Optima Fantasy Sports has built a better mouse trap for all fantasy owners

Optima Fantasy Sports launches Sunday, Oct.15 for NFL games, with other sports soon to be added.

A new subscription service, Optima Fantasy Sports, is making a proprietary system that has been used to help real professional sports franchises make personnel decisions available for daily/weekly and season-long fantasy sports game players. Optima isn’t looking to give subscribers more information, but better information.

Optima has been building predictive models for teams in MLB, the NBA, the NFL and various soccer leagues throughout the life of the company. Because of its success, the natural extension of its models into use for fantasy sports arose about two and a half years ago. When those models were put to the test for fantasy usage, they performed even better than hoped.

“In head to head comparison our models were two and a half times more accurate than NumberFire and Fantasy Labs,” said Troy Brazell, CEO of Optima. “A third-party project done by the University of Oregon Department of Economics found that most of the fantasy analytics providers hover around 20 percent accuracy. Our models are testing at 54 percent, significantly better than the two aforementioned companies as well as Bloomberg, Swish Analytics, and Four on Four.”

Optima’s system excels because it focuses on the information that actually determines athletic performance.

“We have a very unique and proven approach which included looking at all five areas that determine performance,” Brazell explained. “Those are physical, technical, tactical, mental and emotional. When you put mental and emotional together you get locus of motivation, or what we call ‘heart.’ We look at a player’s individual resources and find out if he has factors that would prevent him from playing at a top level. For example we just met with a team who really likes a kid but the coach was concerned about how his speed would translate. That is relative. The real question is, does he have the other resources needed to play or is he just a really fast average player?”

The system will go live for subscribers for the Sunday games of Week 6 of the NFL season, and then be available to fantasy football players for all NFL games from that point on. While the product is currently limited to football, Brazell says that fantasy baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer will soon be added. Players in both daily/weekly and season-long formats will benefit from the service equally because in both of those formats, players have to set lineups.

“There is so much noise out there for people in sports, whether it be fantasy or real,” Brazell added. “What Optima has done well, and this is why the data companies are coming to us, is we sort through the data and identify the key points that are more predictive of actual performance. We have sorted through that noise and we have some really interesting things that fantasy sports players are going to like.”

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For fantasy sports team owners, just like individuals running real teams, winning is largely about having superior information. Not all information is necessarily good information. Optima Fantasy Sports has a model that is proven to discern the useful information from the irrelevant information.