NumberFire

I'm always curious about this because...

I ran Numberfire for a really long time.

Then we were bought by FanDuel, and so I worked for FanDuel for a while, but we were still running Numberfire.

And at the time, I was kind of guiding a lot of writers and such in terms of how to put together decent arguments and think about the game in a certain way.

And it's always interesting to me to hear the process of where things start to where things finish.

At every point on a football field, there's some expected value on that drive for that team.

We used to do this at NumberFire.

We were one of the first people to really utilize EPA in the space.

We weren't the first ones.

I won $100,000 on a show, and I quit my job the very next day and started my company.

That company was called Numberfire.

NumberFire is a sports data analytics company, or as Nick puts it,

data for sports fans built by a sports fan.

Because Nick had a very specific customer in mind.

To keep more customers happy, Fandel needed to level the playing field.

They couldn't make everyone equally skilled, but they could give everyone better information about the athletes in their fantasy lineups.

So Nigel's team called up Nick, the sports data guy, acquired NumberFire, and made Nick Fandel's VP of product.

Uh, I won $100,000 on the show, and I quit my job the very next day and started my company.

That company was called NumberFire.

NumberFire is a sports data analytics company, or as Nick puts it...

Data for sports fans built by a sports fan.

Because Nick had a very specific customer in mind.

And to me that's like, I always want to build a business where people are passionate and excited, and so I was like, "This is a great category."

This is Nigel Eccles.

And in 2009 while Nick was winning 100 grand on Millionaire and starting NumberFire, Nigel, along with his wife and a small group of friends, founded another company, one that was going to, in startup parlance, disrupt fantasy sports.

But should we then be capturing backfields to make sure we get the player who ends up being productive?" And then also on Twitter, I got one from @Holmes3127 that says, "What is your philosophy regarding buying backfields? Do you prefer getting your own handcuffs or other people's handcuffs? Does backfields being ambiguous change your overall approach? Thanks." Okay.

So the idea of ambiguous backfields, it was something I had researched, like, a decade ago over on NumberFire.

That's the site I used to work for.

It was eventually bought by FanDuel, and then I worked with FanDuel and NumberFire for years.

But my research through the years has essentially said that when you're drafting specifically middle-round running backs, you should be looking for players who are in these questionable backfields, not players who have an early-round teammate, not players who have their backfield all to themselves.

You want ambiguous backfields.