The robots now writing the Associated Press' company quarterly earnings stories are now grading your fantasy football draft, and they're being kind of harsh about it.
This is actually the third year that North Carolina-based Automated Insights have been evaluating draft outcomes for users of Yahoo Fantasy Football. But this year's analysis, which is carried out by AI's Wordsmith program, incorporates more data and more complex language, making it particularly brutal.
"We configure the lexicon for each project - in this case, we taught Wordsmith many, many snarky phrases," AI's James Kotecki told us an in email. "Wordsmith determines the best phrase combinations for a specific report, from AP style to Fantasy Football trash talk."
Here's the report Wordsmith gave Lema D, who received a "C" grade after she drafted too many New York Giants too high in the draft (Big Blue is 13th in Vegas' odds of winning the Super Bowl). She also drafted a kicker, a non-essential position, in the 9th round out of 15.
"Sometimes in life we make mistakes," the robot said. "Lema's Team will hopefully use this giant mistake of a draft as a learning opportunity, so in future drafts they will perform much better."
Kurt C.'s team, "KC Masterpiece," fared even worse, earning a "D" because he chose too many running backs - and they weren't even good ones.
"Congratulations, KC Masterpiece has earned a participation award," the robot mocked, "because that's just about all they did in this draft, participate. This delightful roster (for the opposition) is projected to finish 12th in Athlon Media NY League with a record of 2-12-0 (1,187 points). They went with the SMU "Pony Express" draft strategy, loading up on three tailbacks in the first five rounds, selecting Le'Veon Bell (second round), Reggie Bush (fourth round), and Trent Richardson (fifth round). In spite of that positional emphasis, they landed one of the lowest-scoring groups of RBs in the league. Brutal draft."