An Introduction to the Suck4Luck Project

I’m a reformed American Football junkie. Well, not totally reformed, mind you. I used to play in five fantasy leagues a year, at least, and never scheduled anything on Sunday after noon (cst). I still watch my beloved Chicago Bears every time they play.

Anyway, I also like weird. Stuff like Jon Bois 17776 and Scorigami are right up my alley. In addition to weird, I also like bad: bad plays and silliness are some of the most fun I have watching football. So I thought one day about six years ago: what about a Fantasy Football league where the object is to pick the best worst players?

Could it work?

It wouldn’t work. At least, not with traditional rules and scoring. I wanted to make it happen though, and through some deep thought I dreamt up a system of scoring, waivers, and selections that would make the game/league a four-player season-long ordeal. I enlisted my brother and two friends, and year 1 of “Suck4Luck” began.

Back then, I did everything by hand on paper. My leaguemates would text me their picks every week, I would calculate waivers by hand, get scores from the internet when relevant, calculate scores, etc. Yuck. But it was fun! It was about this time that I started my Computer Science schooling at a local community college, and I decided to learn on the job and code up some tools for the league.

By year 2, I had migrated to a modified ESPN league that I still had to do some things by hand with, but scoring was handled. I also wrote a command-line tool in Python that would calculate waiver player priorities, something that was tedious to do by hand. I used my final-project for an html/css course to make a website advertising the rules and singing the praises of the reverse-fantasy league.

Then, I wrote a Java GUI tool to handle waiver selections much easier. Next, I used PHP to create a website where my leaguemates could turn in their picks every week. I then combined the tools, letting the Java GUI program communicate with the Website, and automated tasks using cron in a linux environment on a spare desktop. I even had it scrape data and auto-enter picks on ESPN using Selenium and Python (this quickly broke as ESPN continually modified their site)

This was turning into something!

I’ve decided it’s time to open up Suck4Luck to the masses: a webapp and backend that allows many people to set up leagues and play this very same game I’ve been playing for half a decade. This will take a lot of work, but it will a)look good in my portfolio, b)be a lot of fun, fulfilling work, and c)maybe make kajillions of dollars (or like, five dollars).

So What’s the Plan?

I have experience in developing webapps using Flask, as I developed my first relatively complex/large project with it, in the form of a mood-tracker app called MoodTracky a few years back. Obviously this requires Python and Jinja/HTML knowledge. I’ll probably use Bootstrap like it’s going out of style (is it?), though I might look at Tailwind or gasp vanilla CSS. MySQL or SQLite will handle the DB. I’ll probably host at PythonAnywhere as they’ve been great to me in the past and handled my mood tracker app flawlessly. Maybe I’ll just host it on my spare Raspberry Pi to start.

This project is still in the planning stage, but I’ve found a great, reasonably affordable API for football/fantasy stats over at LineupExperts that I’ll likely be using: this will require me to code up my own scoring rules for the league and calculate scores manually as opposed to drawing them directly from ESPN or whatnot. This will thusly require a full fantasy football backend. Yikes, this is going to be even more work than I thought!

I’m excited about the project though, and that’s the key: and it’s not like it’s some flash in the pan - I’ve been working my way up to this project for years now. This blog is going to stay a place where I talk about my coding learning journey, but this “series” is going to outline my work on the Suck4Luck project and the pitfalls, triumphs, tears, and everything else that goes into it.

I sincerely hope that by next football season, you’ll be able to log in and play along with me in the most fun fantasy football style I’ve ever played!