There are only 43 days until the NFL starts back up again. This means it’s time for all of you data-loving football fans to start getting ready for the second annual Fantasy Football API League. The league is a yahoo-defaults (modified roster) fantasy league with a catch - instead of participating in a regular draft you must write a RESTful API client to select your team. Before the draft begins you’ll be able to query the API to find out when your picks will occur. During your designated picking times you’ll be able to select one of the remaining players until your team is complete. For anyone who competed last year, I’ve shortened the draft window to 30 seconds per selection but increased the time size slightly to encourage deeper algorithms.

Same as last year, we’ll have the draft on Tuesday, September 2nd after work. That gives you more than a month to harvest your player data and figure out your drafting strategy. There will also be a mock draft a week early to let everybody work kinks out of their clients.

Convinced? Still reading? Great! Go sign up here

My reference implementation (sans data) from last year is up on GitHub.

Finally, this post wouldn’t be complete without a mention of last year’s results. I’d like to congratulate Marcus, who strung together the only undefeated fantasy football season I’ve ever seen (including routing me in the finals, which stung).