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" It&amp;#039;s almost football season, which means it&amp;#039;s almost fantasy football season, which means it&amp;#039;s almost\u00A0time to start paying attention to teams and players we otherwise would care nothing about.\u00A0It can get ugly,\u00A0and\u00A0pretty sad.\u00A0Refreshing Twitter for news on the third wide receiver on the Arizona Cardinals&amp;#039; depth chart is a sign of\u00A0addiction. Reading\u00A0columns about how an\u00A0undrafted rookie free agent for a team across the country\u00A0is performing in training camp is a symptom of disease. Not only is it sickening, none of this thankless\u00A0research\u00A0guarantees\u00A0you&amp;#039;ll\u00A0have a better team than the guy in the office who forgets to set his roster every other week. This is why fantasy football can be so maddening. Thanks to a new app,\u00A0though,\u00A0we may no longer\u00A0have to see hours upon hours of\u00A0preparation\u00A0be for naught. Edge Up Sports has partnered with IBM&amp;#039;s Watson, the same supercomputer that dominated Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, to create a mobile\u00A0fantasy football platform that\u00A0will provide users with\u00A0all the information they need to make the tough decisions\u00A0in a fraction of the time it takes to slog through\u00A0countless\u00A0articles online. In addition to taking weather,\u00A0statistics, and injury history into consideration (of course),\u00A0Watson will comb through the Internet, look for any mentions of a\u00A0player of interest, ascertain the tone of the\u00A0articles referencing him, and evaluate that player&amp;#039;s fantasy prospects\u00A0accordingly. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot of information that&amp;#039;s unstructured, coming from sportswriters, analysts, and things like that,&amp;quot;\u00A0Edge Up founder Ilya Tabakh told Esquire in an interview.\u00A0&amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re able to take a pretty wide sampling of analysis around the league from many different sources and actually process that analysis to see which players are being referred to in articles.\u00A0We can find the\u00A0sentiment of that overall article\u00A0as well as the sentiment of the article toward the player.&amp;quot; Not only that, Watson can determine a particular writer&amp;#039;s tendencies to praise or disparage a particular player. If a New York-based writer has a tendency to rip on Tom Brady, Watson will recognize the bias and take it into account before providing a final evaluation. Watson knows. Watson is smarter than you. Let it do its thing.  The Edge Up app isn&amp;#039;t reality quite yet. Its Kickstarter just launched, but it&amp;#039;s\u00A0already\u00A0over 10 percent of the way to achieving its\u00A0$35,000 goal just\u00A0hours after going live. Backers will have access to the app and Watson&amp;#039;s artificial intelligence in time for the 2015 season, but it might take a little\u00A0longer for the app to be ready for the public. This year will essentially be\u00A0a trial run, available at first only\u00A0to the core group of backers. Tabakh and his team will use the season (and the Kickstarter money) to hone the app&amp;#039;s effectiveness, fine-tuning elements such as synchronicity\u00A0with league host\u00A0sites like\u00A0Yahoo and CBS. Once\u00A0available, Edge Up will likely offer its\u00A0service through a onetime season-pass payment, or through a monthly subscription fee. Tabakh stresses, however, that, at least for now, the focus is on traditional fantasy leagues, not gambling or daily fantasy. For Edge\u00A0Up, it&amp;#039;s about enhancing users&amp;#039; entertainment, not making them\u00A0money:\u00A0&amp;quot;The focus for this season and for the first couple of seasons is to build the best experience we can and give\u00A0people the ability to focus on the reasons that they play on a social level.&amp;quot; Skeptics may say that few enterprises are less predictable than fantasy football, but anything that even slightly\u00A0increases our chances of being able to talk-trash at the water cooler is a step in the right direction. And if our seasons happen to go south anyway, we can always take comfort in blaming the world&amp;#039;s most advanced computer instead of our own incompetence. Edge Up&amp;#039;s Kickstarter page is currently live and will be open until funding closes on September 9, just in time for the season opener between the Patriots and the Steelers on September 10. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a37102/ibm-watson-jeopardy-fantasy-football-edge-up-sports/>