Best Ball is extremely difficult.
If you’ve played this game since the introduction of the huge tournaments on Underdog, Drafters, DraftKings or FFPC, you know the game can be very cruel. You can draft what seem to be extremely strong teams that flame out in the tremendously tough playoff rounds. You can suffer brutal injury luck, and you can even get so lucky as to make the finals in Week 17 only to see your dreams of life changing money go down in flames as your players have low scoring games.
In particular, what most probably view as the flagship tournament of the best ball space, Best Ball Mania on Underdog Fantasy, is arguably the toughest. It’s a huge tournament with hundreds of thousands of teams, a very difficult advancement structure and a final with hundreds of teams in Week 17.
Since the inception of Spike Week three years ago (I can’t believe it’s been that long already), I have been lucky enough to make the Best Ball Mania finals twice. On both occasions, I’ve also been lucky enough to have very strong finishes with a legitimate shot at taking down the entire tournament each time, including this past year.
In 2021, I actually went on stream with Peter Overzet to draft a team that ended up finishing 8th in Best Ball Mania 2.
This year, I navigated my way into the top 10 until ultimately finishing in 12th place in Best Ball Mania 4.
(Funny enough, I also called out that exact team as my best shot at winning BBM before Week 15 on an episode of Legendary Sickos with Pat Kerrane.)
So while I haven’t quite gotten lucky enough to bring home the top prize in BBM yet, I feel strongly that I’ve been able to hone in on some edges that have helped me craft some teams that not only navigated the gauntlet that is the Best Ball Playoff rounds but also give me a shot at winning in the finals. And you’ll see that both of these teams utilized many of the same tactics to finish so highly in these tournaments.
The Secrets Behind 2 Top Best Ball Mania Finishes
Zero RB is a Massive Edge
I’ve heard every argument or excuse as to why Zero RB can’t work in Best Ball, and I’m here to tell you it’s all wrong, especially on a half PPR site like Underdog.
Specifically for Underdog, a common misconception is that because it’s only half PPR scoring you need to attack the running back position early because running backs become more valuable. Funny thing is, running backs do become more valuable with half PPR scoring… but ALL running backs become more valuable, not just the early ones. When the cheap RBs hit their high end outcomes, either for the entire season or for an individual week, and you pair them with elite players at QB/WR/TE, you have a weekly ceiling that no other structure can really provide. For example, on my BBM4 team in Week 17, Kyren Williams projected for the 2nd most raw points of any RB on the week (behind Christian McCaffrey). Then, with Raheem Mostert out, Devon Achane projected for a top 3-5 RB score on the week as well. If I had spent several of my top picks at the RB position, the power of those 2 players’ projections would be muted because I can only use a maximum of 3 RBs in my lineup that week. But if you pair them with elite options at QB, WR and/or TE, you create a collective ceiling on your team that gives you the potential to bink a tournament. Unfortunately, I didn’t have CeeDee Lamb on the team, but veering away from RB did allow me to find a different “guy you need” in Lamar Jackson at the QB position.
But let’s take a quick step back first. The thing about roster construction strategy is that basically any strategy can win. Zero RB, Hero RB, Robust RB, the Triple Option, etc. There are scenarios and conditions under which each of these strategies thrive, and that’s the point about any specific strategy. It is targeting a certain scenario that plays out in the NFL season, which will ultimately create massive upside because the collection of players together now have greater upside and points projections that other teams.
Zero RB teams dominated in 2024 Best Ball and even won the 2023 Best Ball Mania Regular Season Top Prize. They won’t always dominate, but I’ve found Zero RB to be arguably the biggest cheat code in Best Ball. Both of my BBM finals teams were Zero RB teams.
In BBM2, Pete & I waited until the 8th round to draft our first running back, Raheem Mostert. He played 4 offensive snaps in Week of that season, got injured and never played another snap that year. But the rest of the RB room is a great example of how many different ways Zero RB can become a smash for you in Best Ball. That team never really got the stone cold breakout star RB for the entire season that you’d love in a Zero RB team. James Conner was sort of that, but he didn’t really smash until later in the season when Chase Edmonds got hurt.
What did happen is arguably my favorite feature of the strategy, and it’s very unique to Zero RB. Our RB production had this very beautiful layering effect where different RBs popped up for big games at different portions of the season, almost passing the baton from one RB to the next. Zeke gets hurt for a few games to benefit Pollard. Then, Zeke comes back, but Dalvin Cook and Chase Edmonds go down. Then, when those backs return, Rashaad Penny and Sony Michel stumble into an advantageous situation. You can get a layering effect with some other structures, but not in the same stratosphere of upside as with Zero RB. You may just happen to get layering of big games due to TD variance with WRs or TEs, but they aren’t gaining any weekly upside or projection. With Zero RB layering, you end up with much of the season having multiple top 5 RBs (in terms of weekly projection) on your team, it just rotates between your stable of backs.
In this year’s BBM4 team, I waited even longer to draft my first RB, starting with Antonio Gibson in the 10th round. This team saw somewhat similar layering, but it was also largely dependent upon Kyren Williams and his breakout. More on Kyren (and a similar situation in Sony Michel) later.
There are lots of other perks of Zero RB, but I won’t bore you with explaining everything about the strategy again. If you’d like to read more about it, we’ve got a detailed piece on it here.
The last thing I will mention that also played out on both of these teams is carrying performance by the QB, WR and/or TE that was nothing to get excited about. In a vacuum, there were a bunch of picks on each team at either QB, WR or TE that were not very good. I mean, Kyle Pitts is on the BBM2 team for goodness sake.
But when Zero RB hits, the RBs are so strong… for such a cheap cost. Meaning your other positions may underwhelm for their price individually, but you still have so much collective high end firepower at QB/WR/TE that your floor is incredibly high on the points you’re getting there. Players like CeeDee Lamb, Keenan Allen, Kyle Pitts and Rondale Moore were not exactly big hits 2 years ago. And DK Metcalf, George Pickens, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba fit that mold this year. But there’s still so much collective talent between those groups, they’re contributing just enough alongside your solid WRs to let you navigate the crazy journey to Week 17.
Then, once you get to Week 17, you end up with a very unique roster in the finals.
We Can Manufacture (Powerful) Uniqueness in Best Ball
There’s certainly plenty of luck involved in Best Ball. No one can deny that. And there’s definitely luck involved in having lower owned players in the Week 17 final. We can’t predict during the draft summer who will be popular in the finals, and even if you could, you don’t necessarily want to target players who either had terrible seasons or terrible Week 15/16, or both.
But luckily for us, we can have our cake and it too with this one. As I described above, Zero RB has a unique ability to generate uniqueness in the playoffs. The structure itself is benefitting from chaos that occurs at different points throughout the season at the position that benefits from that chaos to turn mid to late round picks into top projected players at their position in a given week (or weeks).
That layering effect (at both RB and WR) creates lower ownership on certain players when Week 17 gets there. But not only does it create low ownership on certain players, it creates a much more powerful version of uniqueness. It’s one thing to have a random middling projected player with an uninspiring ceiling at low ownership. That’s not particularly helpful. What is helpful is having high ceiling WRs at low ownership because your other high ceiling WRs happened to be the ones to carry you to the final. Or having RBs pop up in Week 17 who just stepped into a bigger role and suddenly project exceptionally well.
I mentioned the layering Pete and I had in BBM2 at the RB position, and that allowed us to have almost none of the high owned players in the final. We snuck a 6% owned Ja’Marr Chase into the finals thanks to this, and he scored 50 fantasy points.
In BBM4, Kyren was a star for much of the season, but I never really had any other RB emerge at that level. I was largely using Chuba Hubbard’s score during the season. But this team got lucky to have Raheem Mostert end up inactive in Week 17, turning Devon Achane from a “please score an 80 yard TD on 1 of your 7 touches” type option to a “Achane might be the RB2 overall this week” option. Having Kyren and Achane was a monstrous edge in Week 17, but particularly so given the fact both were low owned.
Speaking of Kyren, he is arguably the greatest example of manufacturing uniqueness in Best Ball. Late summer when we got real confirmation Kyren was not just the RB2 for the Rams, but he would have a real role as, at minimum, the pass down back, I hammered him. He was my highest owned player on Drafters & DraftKings where I had most of my drafts left to do. Unfortunately, I had nearly wrapped up my BBM drafts for the year, but I was still able to sneak in a bunch more Kyren to get up to 13% exposure in BBM. Of course, I was drafting him relentlessly because we had gathered new information that made him far more valuable than his 18th round draft cost. But he was also a player who was never being drafted for the vast majority of that particular contest, which is what gave him even BIGGER value. Per our TournamentDB, Kyren was drafted in just 19.55% of BBM drafts over the entire tournament. Being drafted that infrequently meant that almost no matter what kind of season he has, it’s going to be impossible for him to be extremely high owned in the final. There just won’t be enough teams that have him to create high ownership even in a 99th percentile outcome season.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Kyren was arguably the most valuable pick we’ve seen in the last round in recent history, but he was still just 6.8% owned in the BBM finals. Only 30 total teams had Kyren Williams.
On the BBM2 team, Pete and I selected Sony Michel in the final round who was in a very similar situation. At the time of the draft, Sony was still on the Patriots. However, he had rarely been drafted that year as he was the RB3 at best for New England. But, it was possible he was cut or traded and ended up in a better situation, or he could still stumble his way into a role in New England. You add in the fact he was never drafted in Best Ball Mania, and he became a very appealing last round target. If you recall, Sony Michel ended up on the Rams that year, and he took over as the workhorse back starting in Week 13. So even with a stretch from Week 13 on of top end production, Sony was just 4% owned in the finals.
The final way you can manufacture uniqueness, as displayed by these teams, is through unique player combinations.
We have Projected Ownership here at Spike Week that can tell you during the draft summer about how often players are drafted together on the same team, and Pete and I used something even simpler. We pulled up Davante Adams to the 1.02 to build a very unique version of a Davante Adams team. No one was drafting players who went at the 2/3 turn and 4/5 with Davante, so we naturally created a super unique blend of players by just taking Davante at the 1.02 instead of late first round. We manufactured low ownership on several of those players despite the fact that Davante Adams was the 3rd highest owned player in the entire finals at 29%. it also helped us avoid the two chalkiest players in the finals – Mark Andrews and Cooper Kupp at 66% and 46% respectively.
In BBM4 this year, the initial unique combo actually did not work out for this team. I knew that the chalkiest pairing at the 1/2 turn was Amon-Ra St. Brown and CeeDee Lamb. That’s what our projections said, their ADPs aligned and they happened to play each other in Week 17. I opted to steer away from that pairing and pull up Jaylen Waddle from the mid to late second round to 13th overall. Per our TournamentDB, 20% of Amon-Ra teams were drafted with CeeDee, the highest percentage pairing with ARSB. Meanwhile, Waddle was drafted just 3% of the time with him.
Clearly I wish I had CeeDee Lamb in place of Jaylen Waddle now that we have the results. I would have made a bunch more money. But I’m still comfortable with the process that got me to this particular team, and I don’t regret the decision. That’s partly because it’s easy to look at one decision in vacuum and assume the rest of the team would remain the same, but in reality there’s often a butterfly effect to these things. I ended up snagging Lamar Jackson at the 3/4 turn as my best available player, and while I did not draft him because of the Week 17 correlation with Waddle (he was my BPA), it did create the formation of Week 17 correlation in my lineup naturally. That helps boost Zay Flowers and Devon Achane later, both of whom were massive pieces both for the entire season and week 17 specifically.
Upside Archetypes & Contingent Value are King
Something you may notice when looking at both teams above is a consistency in the types of players selected onto each team. One of the biggest traps that Best Ballers fall into is not just in individual player selection, despite the fact that’s all everyone debates all summer. The real trap is in the types of players we select. To be clear, this is not a super straightforward and simple exercise. Just as we are about individual players or NFL teams, we are going to be wrong about how much upside players do or do not have in a given NFL season.
The fact that we are going to be wrong doesn’t mean we should ignore upside and contingent value, however. Quite the opposite. Our competitors are going to be wrong about 1v1 player choices all the time, just as we are. That’s just part of this game. But if we keep our focus on the types of players to target, it allows us to get fewer things right and make things easier on ourselves. And even more importantly, it’s precisely what unlocks the type of roster that can put us in contention to win a Best Ball tournament.
If you look up and down these two squads, you see almost nothing but upside archetype players. There are several different categories of upside players, and we can mix and match through them on our teams to create a collection of chess pieces that work together flawlessly.
At the RB position, you see a combination of contingent value players, ambiguous backfield players and youth/uncertainty options. In general, these players are arguably the most undervalued players in all of Best Ball. Because they don’t project for a strong role in Week 1, our opponents can’t wrap their heads around how they could be so valuable. They may need an injury, some luck or simply to outplay a teammate and be handed the reigns of the backfield to turn into a player you’d love to have on your team. But once they do, they are the one archetype who can catapult themselves from a mid to late round player up to the very top of their position.
Rashaad Penny was useless for all of 2021… until he was handed the reigns of the backfield in the fantasy playoffs and turned into the RB1 overall in fantasy during that stretch. Kyren Williams was hurt his entire rookie year and had an awkward athletic profile, but with only Cam Akers in front of him, he quickly turned into Sean McVay’s next workhorse in a top tier offense that produces fantasy gold at the RB position (as we saw with Sony Michel down the stretch of 2021).
Miles Sanders went 100 picks before Chuba Hubbard because it was assumed he would get the lion’s share of the backfield work. He got a big free agent deal, but he had never really proven to be better (or at least not significantly better) than Hubbard. So Hubbard ended up outplaying Sanders and taking the job away from him.
Those are all ambiguous situations that happened to play out in my favor.
Tony Pollard and Alexander Mattison represent the contingent value side of things. They were strictly backups to workhorse RBs (Zeke and Dalvin) when Pete and I drafted them. But, we knew that if they were to get a scenario in which they become the lead back (typically an injury to the starter), they would become top 5-10 RBs in that week.
Not every running back has the ability to generate the kind of high end outcome these players did.
On the WR and TE side, you see just a couple upside profiles. WRs are not so much contingent value bets, but they do offer talent, uncertainty or “spike week” upside.
When you draft talent (or at least potential talent) at these positions, often times that talent just shines through. Ja’Marr Chase was going in the 5th round of drafts in BBM2 because he was a rookie alongside two other solid NFL WRs in Tee Higgins and Tyler Boyd. Now he’s a top 5 pick in fantasy drafts because, at the end of the day, talent wins out.
Davante Adams, CeeDee Lamb, Keenan Allen, Amon-Ra St. Brown, DK Metcalf, Jaylen Waddle, George Pickens, Jaxon Smith-Njigba. The list goes on and on of talent based bets. Some of them hit and some of them don’t, but when we focus on that profile, we create “big win, small loss” type scenarios in the Best Ball portfolio.
We also have the spike week players you see here. MVS on the Packers and Gabe Davis were the epitome of this. There is a very huge bias against these players in best ball because most folks still think about best ball like a traditional managed fantasy football league. You never, ever want to start MVS or Gabe in your home league against your buddies. And frankly they’re probably (or certainly in MVS’ case) not very good at football. But they offer a ton of utility in best ball simply because of their archetype. They’re not going to hit for useful games a lot, but when they do it’s a BIG game.
These guys are very few and far between, so we don’t want to go crazy targeting them. Typically, we’ll just be targeting bad players who we pretend have upside because they’re fast or made big plays in college. But when we can identify them, they are often extremely undervalued in best ball drafts.
Week 17 Correlation is a Freeroll With Upside
I’ve spent a ton of time discussing what Week 17 correlation really means in Best Ball, and why it matters, so we don’t need to go too deep on that again here. It’s actually fairly straightforward in that Week 17 correlation is a micro lever that we can pull during certain drafts when it makes sense to give ourselves a tiny win probability boost without sacrificing anything at all in terms of advance rate, projection, etc. We don’t draft worse players in lower tiers just because of a Week 17 correlation, and we don’t target specific Week 17 games that look juicy over the summer (remember everyone thought Chiefs/Bengals this year was the best game, while in 2022 Bucs/Panthers was the shootout of the week and no one saw that coming).
But the fact that so many of our opponents don’t truly understand how to utilize Week 17 correlation is why it can be a micro edge if applied correctly. For whatever reason, Week 17 has become like the Democrats vs the Republicans where everyone has taken their side, and they have zero interest in being rational or listening to reason on the subject. Which creates an advantageous situation for those of us who sit directly in the middle between the two parties.
We don’t seek out certain Week 17 games or worry about it in our drafts… until it makes sense. We don’t draft players who rank in a lower tier, don’t fit our roster construction or don’t have the profile we want to target in best ball just because of a week 17 game. A ton of the time, there are other levers we can or should pull when we are on the clock deciding which player to select, whether that be simple player ranking/projection, attacking lower owned player combos or something else. But there are plenty of times where you reach a spot in the draft and you are in the midst of a tier of players who are all pretty similar.
For instance, on my BBM4 team, I had selected DK Metcalf and Jaxon Smith-Njigba through the first 5 rounds. With my 6th round pick, we were in a flat tier of WRs who are all very similar. So, considering the fact that I had two Seattle WRs on my team and there was no real differentiating factor between all the players in that tier, George Pickens jumps to the front of the line. He is a young WR with both breakout and Spike Week potential, so he fits the mold we are looking for. He’s not a reach by tier based drafting or ADP. So you keep working through all your levers that you can pull in the draft, and ultimately the correlation becomes the deciding factor.
Ironically, I was not high on George Pickens in 2023. I was underweight on him across all my drafts. But using this process of working through all my levers and ultimately using Week 17 correlation to help make that pick, it was the sneaky catalyst to this team having a shot at winning $3 Million. Pickens’ game in Week 16 got me to the finals, and he was extremely close to being a huge difference maker in the Week 17 final.
Lastly, I just want to mention the ‘upside’ part. In any one instance, it is unlikely that a game environment plays out in such a way that it boosts your team to a tournament winning score. But we aren’t playing for the most likely outcomes. In fact, we are playing for the opposite. So long as we are doing what I outlined above in our decision making process, we aren’t sacrificing anything by smartly implementing week 17 correlation. And while it’s unlikely to matter in any individual instance, the instances in which the game environment becomes a fantasy goldmine create an upside scenario that make is quite literally life changing. Again in BBM4, the Ravens are scoring at will against the Dolphins, including a long touchdown to Zay Flowers. That’s creating fantasy points with very little time coming off the clock for 2 of my players. It’s also forcing the Dolphins to play in a more aggressive manner, which benefits my Dolphins on the other side (Devon Achane and Jaylen Waddle if he were playing).
You Don’t Have to Draft the QB to Stack an Offense
One of the final gigantic edges in Best Ball that you can find from these two teams is our opponents obsession with forcing in the QB as part of their stack when it’s unnecessary.
Due to the way QBs score fantasy points across the entire league, QB is the most replaceable position in Best Ball. The wonderful thing is, our opponents don’t draft that way. Of course if we stack up a couple pass catchers from an offense and they have good games, we’d ideally like to have the QB as well because it’s almost a certainty that he’s having a good game. But there are a few factors at play that I don’t think the market takes into consideration enough.
- QBs are unlikely to separate in a huge way. Of course you’d ideally have the QB1 overall, but even Best Ball Mania has been won multiple times without the highest raw points scoring QB in Week 17. And if you’re worried about advancing, a QB is definitely not going to be the biggest deciding factor.
- If you draft a stack and it hits… you don’t need the QB of another stack that hits. You only use 1 QB score in your lineup, so the more roster spots you use on the position, the less shots you have at finding the “guys you need” at RB/WR/TE where you need to fill 7 roster spots in your lineup. Especially if you draft a higher end QB AND you stacked them, as Pete & I did in BBM2 with Dak and I did in BBM4 with Lamar, do you really want to forego shots at finding Kyren Williams or Rashaad Penny to make sure you add a 3rd QB? I could have reached for Tua, Goff, or Geno on my BBM4 team to complete a stack, but I didn’t force it. I had Lamar Jackson, so the priority was to find the RB/WR/TE to win me the tournament, not to force another QB to complete a stack “in case Lamar fails”.
- You can get all the benefits of the stack without drafting the QB. Both of these two teams have what I’d call “secondary stacks” on them where the QB is not involved. I’d actually argue it’s one of the more powerful things you can do in Best Ball, both because you’re adding a bunch of stack upside into your team both for the entire season and week 17 without sacrificing your roster construction in a way that puts a dent into your total upside. My 2 QBs in BBM4 were Lamar Jackson and Kenny Pickett. They were actually single stacked with Zay Flowers and George Pickens. Both those make sense in a vacuum, but what really took this team to the next level was the secondary stacks. You see ASB/LaPorta, Waddle/Achane, Metcalf/JSN and Gabe/Damien Harris all as secondary paths to teams having huge games. If Lamar fails, I’m probably toast anyway, but I’ve built the team as if Lamar is a hit. Once I assume that, I can create a team that now benefits from other offenses being a hit, but I can also capture the upside at the RB/WR/TE positions that I need to make a run at winning the whole tournament. If Goff, Tua, or Geno have big games, I will still get the benefits of that because I have their pass catchers, and I am unlikely to lose many points at the QB position anyway.
Obviously there are times to draft more than 2 QBs, and I have teams with 3 in my portfolio and will continue to moving forward. However, I think from a macro perspective, the market is far too concerned with covering their QB position with too much draft capital relative to how much impact the QB position has on winning these best ball tournaments.
Draft Gabe Davis… When He’s Cheap
I’m just kidding about Gabe specifically, but it is funny that Gabe Davis was on both of these teams considering they were 2 years apart. I do think a potential lesson in that is with player archetypes like Gabe, we simply have to be smart about how we attack them… and very price conscious. Despite the fact he bounces between goose eggs and big games in maddening fashion, a player like Gabe is an amazing archetype of player to have on best ball teams. We don’t have to choose when to start him, so we can deal with the floor games while benefitting from the handful of big games he has per year. He didn’t help either team in the finals, but he came through with big games in Week 15 in 2021 and Week 16 in 2023 to help power these teams through the playoff rounds. That’s really powerful, but we just don’t want to chase that type of player up draft boards too high (as I stupidly did in 2022) because it negates all the benefits of his useful archetype.
