Underdog Weekly Winners Draft Strategy: How To Win The Regular-Season Contest

Every Underdog Weekly Winners draft strategy question comes down to one mistake: people draft it like Best Ball Mania. Weekly Winners looks like a normal NFL best ball draft, but it pays out week by week, and that flips the math on almost everything drafters have learned about season-long fantasy football. Floor stops mattering. Median projection stops mattering. The only thing your roster is chasing is a top-of-the-field spike week, and there are real numbers, pulled from actual contest data, that define exactly what a spike week is. We will get to those thresholds, because once you see how many points a first-place lineup actually needs, half of the player pool eliminates itself from your drafts.

The Quick Answer

The winning Weekly Winners approach is to draft a mostly normal best ball roster, then bend it toward single-week ceiling: skinny-stack one elite quarterback with a single pass catcher, lean on running backs for the flex, chase uniqueness over raw ADP value, and build your roster around one or two specific weeks you are trying to win. Every one of those adjustments comes from contest data Hayden Winks, the Underdog analyst who had a hand in shaping the format, walked through on our stream. The exact scoring thresholds, the stack data, and the worked draft example are all below.

Watch The Video

This guide is built from our full Weekly Winners strategy stream with Underdog's Hayden Winks, including a complete live draft where every principle below gets applied pick by pick: Watch on YouTube.

What Makes Weekly Winners Different From Best Ball

Weekly Winners is an NFL best ball format on Underdog Fantasy: you draft an 18-round roster in the summer, there are no waivers or lineup decisions, and your best scorers count automatically. If you have never drafted on the platform, our guide on how to play Underdog Fantasy covers the mechanics. The difference is the payout structure. Instead of one season-long race where advancement is decided in the final weeks, Weekly Winners pays a prize pool on 17 separate weekly slates across the NFL regular season, and Underdog pays winners as soon as the week settles. Win week 2 and the money is yours in week 2.

That structure changes who you are competing against. In Best Ball Mania, the field is whittled down for weeks before a final group of a few hundred teams decides the top prizes; the season Winks pulled his data, the BBM final was 441 teams. In Weekly Winners, the season he described, roughly 200,000 teams were live against each other every week, and only about the top 3% of them cashed in a given week. The stakes made the sweat worth it: that contest ran a $15 entry with up to $20,000 available to a winning week. You are not trying to survive a bracket. You are trying to post one of the very best scores in a six-figure field, in one week, at least once.

A Weekly Winners roster, in other words, is not a season-long portfolio; it is 17 weekly tickets on the same set of players. What makes a ticket live is not a matter of taste, because Winks put hard numbers on it.

The Spike-Week Thresholds: What A Winning Week Actually Scores

Winks studied what it took to post a top-1% week using Best Ball Mania scoring data, and the numbers are the most useful thing in this article. A lineup needed roughly 170 points just to cash a week, and over 200 points to have a real sweat at first place. Position by position, the top-1% teams averaged approximately these outputs:

Sit with the quarterback row, because it does the most work. A 29-point week is not something most quarterbacks ever produce, and the spike weeks concentrate hard at the top of the position: by Winks' count, Patrick Mahomes alone accounted for about 16% of all quarterback spike weeks in the sample, and in a separate breakdown Winks ran using a 30-point cutoff, roughly 70% of those quarterback spike weeks came from early-drafted quarterbacks. That is why he moved toward elite-quarterback builds after running the data. Your late-round quarterback might be a fine season-long value, but Weekly Winners does not pay season-long value.

The same ceiling test applies everywhere. A possession receiver who reliably posts 13 points is a useful best ball player and close to a dead roster spot here, because 13 points does not appear anywhere in that table. Before you draft anyone, ask the only question the format cares about: how often does this player actually reach these numbers? Stokastic's NFL DataHub projections make that check fast, because the tool surfaces ceiling-driven projections you can compare against the season-long averages ADP is built on. Our breakdown of boom/bust probability in DFS explains the underlying idea: for top-heavy payouts, a player's chance of a huge game matters far more than his median projection.

Knowing the thresholds tells you which players to draft. The contest's field size tells you how to combine them.

Skinny Stacks Beat Fat Stacks

Stacking is best ball gospel, so Winks' most surprising finding is worth stating plainly: most top-1% weekly teams had either no stack or one single stack. The fat quarterback stacks that win Best Ball Mania were largely absent from the top of Weekly Winners leaderboards.

The reason is arithmetic, not heresy. Consider the classic Bengals build, which spends your first three picks on Ja'Marr Chase, Tee Higgins and Joe Burrow. For that roster to win a week, Chase has to beat all the other first-round picks and Higgins has to beat the field of picks drafted alongside him in the same week, and they are catching passes from the same quarterback, competing for the same targets. Winks' preference was the skinny stack: the quarterback plus one pass catcher, betting that receiver takes a monster share of the passing game rather than splitting a big day with a teammate. You want your receiver to score 45, not 25; the monster week, not the merely good one.

There is a second data point that locks this in. Looking at the top 50 teams in a given week, roughly 90% used their first-round pick in the winning lineup, about 85% used their second-round pick, and around 78% used their third. Your early picks almost always have to hit for you to win a week, so drafting two receivers who cap each other's ceiling with your two most important picks is hedging against yourself exactly where you cannot afford to. Our NFL DFS stacking guide covers correlation basics; the Weekly Winners adjustment is simply to keep the correlation and cut the redundancy.

Uniqueness Is Worth A Reach

In a 200,000-team weekly race, more teams roster the player you need than actually cash. Winks' example: say a quarterback posts a 40-point week and the next-closest quarterback scores 28. Every team with him is holding the right ticket, and there are still far more of them than there are cashing spots. The tiebreaker is the rest of your roster, which means the combinations matter as much as the players. If most of that quarterback's drafters paired him with his tight end and popular mid-round receiver, the team that paired him with the cheaper, less-drafted receiver from the same offense clears a huge chunk of the field the moment that receiver has the big day instead.

This is the same uniqueness math that governs large-field DFS tournaments, and if you play those, our breakdown of how many uniques you need in DFS and our guide to NFL DFS leverage and game theory will feel familiar. The practical Weekly Winners application: reaching a round past ADP to lock a unique game stack or combo is a good trade here, even though it is usually a leak in Best Ball Mania. Winks was explicit that small reaches to flip which side of the draft board a pairing comes from, or to secure the one-off combination nobody else is drafting, are worth more in this format than the ADP value you give up.

Uniqueness also shapes which positions you lean on late, because the field's habits have left one position systematically underpriced.

Running Backs Fill The Flex

More contest data: on elite weekly teams, running backs filled the flex spot about 50% of the time, against 39% for wide receivers, and when running backs were in the flex they outscored the receivers who were. At the same time, running back ADPs fell from Best Ball Mania to Weekly Winners because drafters carried over their receiver-heavy habits. Cheaper acquisition cost plus higher realized flex value is the cleanest structural edge the format offers.

The takeaway is not to force three-back builds every draft. It is that the standard best ball roster construction, something like the 2-5-8-3 build Winks cited, in conventional best ball shorthand two quarterbacks, five running backs, eight receivers and three tight ends, remains a sensible baseline, and the format rewards tilting from it toward big, touchdown-capable running backs rather than a ninth receiver. Your ninth receiver needs to out-spike your top eight to ever matter; a bruising back with a real goal-line role only needs one two-touchdown week. If your baseline construction is rusty, start with our best ball draft strategy guide and layer these adjustments on top.

With the roster shape settled, the last lever is time: which of the contest's 17 weekly slates are you actually drafting for?

Build For One Or Two Weeks, Not Seventeen

You only need to win once. That premise unlocks the most creative part of Winks' approach: pick one week, or at most two or three, and aim your roster at them.

Several angles feed the week choice. Bye-heavy weeks are attractive because much of the field is missing starters while your roster, built on purpose around those byes, is whole. The season of the stream, that pointed at weeks 7 and 13, each of which had five or six teams on bye, and week 7 doubled up the value because it also packed in high-scoring matchups like Lions-Ravens, Chargers-Chiefs, Dolphins-Eagles and 49ers-Vikings. Just know the field has caught on to bye stacking, so some of that edge is offset by ownership overlap. Game environments matter more: target weeks where your core stack gets a high-total matchup, ideally in a dome, with a natural run-back opponent. And player archetypes let you aim at a part of the season: rookies and players returning from suspension or injury tend to peak late in the year, while established veterans in secure roles are safer bets early. A roster full of week-one starters is an early-season build; a rookie-heavy roster is betting on November and December.

One warning from the stream applies to every angle in this section: none of them is a strategy by itself. Drafting nothing but shared bye weeks, or nothing but one game environment, replaces one kind of blindness with another. The week target is a filter you apply after you have taken the best spike-week players available, not a replacement for them.

Here is what all of it looks like when the picks are live.

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A Worked Example: The Stream Draft

In the 2023-season draft Winks and Stokastic's Neil Orfield ran on the stream, every principle above shows up in sequence. From the 1.02 they took Ja'Marr Chase over building the full Bengals stack, reasoning that too many Chase teams also rostered Tee Higgins. Then they drafted Mark Andrews in round 2 and Lamar Jackson in round 3, a skinny Ravens stack, and passed on the popular mid-round Baltimore receivers most Lamar drafters were pairing with him, so the build needed Andrews, not a committee, to eat in the passing game. The one Ravens receiver they did add came many rounds later, well past his ADP, purely as a cheap, unique correlation piece. The Ravens and Bengals met in week 2 that season, which turned the first three picks into a game stack aimed at a single week, with Chase as the bring-back on the opposite side of the same game.

From there, the running back and receiver picks were filtered through the same week-2 lens with healthy veterans in strong matchups, and rookies were mostly faded because the build targeted September, not December. The closing picks were pure uniqueness plays, ending with a backup tight end almost nobody drafts, on the logic that any week he became the tight end you needed would be a week the starter ahead of him was out, an outcome that would knock one of the position's elite scorers out of the field's lineups and make the roster's Andrews bet even stronger. The specific names age out every season; the sequence, ceiling first, skinny stack, one target week, uniqueness at the end, is the part that carries forward, and it is exactly the framework to bring into your own drafts each summer.

Run the ceiling check before you draft. The whole edge in Weekly Winners is knowing which players actually reach spike-week thresholds, and that is a projections problem. The NFL DataHub is the draft-prep surface here, putting ceiling-driven player projections next to the ADP-based averages the field drafts on, and the same discipline we teach for vetting DFS lineups applies to stress-testing a build before you lock it. Once the season starts, Stokastic Prop Tools (PrizePicks + Underdog projections) covers the other side of your Underdog account, the daily pick'em entries, with the same projections-first approach.

This format rewards drafters who do the homework while it is still too new and too data-thin for the field to have caught up. The thresholds, stack data and flex numbers above are the homework. Bring projections built for ceilings, not averages, and you are playing a different game than the 200,000 teams drafting it like regular best ball. Stokastic members get 10% off their first payment with code WEEKLYWIN10.

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