The Almanac

About

A fantasy football almanac, compiled and maintained for one league. 2017–2025, 9 seasons of receipts.

Origin

The League

A league of friends, founded in 2017 and continued every year since. Eight managers, one ESPN league, no expansions.

The Roster

The Banquet at Maddox

Full owner pages →

The eight managers, in no particular order. Click any name for their career page.

The Site

The Almanac

A web almanac for one league’s nine seasons of fantasy football. Standings, head-to-heads, drafts, transactions, and a few custom metrics that try to separate good managers from lucky ones. Built for the league. Public because the receipts deserve to be public.

LiveThis WeekGame-of-the-week hero, every matchup with H2H series, top performers, and biggest start/sit busts.HistorySeasonsYear-by-year standings, weekly scoreboards, all-play records, and the Lucky Good Matrix grid.RivalriesHead-to-HeadThe all-time matrix plus deep pages for every owner pairing.ManagersOwnersCareer pages — every season, every roster, every trade, every pickup.RecordsThe Record BookCareer All-Play, Lineup Efficiency, Draft Score, FAAB Efficiency, Poo Bowl.The Draft RoomDraftsEvery draft, every pick, with VoE/Game and PRS surplus per slot.

The Source

How the data flows

Everything is pulled from ESPN’s Fantasy API and snapshotted into JSON files in the repo. The site reads those files at build time and revalidates hourly.

Coverage: 2017 through 2025 (9 seasons).
Refresh: auto-pulled every Tuesday morning during the season. Off-season the data is static.
Schedule randomization: the regular-season schedule is randomized each year on June 21.
No live scoring:the site doesn’t poll in-game scores. “This Week” shows the most recent week present in the snapshot, which during the season is whatever ESPN had as of the last Tuesday refresh.

Custom Stats

What gets computed

A few non-standard metrics show up around the site. Quick legend:

Lucky Good Matrix: 2×2 grid that splits a season into Good/Bad (PF) and Lucky/Unlucky (actual − all-play).
All-Play Record: What a manager’s record would be if they played every other team every week. Removes schedule luck.
Draft Score: Composite z-score blending Value-over-Expected per game (slot baseline) and Position Rank Surplus (cohort comparison).
Trade Score: Career W-L-T on trades plus started-points surplus. Career means and per-trade detail on the transactions pages.
Lineup Efficiency: Actual points scored ÷ optimal points possible from your roster. Pre-2017 rosters aren’t in ESPN’s API, so 2017 is excluded.

Fine Print

Data caveats

2017 rosters are missing. ESPN doesn’t expose roster-level data that far back. Anything roster-dependent (lineup efficiency, biggest bust, top scorers) is blank for 2017.
Records are regular-season only. Playoffs are too small a sample to mean much; including them would also reward teams that simply made the playoffs more often.
FAAB pre-2020.The league switched to FAAB waivers partway through the run. Older pickups exist as free agents only and don’t count toward FAAB efficiency.
Owner ID quirks. Internally, Hayden = cliff, Caden = dite, and Ian = carl. URLs use the IDs.

Credits

Maintained by

Compiled by the historian. Maintained under the watchful eye of Jerry Sandusky.