Underdog has launched a new tournament format this year with quarterly Best Ball tournaments. They kicked off with the First Quarter, a weeks 1-4 tournament with a fun, unique structure. We outlined First Quarter Strategy here leading into the season. There are certainly some things we can take strategy-wise form the First Quarter into the Second Quarter, but this tournament is certainly a good bit different.
If you didn’t play in the First Quarter, here’s a quick refresher of this format concept. It is just a 4 week Best Ball tournament. What happened in Weeks 1-4 doesn’t matter for this tournament. What happens after Week 8 also doesn’t matter. This winner is NOT decided by total points over these 4 weeks. You still have 4 advancement stages in this tournament, just like Best Ball Mania, but every stage of the tournament is one singular week of the NFL season.
Advancement details:
- Week 5 – 2 of 12 advance to Round 2
- Week 6 – 2 of 5 advance to Round 3
- Week 7 – 1 of 4 advance to Round 4
- Week 8 – 374 Seat Final
The advancement structure is the exact same as the First Quarter with each individual week presenting it’s own single week sweat, but obviously the huge difference here is that there are NFL teams on Bye in each of these weeks of the tournament. We’ll obviously dig into how to handle that, but it’s arguably the biggest factor in both our overall strategy and individual draft rooms for this contest.
Advancement Structure Strategy
Before we get to the bye week issue, roster construction and specific player targets, let’s just reiterate some of the advancement structure strategy from the First Quarter.
At a high level, it’s actually pretty straight forward, even if it’s rather shocking. Week 17 might be all that matters in regular best ball, but in this format Week 5 and Week 8 are pretty much all that matter.
We should actually start in the middle – with weeks 6 and 7. With both such high probability (40% and 25%, respectively) of advancing in those weeks, as well as the sheer fact that the pods are so small means we shouldn’t concern ourselves much with those weeks. We need to focus on the two most important, and most difficult, weeks for this format – Week 5 and Week 8. We clearly don’t want to just load our team with players on Bye in Week 6 and Week 7 because we do still need to have a strong week and actually advance, but if we are going to take on some added risk in certain weeks for this contest, those two are our best bets to do so.
We need to simultaneously play this like a Week 5 micro field DFS tournament and a Week 8 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…
Bye Weeks
You can always find all the NFL Bye Weeks in our NFL Bye Week Cheat Sheet here. But here’s a condensed list of the teams on Bye in each of the weeks for this Second Quarter tournament.
Week 5
- Atlanta
- Chicago
- Green Bay
- Pittsburgh
Week 6
- Houston
- Minnesota
Week 7
- Baltimore
- Buffalo
Week 8
- Arizona
- Detroit
- Jacksonville
- LA Rams
- Las Vegas
- Seattle
Bye Week Chaos in the Second Quarter
Clearly these Bye weeks are a HUGE factor in this tournament, but it’s somehow probably even more than meets the eye. Let’s do a little Q&A to hit the major points here.
Should you even draft Week 8 Bye Players?
There is almost always a certain price where players become a good buy despite their flaws, but this one is about as unique as it gets. If I told you over the summer, that certain players you could draft in Best Ball Mania were a 100% certainty to not play in the finals, would you draft them? I don’t think so. And if you look at the ADP of all these players, we aren’t even getting as stark of a discount as you’d expect. I’ll take my chances I can survive without those players in the first 3 weeks.
How much should we devalue the Week 5, 6 and 7 Bye teams?
Each one of those is a little bit different. First, there are 2 more teams on bye in Week 5 compared to the Week 6 & 7. Week 5 is also significantly more difficult to advance (2 out of 12). Naturally, we need to devalue those Week 5 players quite a bit more. But it’s also important to note that the 3rd most difficult week (Week 7 – 1 of 4 advance) does have both Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen on bye, along with their Raven and Bill teammates. It may be tempting to totally avoid those two teams as well, but then we also have to consider the fact the Bills draw a juicy Panthers matchup in the Week 8 final, while the Ravens draw a similarly appealing Bears matchup. I told you this was a complicated tournament.
Which position is hurt most by the bye weeks?
The first thing that jumps off the screen positionally is the tight end position. Trey McBride, Brock Powers, Sam LaPorta, and Brenton Strange are all on bye in the championship round. George Kittle *should* be back by the time the final rolls around, but he isn’t eligible to return from IR until Week 6, meaning we would need another TE to help us get to his return… and we can’t guarantee he’ll be back immediately when eligible in Week 6. All that is before we add in the Week 5 byes with Tucker Kraft, Kyle Pitts and the Steelers & Bears TEs.
How are you approaching these bye week teams in your drafts?
Based on what I’m seeing in drafts and ADP, I think I’m ultimately avoiding the vast majority of players with a Week 5 bye. I’m ignoring all of the Week 8 byes, and de-prioritizing the Week 6/7 byes. There are 14 teams on bye across these 4 weeks, so it’s simply not feasible to 100% fade every player on all of those teams. But I am going to keep a very tight player pool with the 10 teams on bye in Week 5 and 8 pretty close to x’d out.
Do you have rankings for this Second Quarter contest available?
Yes! Premium subscribers can get access to our Second Quarter rankings here in the Rankings Hub, as well as any premium content, other rankings, discord access and more. The Draft Hacker overlays are also HUGE in your drafts for this contest. You can update which weeks show on your Hacker as the “playoff weeks” to the Weeks relevant to this tournament and get the same matchups, correlations and other data updating on your screen in real time.
Roster Construction
I wrote this in the First Quarter strategy piece, but I think it’s very true here again in this contest, and maybe even more so given the bye week issues.
Just a very quick venting session / pet peeve before we get started here. There are really no *right* or *wrong* ways to build teams here. Can you build 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 6 and 7, I do not need to hit the nuts at QB until Week 8. 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.
Lastly, and most obviously, is the fact that you clearly need RB production immediately in Week 5. 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 we ignore the fact that production is 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.
If you look at the likes of Chase Brown, Josh Jacobs, Bucky Irving, Chuba Hubbard, etc. types in the first quarter, they had some early season production, but not enough to support their draft capital. It was easily replaceable by later RBs, and you missed out on the likes of Puka, Nabers, Lamar, Allen, McBride or others who could actually help you gain more points on your opponents. It’s not meant as slander to those specific RBs, just an example of what happens when the immediate RB production doesn’t come through at expensive prices.
Week 8 Games of Note
We’ve got a small sample of teams from the first 3 weeks of the NFL season, and while that’s far from perfect in identifying the best matchups and spots by the time Week 8 comes around, but it’s significantly more helpful than the lack of information we work with over the summer in our regular best ball drafts.
- Buffalo @ Carolina – The Panthers defense may have played better against the Falcons, but the Bills should name their score here, whether it be with Allen or Cook. And the Panthers have shown enough ability to punch back and the Bills defense enough weakness for a bunch of fantasy points here. The Bills Week 7 bye is a tough wrinkle, but we also shouldn’t exclude them by any means.
- Chicago @ Baltimore – Another Week 7 bye in the Ravens and a Week 5 bye for the Bears, but the Ravens offense should have tons of success at home here, and they currently sit at 1-2 through 3 weeks, meaning they’ll need to be aggressively attacking some W’s.
- Dallas @ Denver – In the First Quarter strategy piece, I highlighted the Broncos as a major priority partly because of matchup with the Bengals in Week 4. The injury to Joe Burrow hurt the overall juice in Bengals games, but the Cowboys have stepped into that role as the new Coors Field of fantasy football. CeeDee Lamb should be back by then to help the Cowboys punch back, and their defense is just as bad as we expected.
- NY Jets @ Cincinnati – The Bengals are still very bad on defense, as we saw the Vikings shred them in Week 3 despite their own offensive injuries. Justin Fields will be back soon, and the Jets are an extremely condensed offense.
Player Targets
This is certainly not an all-encompassing list of player targets, and if you’d like to use our custom rankings designed specifically for this tournament (and downloadable), you can find them here. You just need a Spike Week Premium subscription to access.
- New York Jets – Fields/Breece/Wilson/Braelon – the Jets are probably my biggest priority in this tournament. First, they do not have a bye in any week of this contest. It hasn’t been a perfect start to the season for their offense, but they’ve shown plenty of upside, and they have the juiciest schedule in the league over these 4 weeks. They play the Cowboys, Broncos, Panthers and Bengals, in that order. Wheels up.
- Juwan Johnson – The TE position is extremely dire in this tournament with byes and injuries. And yet the TE2 overall in fantasy through 3 weeks, who doesn’t have a bye, barely cracks the top 100. His production is no fluke either, with utilization that very much reflects one of the very top TEs in fantasy football.
- Tyjae Spears – Clearly I can’t accurately project what Tyjae’s role will look like when he returns, but with all of the issues for so many different players in the player pool, it makes no sense that he is priced this cheaply. He is eligible to return from IR in Week 5, and the Titans made it known all summer they wanted this to be a pretty even split between Pollard and Spears.
