Best ball-specific draft strategies to try in football

Best ball draft season for fantasy football is back. Whether you are a seasoned veteran of the format or are new to the game, it's always a good idea to take inventory of your own approach and make sure you are doing everything you can to improve your chances of ending the season with a positive return on investment.

With several new companies launching best ball platforms, there's never been a better time to get into the game. Today, we will discuss what makes best ball unique and a few simple approaches to add value to your team in the early rounds and continue adding points to your lineup all the way to the end of your draft.

What is best ball?

To get started, let’s discuss the main difference between this format and traditional season-long leagues, and how you can use this to your advantage. Best ball is a fantasy game where you draft your team and that’s it. There are no waivers and you don’t set a weekly lineup; you simply draft your team and your highest-scoring players each week are in your starting lineup while your lowest-scoring players are on your bench. Most best ball leagues also have no playoffs, so final seeding is determined by total points at the end of the season. This distinction means that our approach to risk, upside and weekly certainty needs to be completely different from that of a person drafting for a season-long managed team. Despite this, people tend to draft the same way, and many of those managed-league biases carry over into best ball drafts, presenting us with unique opportunities. 

Certainty: Who needs it?

Every year, average draft position is shaped by divergent opinions of complex situations: murky backfields where a talented rookie and veteran incumbent compete for touches, WR groups where no one appears to have a locked in role, TE2s on a team that might run more 12 personnel. We don’t need certainty in best ball; we need to align our draft to convert uncertainty into fantasy points in our starting lineup. 

How we handle these situations and the way season-long certainty-dependent drafting shapes ADP will lead to asking ourselves very different questions. “Will J.K. Dobbins beat out Mark Ingram in Baltimore?” is replaced with “Will JK Dobbins’ and Mark Ingram’s combined production outperform their combined ADP cost?” Right now, each would cost you a pick around the 4/5 turn in a draft, so the answer to our best ball volume question is likely no. What we see with situations like the Baltimore backfield is two sides within the fantasy community, both very convicted about how the situation will play out, driving up the prices of each player to the point that one side or both have to be wrong. In best ball, we’re looking to target the opposite: situations where the fantasy community has very little conviction about the situation and doesn’t take a strong stand one way or the other. There is no reason to have Dobbins and Ingram both in the 48-52 ADP range while Matt Breida and Jordan Howard are both outside the top 100. In that fourth-/fifth-round range, you can load up on wide receivers and then take both Breida and Howard with your 10th- and 11th-round picks and likely have a weekly bankable RB2 score from one or the other. In best ball, rather than looking to make a conviction play on a guy that might be overpriced, we can identify groups of assets that are undervalued as a whole, and mine value from the reduced opportunity cost. 

Stacks and combinations 

As discussed with the example of the Miami backfield, we don’t have to answer the question of Howard vs. Breida if we just take both. The pair are undervalued and if we have both on our team, the computer will sort it out and whichever scores the most points will be in our starting lineup. This type of thinking can apply to other areas as well. Every skill player receiving significant snaps on an NFL team has fantasy value for best ball, no matter how unsexy his team is. Fantasy players are biased. We like good players on prolific offenses, especially if they have stable roles. We’ll chase the dragon on Patrick Mahomes’ WR3 before we think about taking the No. 1 option on another team who might actually be the much better fantasy pick at that ADP. One of my more successful, winning strategies in best ball has been identifying those unsexy teams that no one wants to draft from and building combinations and stacks of their players in the late rounds to continue to add viable starting value to my roster much later than it should traditionally be available. 

Let’s talk about my most successful late-round stack last year as an example: D.J. Chark and Chris Conley in the final two rounds of several drafts. I got there by noting (and discussing on several podcasts) that only one pass-catcher on the Jaguars (Dede Westbrook) had an ADP in the top 200. No one was interested in any other players on that team. In situations like that, someone has to have value, and at an opportunity cost of next to nothing, you could give yourself a shot at 800 routes run and 200 targets while also using the combination of those players to build certainty from uncertain circumstances. Are there more situations and opportunities like this in 2020? Absolutely. Let’s look at some quick math:

For this exercise, I looked at each team’s total projected passing volume from my model and compared it to the current ADPs of their top four pass-catching weapons (wide receiver and tight end). What we’re looking to do here is identify the teams whose passing volume can be had for the lowest total ADP cost. As you might expect, the teams at the very bottom of this value comparison are the really good offenses that the fantasy community has the most faith in. The Chiefs, Bucs, Saints, Giants, and Cowboys all have 3-4 pass-catchers being drafted in the top 100 picks because we think we know what to expect from these situations. Washington and Jacksonville, on the other hand — despite being projected for a season full of pass-friendly gamescripts — only have one pass-catcher apiece being drafted at all. Once Chark and Terry McLaurin are gone, you can wait the rest of your 18-round draft and not see another Washington/Jacksonville receiver or tight end come off the board.

Minnesota is similar: After Adam Thielen you have to wait for Justin Jefferson or Irv Smith before anyone takes notice. Houston is high on the list because, despite having two players in the top 150 and a top-five ADP QB, Will Fuller has the highest Texans WR ADP, checking in at 85. The Patriots make the list because after Julian Edelman is taken you can wait till the end of your draft to snag some combination of N’Keal Harry, Mohamed Sanu and Jakobi Meyers. These are the types of situational values offered to you by fantasy player biases that you want to target at the end of your drafts.

I hope this short discussion has been thought provoking and helpful: as you start your best ball portfolio it is important to look out for promotions and offers from some of these fantasy sites. One of the best ways to raise your ROI in fantasy is to weigh your options and make sure to put down your volume at sites and with companies that value your business and reward it with promotions and signup bonuses. This will be a much more competitive market in 2020 than in past years so there should be a lot of opportunities to give yourself an edge.