As we begin the main drafting season for the 2024 NFL Best Ball season, it’s important to understand what strategies have displayed tournament winning upside on prior slates. While many items displayed here will be descriptive in nature, the past does have the ability to show paths and tendencies of the market.
Tournament Breakdown
Each draft there is one goal, draft a roster that scores the most points over the NFL regular season (Weeks 1-17). Much easier said than done. If you do not select the correct combination of high scoring players, your teams will not win one of these tournaments.
- – Cumulative scoring tournament: No advancements, you are playing against every entry.
- – 20 round snake draft – 12 teams drafted
- – Fast and slow drafts
- – Starting lineup: 1 Quarterback, 2 Running Backs, 3 Wide Receivers, 1 Tight End and 1 Flex (RB, WR or TE)
- – 2023 size
- – $20 entry – 111,252 entries – filled 76.9%
- – Lock date – NFL Kickoff
- – 2023 prizes
- – $300,000 to first
- – $2,000,000 in prizes
- – Top 16.9% paid
Winning Lineup
First place was a Hero RB structure with a roster build of 2-7-7-4 which scored 2,794.34 points. It won the tournament by 4.6 points. The big takeaway was this team found multiple contributors late to pair with early studs at WR. This team also screams boom or bust weeks, and variance allowed the boom weeks to align perfectly over the NFL season. It surprising lost closing line value (CLV), more on this to come below.
Lets also take a quick peek at the second place team. It was a Zero RB structure with a roster build of 2-7-8-3 scoring 2,789.74 points. We can see overlapping players of CeeDee Lamb, Dak Prescott, Leonard Fournette, Jake Ferguson and Kyren Williams. Yes, you read that correctly, the top two teams both rostered Uncle Lenny. The Dallas Cowboys team stack who greatly overachieved their draft slots were the key to success plus Kyren Williams. Interestingly enough, this team was also a CLV loser. While I personally do believe CLV is a good thing, drafting good players is also a good thing. A sample size of two is far too small to deem predictive, but is a good reminder that when we are drafting Best Ball teams things like stacking may supersede getting CLV. Tank Dell was crucial to the winning team and Brock Purdy to second place.
Did the second quarterbacks add value to the teams? Yes, just barely. Dak plus Stafford was the 144th highest possible two quarterback combo, with Stafford adding 54.84 points to the team. This was probably the most vulnerable position on the winning team with as Dak plus Stafford was the 17th best Dak pairing. Solo Josh Allen scored more points, even Jalen Hurts plus Jameis Winston scored more points.
Dak plus Purdy was the 22nd highest possible two quarterback combo, a whopping 35.96 points more.
What is the lesson learned from this? The teams with Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts in most cases won the quarterback position, however they weren’t able to hit the right stacks elsewhere on the team to capitalize on this advantage. Was these do to ownership combinations, or drafters being unwilling to team stack without the QB?
A glance at TournamentDB shows us that Ceedee Lamb was almost never combined with either Josh Allen (0.80%) or Jalen Hurts (0.21%) before we even consider if they also added Jake Ferguson to the Cowboys stack.
What about 2022? Fine twist my arm, we can take a quick glance to see what won the Drafters Main the year prior. This team knocked their first 10 selections out of the park, scoring 2,734.18 points. And that’s what you had to do with an unstack Jalen Hurts and a double stacked Zach Wilson. Wasn’t Zach Wilson terrible in 2022? Yup, and he only added 12.8 total points to this team. This team still wins the tournament if you remove Wilson from it and play Solo QB with 19 total roster spots.
How many points do you need to win?
Tournament Roster Build
Roster build is a massive talking point in the industry and in many cases, it is overblown. Drafter’s cumulative scoring format isn’t one of them. The format benefits building teams different from your competition and this isn’t much of a challenge to do.
- 58% of teams drafted three or more Quarterbacks
- 76% of teams drafted three or more Tight Ends
- 6% of teams drafted two or less Quarterbacks and two or less Tight Ends
What were the most common constructions?
How much capital is being spent at each position?
How do the top 100 finishing teams compare to the field?
Let’s focus on capital being spent on the quarterback position. This may be the most important chart in this article. I will be drafting exclusively 2 QB, with a rare Solo QB team if the draft board falls in a way that I can use that strategy.
Top 20 Team Nuggets
- – 16 of 20 teams were at 2 WR through Round 2.
- – 11 of 20 teams were at 4 WR through Round 6.
- – Christian McCaffrey, Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry were the only non-WR’s drafted in the first two rounds.
- – Rashee Rice, Jayden Reed and Sam Laporta were the most impactful mid round selections.
- – Tank Dell, Kyren Williams and Puka Nacua were the most impactful late round selections.
- – Four teams had two of them.
- – 15 teams had one of them.
- – One team had zero of them.
- – Every team in the Top 20 had three or more tight ends.
- – 10 teams had 0 TE through Round 10.
- – 10 teams had 1 TE through Round 10.
- – Sam Laporta was on 11 of 20 teams.
- – The team that did not have Tank Dell, Kyren Williams and Puka Nacua; also did not have Sam Laporta.
This team finished in 20th place, only 84 points from the lead. I imagine they would have loved one of those players.
What was popular in the Top 1% of teams?
Now lets look at the top two player combinations and see the absolute power of team stacking.
For fun, lets look at the highest rostered two player combinations from the bottom 1% of teams.
ADP Review
The top 10 largest ADP movers over a 2 day period happened the first 2 days of the tournament. The top 9 largest ADP movers over a 7 day period happened the first 7 days of the tournament. These are almost all rookies too! What does this mean? Get in this contest early and often at launch to build player combinations that will not be available later in the summer.
2 Day Risers
Who were the biggest movers across the full contest?
Fallers
Risers
Lessons Learned
- – We must swing for the fences with each selection, guys like Van Jefferson will not help you on Drafters. Spike and nuclear weeks are what matter at every roster spot, playing for floor is pointless.
- – There are easy ways to get different than the competition without getting too cute.
- – Team stacking is vitally important, even without the quarterback. Finding a team that greatly exceeds expectations goes a long way.
- – If you take an RB early, try to get 4 WR by the end of round 6.
- – Rookies will be the risers.
