Fantasy Football Has Intel Inside

Taco MacArthur from the FX series The League may not be aware of it, but fantasy football involves a whole lot more than just raised beer mugs at the local sports bar.

As millions of fantasy football players gear up for the start of the NFL season next Thursday, Intel wants to remind them that the real-time data, stat-crunching, and ever-more-complex game intelligence they depend upon doesn't just appear out of thin air.

The company is hosting an event called "Look Inside the Huddle" in San Francisco today to talk up its data center products and Apache Hadoop software, two big parts of the back-end delivery system for several top fantasy sports products.

Joining Intel's Datacenter Software Division head Boyd Davis at today's event are John Pollard, general manager of the Sports Solutions Group at STATS, Kevin Meers, co-president of the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, and Josh Zerkle of sports website the Bleacher Report.

But the main attraction will surely be Jerry Rice, the record-setting wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers and a handful of other teams.

"The technology that is available to players and fans today is absolutely mind-blowing. During my time on the field as well as my work as an analyst, I've seen firsthand the impact that technology has had on the sports fan, the athlete, and the game," Rice said in a statement. "I can only imagine what it would have been like to play with these resources at my fingertips and am proud to be working with Intel, a brand whose innovative culture has enabled many of these developments to take place."

Fantasy football is big business—research firm Ipsos figures more than 25 million people will play the game in some capacity this season, generating some $1.1 billion in revenue, Intel noted. And the chip giant has carved out a nice slice of that pie by supplying sports information outfits like STATS with Xeon server chips and other datacenter products.

But Intel also has some fantasy football-relevant software on offer. The company touts the data-pattern visualizations generated by its open-source Graph Builder for Apache Hadoop as tools to "help coaches explore the connections between a variety of game conditions and the team's performance."

"Using Intel Graph Builder, teams could determine how factors such as weather, time of day, travel schedules, team composition, and the frequency of injuries could affect the likelihood of a win," the company said.

Big-data analytics aren't just a boon to professional sports organizations, Intel stressed. More complex and rapid-fire slicing and dicing of data can also "unlock game intelligence" for fantasy players and "enrich the fan experience" overall, Davis said.

For example, Intel recently teamed up with SAP to release a "super-fast, cloud-based" player comparison tool, which "provides fantasy footballers with access to advanced analytics" to help them decide whether to start or sit players on their teams.

Intel's own recent, commissioned survey of fantasy football players found that 70 percent credit advanced technologies for increasing the time they spend playing the game, while 66 percent called Web and app-based statistical analysis tools "critical for success" in fantasy football.

For more, check out PCMag's review of Madden NFL 25 and the slideshow above, as well as 10 Pro Tips for Madden NFL 25.