The goal of Best Ball tournaments is simple. Draft a team that scores enough points in the regular season to advance to the playoffs. Then, finish at the top of your randomized groups in both Week 15 and 16 to make the finals. Score the most points in the Week 17 final and take home the big bucks.
But while the goal is simple, it is certainly not easy. And what makes it far more difficult is that fact that even after we have the results of a season, or multiple seasons, it’s not particularly clear what the right answers even were when we were drafting our teams.
Most analysis, understandably so, is focused on the overall performance of players over the entire season. But most of the major Best Ball tournaments in the industry are not decided based upon a cumulative format. The amount of money you win is not decided by the total number of points your team scores over the entire season. They are the playoff format described above, where you compete in small groups in four separate and uncorrelated steps. One of those steps spans 14 weeks, while the other are decided by just one week of the NFL season at the very end of the sport’s calendar.
Naturally, that means the players, and in turn strategies, that are successful in certain steps of the contest are not necessarily going to be successful in other steps. The players who score the most points over the regular season may not score the most points in the individual weeks that make up the three playoff rounds, while the players who have big games in the playoffs may not be the ones who were helpful in advancing your teams out of the opening round.
To even novice Best Ball competitors, all of this becomes clear and obvious in just a quick glance at the rules of the game. And yet after every single season since Underdog launched their tournaments back in 2020, setting off an explosion in growth and popularity of Best Ball games, we all look back at the prior season(s) and analyze the best and worst picks based predominantly on player performance over the course of the entire season, or even through an “advance rate” view, meaning the players who helped teams most during the regular season.
That type of analysis is clearly valuable in some regard, but it is not particularly well aligned with the goal we defined above for these contests. The problem is that we also cannot just look at what happens in those playoff weeks. Individual weeks or games in a football season have incredible variance. Matchups, injuries, weather, in-game chaos and so many other factors play such a huge part in the fantasy results of a game, that we know we can’t just fixate on who scored the most points in week 17 or the fantasy playoffs either.
This is the great playoff conundrum in Best Ball. We don’t really know how to even define who the “best” picks were. You could draft all the best picks for advancing teams. You could draft players who score well in week 15 and 16. But if you don’t have the players who score the most points in the final round, you’re still going to be left with just a mediocre season at best. And yet, we can’t reach the week 17 final without some players who help us advance from rounds 1-3 of the contest.
So what the hell can we even do about this? Anything?
The Great Playoff Conundrum in Best Ball
Regular Season vs. Playoff Results in Best Ball History
I put together this chart of some of the most notable performances in both the regular season and playoffs in the last three years or Best Ball. Clearly, we can go back further than this. For instance, in 2022, Justin Jefferson put up 3 straight 30 point games (and 6 total in the season) heading into Week 17, and he proceeded to score a whopping 2.5 PPR points in the final. Meanwhile, in that same season, Mike Evans was a terrible 2nd round pick, sitting at WR31 heading into Week 17. Then, he proceeded to score 48.7 PPR points in the final. There are many examples of these situations, but brevity is already ot a strength of mine, so let’s focus on a few from these most recent seasons.
But first, it’s important to understand we aren’t setting out to solve world hunger here. I’d argue this particular element of this game is not solvable, but we are absolutely doing ourselves a detriment by not being acutely aware of both its existence and how significant of an impact it has on the results of our game. And heck, maybe there are some small levers we can pull to set ourselves up to benefit just a little bit better from this chaos.
Let’s start with 2025, the most recent season.
2025:
- Christian McCaffrey went off the board 7th overall, and produced a legendary regular season of 25.3 PPR points per game, making him the RB1 in Weeks 1-14. After a down week 15, he was elite in week 16 and scored well in week 17. But because of incredible scoring from his peers at the position and how ADP shook out, you essentially couldn’t win a tournament like Best Ball Mania with CMC, despite the RB1 season.
- Derrick Henry was one of those peers. Drafted 12th overall as the RB6, Henry was a generally bad regular season pick, finishing weeks 1-14 with just 14.5 PPR points per game and the RB14. He only scored 10 points in week 15, and even with a solid score he was just the RB9 in week 16. But then the Big Dog ate. He scored 45.6 PPR points in week 17 to win lots of people lots of money. Bijan Robinson also scored 39.9 and Chase Brown 29.1.
- WR was similar with Jaxon Smith-Njigba as the regular season WR1, and despite him having a fine playoff, other WRs defined those most important weeks. Chris Olave out-produced his ADP in the regular season easily, but he was THE difference maker in the playoffs.
- 2025 was the one recent year where TE was this impactful. Where things really get crazy is the lack of ADP alignment of Trey McBride and Derrick Henry. McBride helped you reach the final FAR more, and he was even great in week 17, but he was drafted at the 2/3 turn, while Henry went off the board at the 1/2 turn.
- That made Kyle Pitts, hilariously, the most critical TE on the playoffs. He was totally neutral during the regular season, but his 45.6 PPR points in week 15 pushed many teams through. He followed up with another strong game in week 16, but he put up a dud in week 17. So, you either needed the Bijan/McBride pairing to compete with Derrick Henry, or you needed an additional TE to cover your week 17 score.
2024:
- 2024 was the year of Saquon Barkley… until the playoffs. He was the RB1 in weeks 1-14 at 23.1 PPR points per game, but he put up a dud in week 14, and then just solid but unspectacular games in 16 and 17.
- Joe Mixon was a similar huge regular season hit, finishing as the RB2 after being drafted as the RB16. But if you were counting on him in the fantasy playoffs, you were cooked, as his best game was just 10.6 PPR points (RB26) in week 15.
- Jonathan Taylor was a poor regular season selection, going off the board one pick before Saquon but finishing as the RB20. Then, he posted back to back RB1 weeks in the two most important weeks of the year, 16 and 17, including a 39.8 point game in week 16.
- The difference between 2024 and 2025 is a great example of how each season plays out so differently. RBs (and TEs) defined the ’25 playoffs, but it was WRs in ’24.
- Brian Thomas Jr. was your “best pick”, massively out-producing his ADP in the regular season and continuing elite production in the playoff rounds.
- But the Bengals WRs (and a week 17 bring back) were the deciding factor of ’24 tournaments. Ja’Marr Chase was the WR1 in the regular season, and he had a solid playoff, averaging 20 points per game in those weeks. Tee Higgins, however, was the key to week 17 with a 40 points WR1 performance against the Broncos.
- Speaking of the Broncos, if you brought Marvin Mims along for the ride as a cheap WR option opposite the Bengals WRs, you were handsomely rewarded. Despite a borderline useless regular season of 4.7 points per game and two more useless weeks in 15 and 16, he put up 30.3 PPR points in the finals, to finish at the WR3 overall behind just Tee Higgins and Malik Nabers.
2023:
- 2023 was the year of Kyren Williams and Puka Nacua, but also a very binary result in the playoffs where draft slot decided whether you had a chance or not.
- Clearly, Kyren Williams was the smash of all smashes, followed up by teammate Puka Nacua, so you wanted these guys no matter how we slice it. Kyren did follow up an RB2 regular season with a great playoff and an RB1 week 17. That’s particularly notable given how the first round picks played out.
- CMC was the 1.01, and he performed like it, finishing as the RB1. But Tyreek Hill finished the regular season as the WR1 being drafted as the 1.04, and CeeDee Lamb was the WR2 being drafted at the 1/2 turn.
- CMC put up a huge week 15, a strong week 16… and then dudded in the finals. And Tyreek Hill was an epic disaster in the playoffs, sinking teams after a strong regular season.
- Meanwhile, CeeDee topped off a great playoff stretch with a slate breaking 40.1 points in the week 17 final, meaning you ultimately needed a 1/2 turn team with CeeDee to win that season, despite how strong CMC and Tyreek were much of the year.
- But, while many paired CeeDee with Amon-Ra St. Brown at the 1/2 turn, if you pulled Davante Adams up a couple ADP spots and were able to drag him to the finals, he was the ultimate “leverage” play, putting up 37.6 points and the WR2 score.
- 2023 was another year where the WRs ultimately decided your fate, which I think is important to call out after a RB focused 2025.
Thoughts and Takeaways
So, what the heck does this all mean?
As mentioned before, I would urge any assessment of all of this to be more focused on awareness and understanding than answers or solutions. But sometimes that awareness can help lead to possible solutions in unique ways.
That final bullet, I think, is really the key here. It’s so easy to get hyper fixated on the most recent results or data that we have. 2025 was a dominant performance by the RBs, and particularly the top RBs in drafts. When you pair that with things like the Kyle Pitts playoffs, Chris Olave and even the Michael Wilson close to the season, drawing takeaways from this result will lead you in a very distinct direction.
But 2023 and 2024 were FAR different. Not only was the RB1 lower scoring in the regular season, the WR1 was higher scoring, and the elite backs did not define the fantasy playoffs. In fact, QBs (don’t worry, more on the QBs is coming in my next piece, I wanted to tackle them by themselves) and TEs didn’t define the playoffs either. It was far more about the WRs and *cheap* running backs like Kyren Williams (or Bucky Irving, Chuba Hubbard, etc).
That absolutely does not mean ’23 and ’24 are more of the story either. It just means that every season is its own crazy, unpredictable story. Absolutely nothing that happens in a singular season gives you an answer to the test because the questions on the test change every year, and we don’t know them at the time of the draft.
If I did have a takeaway from all of this, I do think it would be the fact that we will basically never see a season where the same players who define the regular season define the fantasy playoffs. The probability is so microscopically low that we are better off assuming we see some form of chaos.
I don’t think that means anything silly like trying to somehow target players who are worse in the regular season, but I do think it means that too much emphasis on the regular season can be equally as detrimental as an over emphasis on week 17. Despite our best efforts to convince you otherwise, Week 17 has *never* been all that maters in this game, but neither are weeks 1-14 (or week 15 or 16).
It is undeniably true that in order to win the big bucks, you have to advance from the regular season first. But it is also undeniable that this is neither a regular season game nor a cumulative scoring format. We cannot focus only on optimizing for advancing or adding the most points possible to our team over the course of the season. The best players will find the best balance between these two, at times, competing philosophies and pair them with all the other important elements of this game, like player takes, structure and more.
