Best Ball 2024: Why Play Best Ball?

Welcome to the FTN Fantasy Best Ball Guide for 2024!

Best ball is a set-it-and-forget-it form of fantasy football, focusing on the best part — the draft. Outside of private or contained leagues, there’s no in-season management, placing a greater emphasis on proper roster construction and positional allocation during the draft. Once the season begins, the highest-scoring players at each position automatically get slotted into the starting lineup week-to-week, getting rid of the grueling task of making difficult start/sit decisions.

For large tournaments specifically, there are no roster transactions beyond the draft, which means you no longer have the ability to make trades or waiver claims. There are many different ways to play Best Ball, but the core principle remains the same; score more points than your opponents.

Why Play Best Ball?

The hassle-free nature of best ball has caused it to skyrocket in popularity in recent years, continuing to evolve and become more widely available across a variety of platforms. It has nearly replaced the concept of mock drafting entirely, serving as the best way to get ready for the start of the NFL season. The growth of best ball has created a rich market, with multiple different sites offering millions of dollars in prizes.

Where to Play Best Ball 

There are a lot of places to play best ball such as DraftKings, Drafters and FFPC to name a few, but our favorite is at Underdog Fantasy, where new users can get a $250 first deposit match by using the code “FTN” upon signup.

Underdog Fantasy recently launched the fifth edition of its annual “Best Ball Mania” tournament, featuring $15,000,000 in total prizes and $1,500,000 to first.

There are many other contests available at various different price points, with more coming soon throughout the course of the offseason.

Our own Mike Randle recently broke down Underdog’s Best Ball Mania 5.

Playoffs

Best Ball Mania V is all about the playoffs, eliminating payouts for the top-scoring regular season teams and allocating the majority of the prize pool to Weeks 15-17.

Finishing inside the top two in your regular season lobby is no easy task, but advancing out of Round 2 becomes even more difficult with stiffer competition. If the contest does not fill (which is highly unlikely), the highest-scoring teams in the regular season that did not finish toward the of their lobby will get a chance to sneak into the playoffs as “wild cards.”

Teams that were fortunate enough to advance out of the regular season will then get placed into randomized “playoff pods” in Week 15, this time needing to finish first out of 13 to move on to the next round. However, unlike the regular season, the same player may show up on multiple rosters, potentially scoring points for yourself and your competition. Once the winner is determined, the structure remains the same for Week 16, with “playoff pods” now consisting of 16 teams. Finally, in Week 17, all the remaining teams will go head-to-head in a 539-person final, featuring $1.5 million up top.

Timing

There isn’t a right or wrong time to draft, but there are ways to strategically space out your entries to ensure your overall portfolio consists of a wide variety of players at different prices. ADP on players are least accurate immediately after the NFL draft, yet to adjust for rookie draft capital and landing spots.

Although early drafts provide the best opportunity to maximize closing value, you still run the risk of stacking up bye weeks and the ability to create correlation for the playoffs without the schedule. Once the schedule is released, players tend to hold their value up until training camp, with continuous news and information trickling in throughout the league, as teams begin to finalize their roster post-June 1 cuts. Veterans will move up and down as a result of new signings and releases, however, rookies fluctuate the most, continuing to generate hype throughout the offseason.

The next big movement occurs at the start of preseason games, as we gain further clarity on where players fall on the depth chart and how their teams plan to utilize them in the upcoming year. Historically, teams drafted closer to the start of the regular season are much stronger as ADP becomes more efficient, but it’s important to stay active and gain exposure to players at different price points.

Pick Clock

When entering drafts, users have the option to choose between a fast 30-second clock or a slow eight-hour clock. For slow drafts, the allotted time for picks will get sped up closer to the start of the regular season as follows: 

• Two weeks ahead of Sept. 5, the pick clock will be reduced to four hours per pick.
• One week ahead of Sept. 5, the pick clock will be reduced to one hour per pick.
• Sept. 5, the pick clock will be reduced to 10 minutes per pick and then down to 60 second at 4:46 p.m. ET.

Slow drafts have an overnight pause of three hours between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. ET, during which time you can still draft and make picks. As the start of the regular season approaches, the overnight pause will change in line with the pick clock. Two weeks ahead of Sept, 5, the overnight pause will span six hours between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. ET. The following week, the overnight pause increases to 10 hours, starting at midnight through 10 a.m. ET. To ensure you don’t miss a pick or get auto-drafted, we recommend adding players to the queue by clicking the star next to their name.