College Football Pick'Em Using LabVIEW DataFinder Toolkit

[David_L]

Introduction

College Football Season is here.  Predicting the winner of a match-ups ahead of time is something that could have very large benefits and something that is done all over the country every week.  Well now  you can automate this process ahead of time using LabVIEW and the College Football Pick'Em application using LabVIEW DataFinder Toolkit!

Steps to Run

1.  Download Data.zip and extract the TDMS files to a folder that is Indexed by DataFinder (by default My Documents is indexed, but you can add any directory you want in the DataFinder configuration).

2.  Download College Football Pick'Em.zip and extract all of the files.

3.  Open College Football Pick'Em.lvproj

4.  Open and Run College Football Pick'Em.vi

5.  Select the two teams and their respective years to compare

6.  Press "Get Stats" to get statistics for both teams from the TDMS data files.

7. Review the stats and select the weighting to be assigned to each statistic.  The weights can be used to change the final score if you think some stats are more significant than others.

8.  Press Calculate Score to determine which team will win.

Steps to Update Stats

Because this years statistics are changing every single week, it will be necessary to update the TDMS files each week before making new predictions for 2009 teams.  To update the files, do the following:

1.  Open Update TDMS.vi.

2.  Select the Path where the TDMS files are located.

3.  If you want to update only a portion of the teams change the start and end team ID controls (team ID numbers range from about 5 to 811, invalid team IDs will be skipped).

4.  Run the VI, when all teams have been updated the VI will stop and you can run the Football Pick'Em VI with the new updated stats.

Additional Notes

This is very much a work in progress.  Feel free to leave any suggestions you have for making this better and check back frequently for updates to the program.

Stats in Data.zip have been updated through 9/10/2009

Files in College Football Pick'Em.zip updated on 9/11/2009

Stats courtesy of cfbstats.com