In 2025, Underdog launched a new contest, the First Quarter, and they have brought it back for 2026… and made it WAY bigger. A Best Ball tournament spanning just the opening first four weeks of the season with $500k in prizes and a $100k top prize… wowzers.
What’s even more fun is that it’s *not* total points over those first 4 weeks. You still have 4 advancement stages in this tournament, so every stage of the tournament is one singular week of the NFL season.
Let’s take a quick look at that tournament structure.
Advancement details:
- Week 1 – 2 of 12 advance to Round 2
- Week 2 – 1 of 6 advance to Round 3
- Week 3 – 1 of 4 advance to Round 4
- Week 4 – 391 Seat Final
Well that’s certainly different! There are a lot of fun strategic elements that are very unique to this contest, and last year it was filling fast.
Payout Structure:
It is worth noting a couple things from the payout structure. First, simply advancing from the Week 1 opening round only nets you your entry fee back on that team. Advancing from Week 2 to Week 3 gives you just $10 in profit on that entry, for a total of $20. Making it to the Week 4 final is most critical (duh), both because that’s where all the top prizes are paid out, but you also jump all the way up to $250 minimum return on a team that makes it to Week 4.
Advancement & Payout Structure Strategy
Before we get to particular player types, targets and roster construction, I think we need to start with the specific components of the advancement and payout structures that are particularly notable.
At a high level, the basic average expectation for your advancement in each round would be as follows:
- Week 1 – 16.7%
- Week 2 – 16.7%
- Week 3 – 25%
- Week 4 – 0.25% chance at 1st place
In 2025, Weeks 2 and 3 were mathematically much easier to advance, but the gap is a bit closer this season. It is noteworthy that you have to beat a smaller raw amount of teams in Weeks 2 and 3, so there’s opportunity for a little more small pod variance in those weeks. Due to that, and the 25% advancement odds in Week 3, I still think if we are prioritizing our weeks, we need to start with Week 4, then Week 1, with the middle weeks trailing behind. Of course, we can still accomplish multiple different things at once in our drafts, but that would still be the priority if we were over-simplifying things.
We need to simultaneously play this like a Week 1 micro field DFS tournament and a Week 4 small field DFS tournament… but with a team we can’t change. There are some particular teams and players I think we can target that help us hit both of those targets with one arrow, but we ultimately just want to avoid the landmines more than try to be overly precise in our guesses on the prime pieces to draft based on matchup and such. But more on that in a bit.
Roster Construction
Before we start, I do want to note arguably the most important roster construction concept, especially in a very niche, unique tournament such as this one. There are really no *right* or *wrong* ways to build teams here, within reason. There are no bye weeks, and weeks 2 and 3 are such small pods that just about anything can happen in this rounds. Can you build with just a solo QB? Solo TE? Only 3 RBs? You bet. Can you also build a pretty standard best ball roster? Of course! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I think what I’d call the “golden rule” of Best Ball ultimately still applies to construction here in this format. Where you lack quality, draft more quantity. Where you have strong quality, draft less quantity. But with this format being just 4 weeks, the “more” and “less” parts of that equation can vary greatly compared to our normal drafts.
For me, I do still want to lean into the concept of “win the flex” here. Especially with the advance rates in weeks 2 and 3, I do not need to hit the nuts at QB until Week 4. So I don’t want to over-allocate roster spots to that position when I really just need serviceable games until a hopeful week 4 explosion.
At tight end, I certainly love the elites in this format (when don’t I love Brock Bowers), but it’s also notable that with the overall pool of draftable players shrinking considerably, tight ends in later rounds with locked in roles or real early season upside have lots of value. There are just not that many RB/WR with an early season role and the corresponding talent to be a fantasy asset in the first few weeks of the year, so it’s possible that even if you have a stronger tight end(s), a late option at that position could still be the best pick for you.
Lastly, and most obviously, is the fact that you clearly need real early season RB production. However, that doesn’t mean you have to spend all your early picks on RB. It can often *feel* that way, but the guys who actually end up as the worst picks in this format are the guys we draft very high simply because we know they will have early season production, but their production ends up very replaceable. We want to spend on early season production that you cannot replace, not just any old early season role. Committee backs will score points, backups do score touchdowns and some of the ambiguous situations will feel a lot less ambiguous after the season starts, so don’t chase the replaceable too much with real draft capital.
Notable Injury Impacts
Some of the most important situations in this particular contest center around the preseason injuries and players who may be slow to start or even miss time during this contest. This is not an all-encompassing list, but some of the most notable injury situations to monitor or capitalize on are:
- Arizona – When is Jeremiyah Love back?
- Carolina – Is Chuba Hubbard ready for Week 1?
- Chicago – Is Luther Burden ready for Week 1? Kyle Monangai?
- Green Bay – Tucker Kraft expects to have his reps ‘limited’ early.
- Houston – Who benefits most from Jayden Higgins’ ACL tear?
- Indianapolis – Is Alec Pierce ready at all during this contest?
- LA Rams – Do Puka Nacua or Alaric Jackson receive a suspension?
- New Orleans – Alvin Kamara’s MCL sprain & Jordyn Tyson out for this tournament.
- NY Giants – Is Malik Nabers a full go?
- NY Jets – Breece Hall’s Week 1 status (& Kenyon Sadiq)
- San Francisco – Everyone is hurt.
- Seattle – Will Zach Charbonnet miss the start of the season?
- Tampa Bay – Emeka Egbuka’s turf toe.
Projected Best and Worst Defenses
Defensive quality projections heading into a season can be pretty fickle, but it can’t hurt to take a peak at who project to be the best and worst options for targeting with our fantasy players (per ESPN’s Mike Clay’s projections).
Best:
- Houston Texans
- Seattle Seahawks
- LA Rams
- Philadelphia Eagles
- Denver Broncos
Worst:
- Miami Dolphins
- Arizona Cardinals
- Washington Commanders
- Tennessee Titans
- Las Vegas Raiders
The Best & Worst Week 4 Game Environments
We often talk about how you can’t predict defenses for Week 17 in our regular best ball bubble. That’s true! And frankly, we shouldn’t worry too much about the defenses in this format either. However, I do think with the final here being so close to the start of the season, we can take a look at the projected extreme ends of the defense curves. I do think we can pinpoint the very bottom and very top defenses a bit more accurately at the start of the season, so it’s at least somewhat worthwhile to look at the finals games to try to pinpoint who we may want to target for matchup purposes.
Here are a few of (in my opinion) the most fun Week 4 games to target:
- New England @ Buffalo – Neither of these teams project to be too terrible on defense, but I have some suspicion that the Bills take a step back on that side of the football. We know New England will have a strong offense, especially with the addition of AJ Brown, and if they can score efficiently we may have Josh Allen (& new WR DJ Moore) forced into a more aggressive game plan.
- Jacksonville @ Cincinnati – Similar situation here with two high-powered offenses. The Bengals may not *quite* be the “Coors Field of the NFL” this season with some defensive upgrades, but that shouldn’t stop this game from having fireworks.
- Arizona @ NY Giants – The Giants are a bit of a peculiar offense heading into 2026, but they might be able to feast on the terrible Cardinals defense, and the Cards should be able to facilitate some shootouts as long as Jacoby Brissett is in there at QB.
- Tennessee @ Baltimore – I’ve made it know how excited I am for the Ravens under a new scheme with new OC Declan Doyle, and they happen to draw one of the projected worst defenses in the league in the finals. The Titans also should hopefully be a bit improved on offense with Wan’Dale Robinson, Carnell Tate and Brian Daboll in town.
- Miami @ Minnesota – I am certainly not excited for the Dolphins against Brian Flores’ defense (and revenge for Flores!), but this makes for a really appealing Vikings offensive spot.
- Kansas City @ Las Vegas – This might be my favorite game, with Klint Kubiak and more dynamic Raiders offense heading into 2026 squaring off with a Chiefs defense that looks like it also might take a sizable step back this year.
Player Targets
You can get my/our rankings for this contest in our Rankings Hub with a Spike Week premium subscription, but I also wanted to note a few of the more intriguing names specific to this First Quarter tournament.
- Travis Etienne – With Alvin Kamara looking unlikely to be ready to roll in the early going, Etienne should take on a workhorse level role in the Saints backfield. He also plays the Falcons at home on the Monday Night hammer of Week 4.
- Jordan Mason – The overall first quarter schedule for the Vikings and Mason is quite good, capped off by the finals matchup with the Dolphins.
- D’Andre Swift – Even if Monangai is back for the regular season, it’s hard to imagine he gets his normal workload in his immediate return, which is not (currently) priced into Swift’s ADP in a top tier Bears offense.
- Tyler Allgeier – With the Jeremiyah Love injury, Allgeier is incredibly likely to serve at least a reasonable role in the first month with upside for a lot more if Love is slow to ramp back up.
- Chris Godwin – I’m not sure how much Godwin has left in the tank, but Emeka Egbuka’s status is in question, and Godwin only needs to last for 4 weeks here. He also could simply bounce back after a down year and a major injury two seasons ago.
- Matthew Golden – Golden projects for one of the best route participation rates of any non-superstar receiver, the Packers schedule is quite nice and he could pick up a few extra targets if Tucker Kraft is actually a bit limited in the first month.
- Demarcus Robinson – I know, it’s gross. But Mike Evans has been incredibly banged up so far in training camp, Deebo Samuel continues to be “sprinkled in” and DRob is continually running with the 1s on offense. Who knows how long that lasts, but it doesn’t need to last long for this contest.
- Brock Bowers – He is the best bet at tight end to break fantasy in 2026, and he gets the Dolphins in Week 1 and Chiefs in the Week 4 final.
- Juwan Johnson – He projects for a much larger role in the first month in the absence of Jordyn Tyson, he’s extremely affordable and he is the most reliable non-Chris Olave option in the Saints passing game.
