Thinking Outside The Box In Best Ball

With the draft season winding down, it’s critical to think through how to handle your last remaining entries, use new-found information to your advantage and find ways to differentiate yourself from the field. Later drafts often yield the highest advance rates due to a much more efficient environment and outlook for the upcoming season.

Although you may lose out on some significant closing line value at this point of the offseason, you’re a lot better prepared to avoid landmines throughout the draft with far less risk of dead roster spots. This is why I recommend drafting in windows and diversifying your portfolio with a variety of builds that may only be available for a limited time. The late window, starting in August, is when I like to get different, by either selecting players who haven’t been drafted for most of the contest and/or creating unique pairings that can help separate my teams in the playoffs. In this article, I’m going to break down some of my favorite ways to get unique and leverage my opponents.

Reaching In The Early & Late Rounds

There’s a lot of great data that goes against reaching and hurting your advance rate while also lowering the overall median projection of your roster. At the same time, you don’t want to be a slave to ADP and draft the top player on the board with every pick. The best approach is to find a balance and use rankings and/or correlation to reach on players who will unlikely make it back to your next pick. Reaching in the early rounds is a lot more impactful when deciding between high-end players who move the needle the most, and it will ultimately dictate the rest of your season.

In Rounds 1-2, the same players are often paired together with consensus rankings relatively similar in this range. As a result, creating a unique pairing with your first and second picks immediately gets you different from the start and almost guarantees a different combination of players throughout the playoffs. Once you get beyond the first 14 rounds, the rest of the draft is a free for all, where you can pretty much throw ADP out the window and go get your guys. This is also an ideal time to start reaching and differentiating your combination of players at the end of your roster by skipping a round entirely. For example, once you get to Round 15, you can close out your draft by only selecting players in Rounds 17-plus, considering they’re all mostly dart throws anyways.

Pairing Bye Weeks at The Onesies (QBs/TEs)

For the most part, there isn’t usually any correlation behind which quarterbacks or tight ends are paired together, considering you can only start one each week. However, you’re a lot less likely to see multiple quarterbacks and/or tight ends on the same roster that share the same bye week. This is another easy way to differentiate yourself in the playoffs, if you can ping-pong spike weeks at the onesie positions. The only downside to the strategy is it forces you into a three-quarterback and/or three-tight end build, unless you’re satisfied with taking a zero for a week. I don’t advise intentionally taking a zero, but it’s a lot easier to make up at tight end due to the lack of separation at the position.

Handcuffing

Handcuffing your own running back has historically been viewed as a minus-EV strategy and insulating your floor rather than shooting for a ceiling. We want to “draft as we are right,” and assume we will hit on nearly every pick. However, even if you are correct on your player takes, it’s important to understand the current landscape of the running back position. It has continued to get devalued, both in real life and in fantasy. Looking at just last season, team backfields as a whole totaled the fewest amount of combined opportunities, touches and fantasy points – with the NFL continuing to become a more pass-centric league.

Even the high-end backs separated far less frequently from the field, with only four surpassing 230 half-PPR points in the fantasy regular season (Weeks 1-17). In comparison, seven wide receivers hit that mark in a scoring format that favors running backs, with Keenan Allen falling just outside the threshold due to a lost season with 224.9 half-PPR points in 13 games. Aside from the decline in overall volume to the position, every-down bell-cow backs have become a dying breed with more teams opting for a committee approach.

Although pairing teammates from the same backfield is underutilized by the field, it’s even less common at tight end position, which creates greater leverage. With the rate of 12 personal or two tight-end sets continuing to decline, this strategy is only applicable for a handful of teams, which I’ll break down shortly. When drafting two tight ends from the same team, I want to target players who will see the field together with stand-alone value and contingent upside. For example, I used the Saints’ tight end room as a target last season, with Taysom Hill and Juwaan Johnson. In 2023, Hill finished as the TE10 in half-PPR scoring and averaged just shy of eight points per game (7.8), but he was the perfect “better in the best ball” archetype due to his boom/bust nature. Through 15 games in Weeks 1-17, Hill finished as a top-10 tight end 40% of the time (6 out of 15 games) and posted the exact same number of finishes ranked outside the top-24 at the position (6 out of 15 games, 40%). 

Johnson, on the other hand, missed significant time due to injuries but came on strong in the back half of the season. He finished as a top-10 tight end in three consecutive games from Weeks 15-17 and found the end zone with double-digit half-PPR points in each outing. His 14.2 half-PPR points per game led all tight ends during that span and was TE4 in the fantasy semifinals (12.8 half-PPR points) and TE1 in championship week with almost 20 half-PPR points (19). Although you can only start one tight end, Johnson’s breakout performance didn’t seem to hinder Hill, who finished as the TE8 in Week 17, respectively, with a receiving touchdown of his own. 

Scrolling The Eff Down

If you’re in the best ball weeds, you may have heard of the phrase “scroll the eff down,” which is basically a term promoting drafters to get weird with their final pick and gain some leverage against the field. In a large-field tournament like Best Ball Mania, consisting of 672,672 total entries, differentiating yourself from your opponents is critical, especially once you get to the playoffs where the players with the highest advance rate appear on multiple rosters.

We only have to look back at last season to see the value of hitting on an 18th-rounder who was undrafted for most of the offseason, with players such as Kyren Williams and Puka Nucua (contentedly from the same team). Both finished inside the top six in their positions. This strategy is best implemented the closer we get to the start of the season, with enough information to get unique while also mitigating the risk of a dead roster spot. I’ve recently broken down some of my favorite “Dart Throws” and “Leverage Picks,” and highlighted a few players that I like tackling onto the end of my rosters.