Late-Round Perspectives: Mike Leone

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Mike Leone is the Director of Analytics in Establish the Run. He's a successful DFS player who's built insanely accurate projections. He's an avid runner, a proud dad, a spreadsheet virgin and a long-suffering Bills fan. These are his late-round perspectives.

With Late-Round Perspectives, I haven't had a ton of people on yet that like, I mean, there's not like a ton of people in the fantasy space in general that I've like hung out with a lot. Like you and I have hung out a lot, like throughout, like you were living down here for a little while, while you left your wife back at home. She was pregnant at the time.

Just really great job being a husband there, but you leave your wife in Buffalo for like six months. You come down here, fortunately, I mean, you hit on a GPP on like the last day, didn't you? When you were down in Charlotte?

Mike Leone (1:05)

I don't know if it was the last day, but it was definitely at some point I hit a baseball GPP at some point.

JJ Zachariason (1:10)

Yeah, I remember it was like towards the tail end, but there aren't a ton of people just in the space in general that you get the ability to like hang out with all the time because we're all dispersed around not just the country, but like the world, right? And so you're probably the first perspectives guest that I've hung out with the most, but you're one of the people that I've hung out with the most, you know, in the space in general.

With that being said, I need you to tell the world about our 2v2 golf outing, the one time that we had. This is maybe seven years ago at this point.

Mike Leone (1:45)

It's probably a bad sign that when you said, I need you to tell the world, I thought of like three or four different things that could have been quite bad for me.

JJ Zachariason (1:56)

I know there have been many instances where things have gone south while we've been hanging out. But this one went south for you. You want to just let the listeners know what happened?

Mike Leone (2:06)

Yeah, we were playing a 2v2 golf scramble. My brother-in-law, Jeremy and I, versus JJ and I's friend, Ricky, who is the best man in my wedding, and came down to the 18th hole. And I mean, it was JJ striped the drive, then goes pin-seeking. I don't remember how close you were. I don't remember how long the putt was, but I know you made birdie to just like totally.

JJ Zachariason (2:32)

We were down by a stroke going into the last hole. And you guys bogeyed and I solo birdied.

Mike Leone (2:40)

Yeah, how long was the putt? I don't even think it was that long. I think you just like.

JJ Zachariason (2:44)

No, no, it was a very lucky hole, but I'm always going to bring that up anytime that I can display that to everyone else.

For those of the listeners, because you started in more of the DFS world. I mean, now you kind of do just a little bit of everything, but you started in the DFS world. I think it would be helpful for people to sort of just know your background, how you got involved in fantasy sports in the first place and sort of how you got involved specifically in like projection building.

Mike Leone (3:12)

Yeah, absolutely. So I went to college, Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and I hopped around with my major so much because I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do.

Ended up settling on a math major because I was kind of good at it and really no other reason. And I eventually just had to choose something and stick with it.

But around the time I was graduating, I read, this is so cliche, but I read the book Moneyball that really got me into sports analytics. And I started writing for a fantasy baseball website called Fantistics.

That was a really good first experience for me, getting used to descriptive stats versus predictive and trying to ignore some conventional wisdom and get at the root of real answers.

And Drew Dinkmeyer wrote for that site as well. And I messaged him when like Draft Street, one of the original DFS sites was taking off about actually about NBA DFS, because like I was fooling around and getting killed. I knew he knew a lot about the NBA. And then him and I just started going back and forth, like trying to make really good lineups. And one of the things we did that just seems insane right now, we would copy and paste like the AccuScore projected box scores into an Excel sheet to like calculate the projected DFS points from there. So, I mean, we've come a long way, but basically what we used to do was like, we kind of knew what stats like mattered a little bit, like for baseball, some of us are going to talk about other sports because I really got started more like in basketball and baseball. And then NFL evolved from there. But baseball was one of the big sports that we did at first. And it used to just be like, I know this guy like has good advanced stats against left-handed pitching or something, right? So I just look at the leaderboard for the day of like stats versus splits, like kind of knowing what matters, but like pretty subjectively being like, well, I guess that means he's a good play. And the edges back then were so big that if you were just directionally accurate, that was good enough. But like anything, it became much more competitive. And as it became more competitive, Drew and I kept trying to figure out what outweighs like, okay, instead of just looking at the stats, we make our own models. And then we would make models that weren't like directly projecting things that were just kind of like waiting different stats. And then it was like, that was good for a while. But now we need to like actually come up with projections. We got to start being more and more precise as things become more and more competitive in the industry. And that's kind of that need to just stay ahead is how I got into projections.