decided to build an app in FileMaker, and I was just kind of using it for my own hobby purposes,
and all of a sudden, I had an idea about a way that I might be able to kind of beat the system. So,
I decided to build an application to do that. The fantasy football industry today is about
18 billion dollar industry, so it is a large industry, right, and we're having an impact on
that industry using the tools that we've got for machine learning in FileMaker. We have been able,
over time, to do a better job predicting fantasy football outcomes and FileMaker has grown with us
and we've been able to take advantage of some of the newer tools in FileMaker, ah, to help us do that.
Since the application has been around for 10 years, and FileMaker keeps updating and
giving us new technologies to work with, we're able to modernize the approach.
For example, we used to use an API connection to a system that would run our machine learning model
and create the ratings for us. Now, we integrate that natively into the platform using CoreML.
Once I got on with FantasyOmatic, a lot of my time was spent on developing and working on the
predictive game models. Those game models ended up actually predicting three of the
first four Super Bowl winners. We actually were able to use that system to outperform a lot of the
big data predictive industries on their predictions, and their models. At FantasyOmatic,
we we actually use a calculation field, uh, to write a weekly preview article for players to
look out for each week, and the readers of course don't know that this is actually an
AI that's writing the article. Here we are, a really small team, being able to compete with
big data and large organizations that are throwing millions at these applications, and we're able to
do it more efficiently and with more agility because we're using the FileMaker platform.