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Best Ball

Best Ball Rankings for Underdog Fantasy, DraftKings, and Drafters

Alex Baker

Published

by Alex Baker

Best Ball has a unique strategy to it, as you can’t rely on the replacement value from waivers for byes and injuries, and end-of-the-bench guys can contribute to your score with a big week while you wouldn’t know to start them in season-long. As a result, the rankings reflect increased value for players who contribute steady production that are less exciting picks. Nonetheless, onto our Best Ball rankings projections for DraftKings, UnderDog, Yahoo and so much more.

Our recommendation is to draft 2-3 QBs, 7-8 WRs, 4-5 RBs and 2-3 TEs, and to draft more players from the positions you’ve allocated less draft capital to. Our projected points added for each player reflect this basic roster construction. The upside column reflects the chance that each player could benefit or be hurt by personnel changes throughout the season (injuries to other players, QB changes, etc.).

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The edge in drafting is getting players when they drop below their ranking. Our RDP is our recommended draft position for each player, so it can pay off to let these players drop before grabbing them.

Legend:

PtsAdded: Avg projected points contributed to team projection over replacement level player according to our simulations.

Upside: Positive negative points to account for the possibility of changing team dynamics including injuries and qb changes working out in a player’s favor or to their detriment.

Update: Underdog  Best Ball Rankings can now be directly downloaded as a csv and uploaded on Underdog’s rankings tab.

Underdog Best Ball Rankings

Last Projections Update: 8 months ago

Underdog BBM III

How to win Underdogs $2 Million payout!

Best Ball Mania three (BBMIII) is Underdog’s flagship product offering $2 Million to first and even $1M to second! If you could only win one best ball tournament this year this would be the one! BBMIII requires you to draft 1 QB, 2 RB, 3WR, 1 TE, 1 Flex and 10 bench spots. Additionally, BBMIII gives 0.5 points per reception. Overall, this tournament favors wide receivers slightly more than most tournaments, but our general positional drafting strategy is sufficient.

Where BBMIII gets a bit more unique is the size of the contest. There are 451k entrants where each league consists of 12 contestants. The highest scoring team in each group of 12 advances to the second round after week 14. Week 15 is split into groups of 10 with the highest score moving on and week 16 is split into groups of 16 with the highest score moving on. The finals take place in week 17 with approximately 470 people making it to the finals. With such a large group of contestants making it to the finals and first place being with $2 million while 470th is only worth $1,000 there is a lot of incentive on pushing your team to the limit in terms of upside for the final week.

We recommend going heavy on your week 17 strategy with everything from considering uniqueness, stacking your pass catchers with your quarterback, stacking your pass catchers with their opponents QB, watching weather, paying a premium for teams/games that might shoot out, grabbing rookies whose roles may change by the end of the season, etc. Yes, you must get to week 17 so you can’t completely overpay for the shot to win it all but if you haven’t positioned your team in a way for your week 17 roster to be a site winner you haven’t maximized your EV!

DraftKings Milly

Best Ball Rankings: How to win DraftKings $1 Million payout

Draftkings “NFL Best Ball $3.5M Millionaire” ie Draftkings Milly is Draftkings flagship product offering $1 Million to first as well as a ticket to Draftkings Tournament of Champions semifinal where you have a chance to win another Million. Finishing in the top 4 will net you a six figure pay day. DK Milly requires you to start 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, and 1 Flex each week and gives you 12 non-scoring bench spots to go along the way. Scoring is pretty standard 1 point per reception scoring. With the PPR scoring as well as the 3 wide receivers that you can start it makes wide receivers even more valuable than normal. PPR wide receivers are a bit more consistent than .5 PPR wide receivers so you don’t necessarily have to go crazy drafting more than our general recommendation but moving them up your draft board is well warranted.

Where the Milly maker gets a bit more unique is the size of the contest. There are 837k entrants at a low price point of $5/entry. The highest scoring team in each group of 12 advances to the second round after week 14. Week 15 and 16 is split into groups of 12 with the highest score moving on each week respectively. Week 17 will consist of the 969 winners from week 16 all playing for a shot at the million-dollar first prize. With such a large group of contestants making it to the finals and first place being with $1 million while 501st-969th is only worth $250 there is a lot of incentive on pushing your team to the limit in terms of upside for the final week.

Due to the low entry fee and size of the contest this contest will be one of the softest in the industry. As such we should not worry much about the first round and assume we have a good chance of making through that round. Further, we recommend going heavy on your week 17 strategy with everything from considering uniqueness, stacking your pass catchers with your quarterback, stacking your pass catchers with their opponents QB, watching weather, paying a premium for teams/games that might shoot out, grabbing rookies whose roles may change by the end of the season, etc. Yes, you must get to week 17 so you can’t completely overpay for the shot to win it all but if you haven’t positioned your team in a way for your week 17 roster to be a site winner you haven’t maximized your EV!