Josh Larky

Josh Larky is the Director of Fantasy and Gambling at The 33rd Team.  He joins us with a unique blend of educational and professional experience.

Josh studied economics at the University of Redlands, double minoring in Math and Psychology.  Working on his honors thesis was the catalyst to realizing he exclusively wanted to pursue work in the sports industry.  Focusing on the impact of the 2008 recession on Major League Baseball, Josh demonstrated MLB’s economic resilience through econometric research.  

Post-college, Josh pursued a Masters in Business Analytics at the University of Texas at Austin to acquire the technical skills needed to land an analytics role with a professional sports team.  While attending a sports analytics conference at MIT, Josh met Matt Kelley, the founder of PlayerProfiler, and began conducting fantasy football research for him while completing grad school.  He worked with Southwest Airlines for his capstone project, analyzing their employee incentives and perks program to assess its effectiveness. 

Year-long stints with the Detroit Tigers (baseball analytics) and San Diego Padres (business analytics) followed, and Larky continued his fantasy football research during this time.  Despite 100 percent accuracy with his attendance projection while working for the Padres (Josh predicted zero fans in 2020 due to Covid), he was Covid-furloughed in May 2020.  That summer, he started his own R coding business, ThatRCodingSite.com, where he teaches people analytics and coding using football datasets.

The 2020 NFL season was his first full-time season in the fantasy industry, as he led all DFS (daily fantasy sports) efforts for PlayerProfiler.  After the season concluded, he was promoted and began leading all analytics projects for the site.  Early in the 2022 NFL offseason, Josh joined FTN, another company in the fantasy and gambling space, to lead their analytics efforts.  During his time in this industry, Josh has done everything from coding a DFS optimizer from scratch to creating viral TikTok videos, and he prides himself on his versatility.

When The 33rd Team reached out, Larky jumped at the opportunity to lead this new department.  Josh has a general disdain for groupthink and the commonly traveled path and is confident the fantasy and gambling department’s content and tools will never read or operate like any other site’s.

Outside of work, Josh rock climbs, snowboards and eats burritos.