Fantasy football is an ever-growing business. According to Forbes, fantasy football is a $40 billion-$70 billion industry. At Shippensburg University, two professors took that into account and launched a business.

Dave Kennedy and Ben Galluzzo — both math professors at SU — created a product named Draft Hog. Kennedy stated that the name comes from the user’s ability to “hog” all of the talent in a fantasy football draft. They won a competition in Carlisle, Pennsylvania that gave them $10,000 towards starting their business.

“We won the TechCelerator program in Carlisle, which is sort of a boot camp for high-tech startup companies. We were one of six companies in the program. We took classes and received mentoring. At the end they had a pitch contest where we pitched our companies to a panel of experts brought in to judge the contest. I thought we were an underdog, because some of the other companies had funding from investors and some had customers already, but the judges liked our idea and awarded us the prize,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy and Galluzzo originally started out by noticing the math that goes into fantasy football and developed the product. Kennedy and Galluzzo’s product was an algorithm that they developed to attempt to create the perfect fantasy football-drafting machine.

“Ever since my business partner Ben Galluzzo got me to start playing fantasy football, we had been talking about how much math is in there. We’ve been moonlighting for a few years to make a drafting algorithm, but it was always on an Excel spreadsheet,” Kennedy said. “As the algorithm got better and better, we realized it might be marketable. Putting it on a website made it much more powerful, because now it could update the calculations throughout a draft.”

The professors then created their business.

“We incorporated as a limited liability corporation. Our official company name is MathEdge Fantasy Sports, LLC, and Draft Hog is just the product. We’ve had to learn lots of details, like how to set up a corporate checking account and where to find the right kind of accountant,” Kennedy said.

The next step after designing the algorithm that drafts the teams was to create a website so that the algorithm could be test-run. The partners ran into some difficulty in making the website, however.

“We hired a company to build the website for us. We quickly realized that it could get expensive to keep paying for all the programming and design work we needed. Our solution was to invite two programmers to be our partners. Now they own a piece of the company, but we can do all the programming and design work in-house,” Kennedy said.

“By now the algorithm has become pretty complicated. It was a challenge to try to tell our programmer, Ruby, exactly how it needed to operate. He was programming in a language we weren’t familiar with and he knew less about fantasy football than we did,” Kennedy said.

The website works by looking at a list of NFL players and assigning them each a value. It is similar to the autopick feature which is available in ESPN fantasy football drafts, but the tool is much more complete. The ESPN autopick feature takes the best player available, regardless of position, or if the pick is good for your team. For instance, if you have two running backs and the best player available when you pick is a running back, you will have another running back drafted for you.

With Draft Hog, the players are assigned values and you can adjust player rankings by moving them up and down the list. As a player of fantasy football, if you believe that a certain quarterback is better than the predicted player high in the list, you can move the player you believe is better ahead of them in the list and Draft Hog will make the adjustment and better advise the customer as to when to draft a certain player, based not only on the skills of the players, but also on how you rate the players. If you like certain players, the program will work to allow you to draft each of your preferred players without reaching for them early in a draft.

Once the site was up and running, the test runs began. The professors tested out their Draft Hog product by getting friends and family to begin using the product to draft their fantasy football teams for the 2015 season. The product produced impressive results.

“We had friends and family test out an early version of the website before the last football season. It seemed to be working well. There’s a tool at footballguys.com where you can tell it the roster you just picked, and it evaluates your team. This tool was giving Draft Hog teams really high marks, like saying they had a 90 percent chance of making the playoffs. It turned out to be pretty accurate. In my own household, six of the eight teams picked by Draft Hog did make the playoffs,” Kennedy said.

“Draft Hog seemed to recommend lots of Seahawks defense, Gostkowski for the kicker and Andrew Luck at quarterback, which was problematic this year. I should add that Draft Hog makes different recommendations to different customers, depending on the custom rankings that they input.” In one of my leagues I ranked Tom Brady really high, so that’s who Draft Hog told me to pick,” Kennedy said.

Draft Hog made some good suggestions, considering that the Seahawks defense was projected as the best defense headed into the 2015 season and the Seahawks defense finished the season in the top 5 in fantasy football scoring for defenses, according to NFL.com scoring.

Among kickers, Stephen Gostkowski had a great season and he was the highest scoring kicker in fantasy football last season, according to NFL.com scoring. This should not come to a shock to some football fans, but to others it was. Many people predicted that Justin Tucker of the Baltimore Ravens would be the highest scoring kicker. However, he finished ninth among points scored.

The quarterbacks that Draft Hog highly recommended played out good and bad. Most fantasy football experts were calling for Andrew Luck to be an amazing player this season and produce all kinds of success. However, injury and subpar play led to him not being productive in fantasy football and the algorithm would not be able to provide you with help as far as a great player getting injured. There would be no way to predict the drop off he had from last season to this year. However, Draft Hog re-evaluates all the players each year and with Luck’s bad season, he will drop in the rankings and the rankings will help you draft Luck with caution next season.

Draft Hog did, however, nail the Tom Brady prediction. Brady was second overall in quarterback scoring, according to NFL.com scoring.

One thing that Draft Hog was unable to predict was the scoring outbreak of Devonta Freeman. Freeman seemingly came out of nowhere and rushed for 1,056 yards and 11 touchdowns on the season. He also racked up 578 receiving yards and three receiving touchdowns last season.

This was a shock to almost everyone, and the draft algorithm is unable to currently predict a player with no-track record to explode like that, but it is able to predict an increase in scoring. The increase was evident in the selecting of Gostkowski and Brady, who each had better seasons this year than last.

The website for Kennedy’s and Galluzzo’s business is expected to officially launch sometime around June. The Draft Hog product will be a subscription-based program.

“Customers will pay an annual subscription fee, somewhere in the $15 – $20 range. They will also be able to purchase additional video content that teaches them how to better play fantasy football, if they’re new to the hobby. We anticipate sponsoring some how-to-Draft-Hog parties at local businesses this summer. We also hope to appear on a local TV news show, possibly helping a fantasy football novice out-draft an expert,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy noted that he has high hopes for the program, but understands the probability of being successful.

“They say that 95 percent of all new businesses fail, so the odds are against us, but we could also experience viral growth. We’ve created a product where our customer will win their draft even if they know nothing about football, so hopefully there’s demand for that. There are over 50 million fantasy football players, so you can do the math,” Kennedy said.

Galluzzo and Kennedy have a very topical product and with a little luck — not Andrew Luck from this season — they will be headed down the path to success.

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