When it comes to fantasy football, it's all about technology.
Technology makes late breaking player news readily available. Gone are the days of checking box scores in the newspaper. Thanks to technology, stats are just a few clicks away.
Automation Creations, in Blacksburg, is taking fantasy football technology to another level. The company developed software which uses advanced algorithms to assist fantasy team owners in their live drafts.
"Fantasy football is very much based on statistics and projections and properties of football players which we can relate to as engineers," said Henry Bass, ACI owner and president.
The program, PC Drafter, translates the X's and O's of the grid iron into the 1's and 0's of a spreadsheet.
"It's a surprisingly natural fit," Bass said.
With numerous free leagues available online, the number of people participating in fantasy football has grown to over 20-million. That's a large market to tap into, especially those using technology to get ahead of the competition.
"We see that as the future of where fantasy football is heading," said Bass. "Really maximizing the use of all the calculations that these Pentium computers are capable of to give people an edge in picking their fantasy football team."
Automation Creations specializes in web based application development using databases. Bass is not exactly a huge football fan. In fact, he calls himself a "computer geek." But he has participated in fantasy football, thanks to his company's PC Drafter software.
"I'm a statistics weenie and I can see all these things on a computer screen, but you show me a TV show of the NFL players and I'm often surprised and say 'oh, that's what he looks like'."
A statistics weinie who just might lead several teams to league championships this year. There are close to 4,000 people subscribed to use PC Drafter. As more people participate in fantasy football, the subscriber rate is bound to grow.
"We've increased sales of our PC Drafter software by about 30 to 50 percent in each year since we started in 2006 so it's very exciting for us," Bass said.
