Fantasy Football is the Perfect Proving Ground for IBM’s AI

With another American football season well and truly underway, millions of players are flocking back to play ESPN’s Fantasy Football Draft, the sport’s most popular strategy game.

What’s more, the US-based technology giant IBM has renewed its partnership with ESPN for another season, with the firm offering players more than ever before.

This year, IBM has integrated its watsonx system into ESPN’s platform to give users tips and tricks that could help them to perfect their strategies for the game.

The new Fantasy Insights technology generates personalised recommendations for the platform's 14 million users based on what IBM claims are 36 billion insights processed throughout the season.

Can AI create the perfect fantasy draft?

In the 1990s, IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a game of chess. Competitive players will be hoping IBM’s technology can give them a similar edge over their friends in this season’s draft.

The new feature appears on the ESPN Fantasy Football homepage and gives users AI-generated overviews of the players that are relevant to each week's competition.

It operates alongside IBM's existing suite of AI-powered tools, including Waiver Grades, Trade Grades, Boom and Bust probabilities and the Trade Analyzer.

“Fantasy football is all about optimising decision making, and AI is helping fans make them with deeper insights,” says Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at IBM.

Jonathan sees the technology as a great showcase for AI, familiarising millions of people with the power of the latest AI technologies.

“With Fantasy Insights Built With IBM watsonx, we're putting the power of watsonx into the hands of millions of people on the ESPN Fantasy Football app, helping them make smarter, more informed decisions while also showcasing the same capabilities businesses around the world use to scale AI,” he says.

What can users expect from IBM’s technology?

So, how exactly does the technology work?

IBM’s system categorises players using data-driven criteria across multiple dimensions.

New categories for 2025 include Buy Low Sell High, which identifies players who have so far faced strong defences but who will face off against easier opponents in the coming weeks.

Then, there’s the Diamond in the Rough function. This targets the footballers who have been rostered by fewer than 85% of Fantasy Football players, but who have scored in the 85th percentile for two weeks running.

Trade Bait is an insight that highlights the players that are popular selections in drafts, but have been underperforming for two straight weeks.

Other categories span predictive analytics, media sentiment analysis and risk assessment too, which speaks to the breadth and depth of IBM’s analysis.

Predicted Top Boom and Predicted Top Bust looks at player performance for upcoming weeks, whilst Hot in the Media tracks popularity in media discussions.

Media Darlings combines a tenfold increase in positive sentiment, but who have been selected by fewer than 50% of players.

Finally, the Risky Business category looks at high-projection players returning from injury, while Sure Thing identifies players with stable scoring floors and Game Breaker highlights those likely to exceed projections.

The technical infrastructure and the business strategy

Watsonx.data is the engine behind ESPN’s new data-driven offering, collecting information from a huge range of sources before analysing it with AI.

It isn’t just about Fantasy Football for ESPN, though, and nor is it for IBM.

The sports media giant believes that these new AI features could help to drive user engagement across its platforms, while also giving its game a USP in a crowded and competitive market.

For IBM, having such a high-profile customer use case gives its technology a huge amount of visibility, showing consumers and businesses alike its AI pedigree. 

With millions of concurrent users making use of IBM’s AI and processing recommendations in real time, this partnership is the perfect proving ground.