There has been a rapid increase in fantasy sports participation over  the past decade. Due to legal implications, there has been focused attention at both the federal and state levels in recent years regarding the relative roles of skill and luck in fantasy football, the most popular fantasy sport. In this paper, the role that the randomly chosen schedule has on the outcome of the final league standings is explored. The independent scoring structure of fantasy football presents a unique opportunity to study this effect since a fantasy player’s weekly point total depends only on the real-life athletes and not the fantasy league opponent. The cardinality of the set of possible schedules is discussed, and a Monte Carlo approach is utilized for statistical analyses. Results demonstrate that the role the schedule plays can be quite substantial, adding another layer to the skill vs. luck debate in which can often be high-stakes contests.

scheduling, Monte Carlo, skill vs. luck, fantasy sports, schedule effect, one-factorization.

Received: September 14, 2021; Accepted: October 16, 2021; Published: November 15, 2021

How to cite this article: Ryan R. Rahrig, Fantasy Football – Skill or Luck of the Schedule? Far East Journal of Applied Mathematics 111(1) (2021), 11-30. DOI: 10.17654/AM111010011

This Open Access Article is Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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