ESPN Fantasy Football Scraper

Ever wonder how accurate projections for your fantasy football league are? Want to know how often your projected fantasy winners actually win? Now you can find answers to these questions and more.

Includes Node.js script to scrape ESPN's Fantasy Football league pages and save data to MongoDB.

Also includes a script to generate statistics from the league data to answer.

To get the most accurate data, this script should be run twice for each week of the fantasy football season:

1. Right before the week's NFL games kickoff (Thursday evening).
2. After the week's NFL games are finished (Tuesday morning).

leagues.json

This is the config file where you set the details of you ESPN fantasy football league details.

Use leagues.json.sample as example to create a file named leagues.json in the root.

Multiple league configuations can be stored. See the sample file for an example of this.

Set the following details for each league in that file:

NAME_OF_LEAGUE

Name of league. Should be alphanumeric, one word, no spaces.

MONGODB_DB_NAME

Name of MongoDB database

teamMap

Objet to store nice team names for each team in your league. Each team should be in following format

Abbrev : NiceName

fetch.js

This is the script that scrapes the ESPN pages and saves the data. It also will save a screenshot of every page scraped, for reference. See the screenshots directory in the project root.

Since the data is saved into a MongoDB, a mongod process needs to be running as well. You can optionaly specify a URL and Port to connect to a remote MongoDB instance.

Once the MongoDB server is ready to go, run this script like:

$ node fetch.js --league NAME_OF_LEAGUE --week 1

Options

--league

One of the NAME_OF_LEAGUE values from the leagues.json. Required.

--week

Which week to fetch data for. Required.

--testRun

Save the data into a collection called test instead of the games collection.

--mongoUrl

URL of the running mongod process. Defaults to localhost.

--mongoPort

Port the mongod process is running on. Defaults to 27017.

--overrideProjections

When updating data for a week, this will override the projected score field. If used after that week's game have started, this will lead to innacurate data. Use with caution.

stats_node.js

This a script that uses the MongoDB aggreation pipeline to generate some statistics.

Currently calculates how accurate projections were on a team-by-team basis, and how often winners were correctly projected.

Once mongod is running, run the script like:

$ node stats_node.js --league NAME_OF_LEAGUE --week 1

Options

--league

One of the NAME_OF_LEAGUE values from the leagues.json. Required.

--week

Which week to fetch data for. If not provided, will compile year-to-date stats.

--players

Run statistics on a per players basis, as opposed to each fantasy team.

--verbose

Show more in depth statistics.

--mongoUrl

URL of the running mongod process. Defaults to localhost.

--mongoPort

Port the mongod process is running on. Defaults to 27017.