The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Using analytics, UConn professor wins $2.5M in fantasy football
“UConn is really a place for analytical professionals to succeed.”
Business professor David Bergman
STAMFORD — Business professor David Bergman may know a lot about analytics and data crunching, but when it came down to choosing his $2.5 million winning fantasy team, he also used old-fashioned intuition.
“You have to understand a domain in order to do anything analytical in that domain,” said Bergman, a football fan since he was a child, living in White Plains, N.Y. “If you don’t, then you cannot succeed.”
That’s a lesson he has often shared with his University of Connecticut students.
“If you had a mathematician trying to pick lineups, I don’t think they would succeed as much as a sports fan,” he said, of his fantasy football success.
Bergman recently won a giant jackpot prize after finishing first in a DraftKings Daily Fantasy Sports World Championship, picking a team that outscored 199 others.
He used a combination of his own knowledge of football as well as research of what top analysts were saying about players and which were potential undervalued assets. There are a variety of fantasy football websites, many of which offer paid subscriptions for access to detailed reports and analysis of player performance and projections.
Bergman, who has been a UConn faculty member in the operations and information management department for seven years, separated himself from the crowd of competitors by seeking under-valued and under-used players.
In daily fantasy football leagues, players are given a set amount of fictional money to use, and each real-life football player is assigned a dollar amount. Generally, the more productive the player is in fantasy, the more he will cost to acquire. Players can select real players to include in their team as long as they stay under a fictional salary cap. Once the team is finalized, the player receives points for relevant statistics that each real player accumulates in the actual football games. If a quarterback on a player’s team throws for three touchdowns, for instance, those are tabulated in the player’s final score.
One lesson, Bergman said, is to look at what other players are likely to do.
“If you’re picking what everyone else is picking, its going to be hard to distinguish yourself,” he said.
For his winning team, he chose three underutilized players to include in his team of eight players and one team’s defensive plays. And he found value in unexpected places.
For instance, Bergman deployed the Dallas Cowboys defense in one week that resulted in a defensive touchdown and an allaround solid performance. The Cowboys defense, by typical statistical metrics, was one of the worst in the league this season.
But by exploiting a beneficial match-up against a poor offense, Bergman was able to secure points from a defense that few had the courage to insert into their lineups due to its lackluster performance throughout the year.
Bergman said he and his wife will save some of the winnings for their children’s college funds, and donate some of the funds to charity.
The Hartford resident is a faculty member at the UConn campus in Stamford, and he said the school offers a robust analytics program.
“UConn is really a place for analytical professionals to succeed,” he said.
Jose Cruz, associate dean of graduate programs in the School of Business, said in a press release that Bergman’s winning is another feather in the cap for the school’s business analytics and project management master’s program.
“David’s winning is just an example of what the MSBAPM curriculum prepares students to do,” he said.