Best Ball Plays & Strategy

The clearest difference between best ball and DFS tournaments is the length of the play period. This affects how you analyze variance. In DFS, maximize volatility within a single game to increase your ceiling. Between two players with similar weekly medians you will always opt for a Mecole Hardman over a Hunter Renfrow. This has been accepted as a perfect translation to best ball and I don’t understand why.

Have you ever heard the term “play whoever you want” in DFS? It’s often misinterpreted. Nobody recommends filling out lineups with $1,000 salary left over in the milli-maker because you wanted to ‘get your guys;’ yet this attitude has been adopted by many in best ball. ‘Play whoever you want’ actually means ‘any set of correlated pieces can be viable in a given slate as part of a constructed lineup.’

Football is a grueling sport to predict, and this is where stacking enters the fold. Stacking allows us to limit how many different variables we have to get correct each week. In a sport where so many variables are outside our control, it’s nice to only need to root for one team’s offense to succeed to ensure that two or more players enter our best ball lineup with spike weeks.

Stacking is not the only way to succeed in fantasy football, you can of course just pick the right players. However, player-centric analysis is difficult, comes with large error bars, and is extremely time-consuming. The beauty of stacking is that you don’t even need to do much player research. You can just focus on stacking players from teams you expect to pass a lot.

New Rams RB1 Darrell Henderson will skyrocket up draft boards until likely settling in as an RB2 in the middle rounds barring a major addition by Los Angeles. With over 60,000 entries filled, 5,000 teams in Best Ball Mania II roster Henderson. Your odds of drafting him after today’s news and building a better team than any of those are low. There are only two outcomes for a team drafting Henderson today:

Whether Los Angeles brings in another competent running back, and whether his own passing down role expands, will define Darrell Henderson’s 2021 ceiling. The fact that he’s never reached a 60.0-percent Snap Share tells us it’s unlikely he possesses a ceiling in the range of Akers.’ Nonetheless, this is a capable player on a top offense thrust into immense opportunity.

Looking back to 2020, both running back and wide receiver proved to return subpar value in the deep rounds. Running backs drafted after the 12th round finished as an RB1 only 4.95-percent of the time. Wide receivers drafted in the same range were only a WR1 3.39-percent of the time. The fall off is drastic compared to quarterback (17.09-percent) and tight end (12.66-percent). This suggests that QB and TE are actually deep and that WR/RB are the shallow positions in drafts.

On Underdog Fantasy, there are about 15 tight ends currently being drafted in the top 12 rounds. It is reasonable to expect about half of them to bust in 2021. A conservative projection would suggest that there are at least five available after Round 12 that can score at least 100 points. With the overall poor quality of the tight end position, it is reasonable to push off chasing TE depth until the later rounds in Best Ball.

Tevin Coleman (Underdog ADP: 176.7) is being drafted of Ty Johnson (ADP: 213.2) in best ball. Coleman, who averaged 1.9 yards per carry last year, is being billed as a possible ‘starter,’ but has almost zero chance to emerge as a league-winner at this stage of his career. If you draft under the assumption of a winning lineup, how will Coleman’s eight-point ‘usable week’ help your team? Take a flier on the higher-ceiling Johnson instead.

You are in Round 10 of your best ball draft and see Joe Burrow available well past ADP, so you snatch him despite having no Bengals players. Burrow has a top five season, helping vault you to the Best Ball Mania II final. However, if Burrow performs well, your score increases, but so do all the other entries rostering Burrow that week. The odds he hits his ceiling in a given week without a top performance from at least one of Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, or Tyler Boyd are low.

In 2020, Ezekiel Elliott averaged 14.8 (No. 14 among qualified running backs) Fantasy Points Per Game, 65.3 (No. 15) rush yards per game, and 3.5 (No. 8) receptions per game. Additionally what made me excited, because this is a best ball league, was his 97.6 (No. 10) Best Ball Points Added. If low-end RB1 production is what we will get in a bad year, I am optimistic about what we can get in a year with a healthy Dak Prescott and a healthy offensive line.

Aside from Davante Adams, the biggest question marks on this team are the wide receivers, though there are some high-ceiling plays. Bryan Edwards has one of the lowest Breakout Ages in the entire PlayerProfiler database, Olamide Zaccheaus is Best Comparable to Jamison Crowder, and Jalen Reagor is a post-hype player who people were in on last year that walks into a better offensive situation this year.

Michael Thomas battled through an injury-plagued season and two quarterbacks playing at subpar levels, but still managed to hit the 15 fantasy point mark in three of his seven games, posting a 42.5-percent (No. 1 among qualified wide receivers) Air Yards Share. Enter Jameis Winston, who can provide Thomas with higher quality, fantasy relevant targets and elevate his stomach churning -35.9-percent (No. 107) Target Premium.

Dak Prescott’s pre-injury production last year was mind blowing: 27 (No. 30) Deep Ball Attempts, a 55.6-percent (No. 3) Deep Ball Completion Percentage, 1.2 (No. 8) Red Zone Carries per Game, 45.1 (No. 11) Best Ball Points Added, and the list goes on. While he might not have the rushing upside you’d like, Prescott has everything he needs to be a best ball star quarterback in 2021: talent, a high powered offense, a solid supporting cast, and negative Game Scripts.

Myles Gaskin’s current ADP on Underdog is in the middle of the fifth round at 56.4, putting him at RB24. Gaskin is the perfect RB2 for your Hero RB builds. He was one of the biggest winners of the NFL Draft, with Miami electing not to take an RB until the seventh round. If you want to be one of the winners of your draft, take him as your RB2 in the fifth. You’re welcome.

Despite playing second fiddle to Nick Chubb, Kareem Hunt still saw 198 (No. 11 among qualified running backs) carries on a Browns team that averaged 30.9 (No. 4) Team Run Plays Per Game. Even with Chubb healthy, Hunt has consistently put up RB2 numbers. If you’re the type of fantasy player drafting for injury upside, then he is easily the best RB for you.

Austin Ekeler is discount Christian McCaffrey and is available 12 picks later. He’s in a perfect situation with the hyper-accurate Justin Herbert targeting him early and often every single game. We have already seen him have a 109-target season (2019), and 100-plus looks to be in the cards again this season. Ekeler has top five RB potential, and is almost always available around the 1/2 turn or later.

At 23 years old entering his third season, T.J. Hockenson is in a perfect storm of fantasy production. He has the talent and first-round pedigree, performed well last season, and is the most talented receiver on the team. It sounds an awful lot like 2020 Waller. If he gets 120 targets, he should outperform his current ADP, but there is potential for an elite 140-plus target season. Go and draft him.

While reaching too egregiously to complete any stacks is not recommended, the best way to win Best Ball Mania II will be to differentiate ourselves from the field while still being smart about optimal roster construction. Starting with four straight Dallas Cowboys may not be the world’s worst strategy given that, contrary to popular belief, there is no RB dead zone this season. It would still be a struggle to win this tournament without guaranteed bell cow production from at least two players.

Drafting two early quarterbacks is the key to survival in the Rookies and Sophomores format. Relying on Zach Wilson and/or Mac Jones to bail you out is not, especially when considering this stacked QB field. The key to putting together teams with this much upside is D’Andre Swift continuously being available in the fifth round, which allows me to go after players like Jalen Hurts and Brandon Aiyuk.