The Second Age of Best Ball

Our primary edges are becoming table stakes. What comes next?

Last year I wrote that we were in a New Frontier, with WR ADP skyrocketing up, which almost certainly reflected a more efficient market based on the findings in the Mike Leone’s 2023 Best Ball Manifesto. With another year of early wide receiver teams crushing, the market has become even more WR heavy in early 2024 drafts. In effect, prioritizing early wide receivers probably isn’t an edge anymore, and is now mostly table stakes. Similarly, other edges available to us have shrunk or vanished.

Team stacking was mostly gone as an edge after 2022, with an average of 10.5/12 drafters using team stacking per the Best Ball Manifesto. Average roster construction has also improved, with more drafters than ever applying basic guidelines and heuristics for positional allocations. Even the advantage of correlating week 17 via game stacking, which even proven DFS pros argued against initially, has been reduced, with .

The Second Age of Best Ball has fully arrived, and it’s a tough, cutthroat place. With the loss of some of our easiest and best edges, the question becomes, how then we do retain an upper hand over our competition?

There are a few edges that come to mind.

ADP Value

ADP value represents one of the most obvious edges, as the 2023 manifesto detailed that teams with ADP value (regardless of real-time or closing line value) provided a significant edge over other teams. But the issue with ADP value is that we don’t control it. If a player falls past ADP is largely up to the other eleven drafters in the room, outside of a small subset of stacking partners at the onesie positions (most drafters do not want to take an uncorrelated pocket passing QB anymore).

Player Takes/Ranks

Player takes is undoubtedly an edge (and one we control, for good or bad), with rankings from a group of experts outperforming ADP. But even when we are correct, it’s a fragile edge, as we see from the cases of Breece Hall in 2022 and Devon Achane and Anthony Richardson in 2023. In each of those cases, drafters who hammered Hall, Achane, and Richardson absolutely nailed that player take, and yet ended up at a substantial disadvantage after each of those players got hurt (ask me how I know). Overall, while player takes is an edge we can control, the fragility that comes with it can make for a tough season (or seasons).

Directional Bets

Directional bets are an edge similar to player takes, but which reduce the fragility of an individual player bet. For example, last year, I really liked each of the Dolphins RBs at their respective ADPs. However, the one I liked most was Jeff Wilson Jr., as he got more guaranteed money than Raheem Mostert, had outperformed him down the stretch in 2022, and was the cheapest by ADP. Yet, I recognized that I had low confidence that Wilson was *THE* Dolphins running back to own. So, I made a conscious decision to place a macro bet on the Dolphins backfield. This resulted in overweight exposure to all of the Dolphins backs (Wilson ~30%, Mostert ~18%, Achane ~12%). Given that Wilson got injured and missed most of the season (and didn’t do much when he returned), choosing to the directionally accurate path instead of the specific one reduced my fragility and paid off tremendously, with each Dolphins RB landing on a week 17 finals team for me.

However, while directional bets may lower the fragility in regards to one player, they often still make up a large percentage of your portfolio. As a negative example from last year, I (probably correctly) identified that the elite quarterbacks very likely would not provide as big of an edge over the rest of the position in 2023 as they had in 2022. In 2022, a huge outlier number of QBs had gotten injured, while the elite QBs smashed at generational levels. Well, despite the elite QBs regressing a bit in 2023, a huge number of other quarterbacks got hurt again, allowing the elite quarterbacks to maintain a substantial edge over the rest of the position. With minimal exposure to the elite quarterbacks, I was at a disadvantage once the top-heavy playoff weeks came around. In sum, while I remain a huge proponent of directional bets (and the humble approach to drafting that often comes with them), we should recognize that some fragility with them remains.

What about the playoff weeks?

Luckily for us, Underdog changed the payout structure of Best Ball Mania (and the Puppy), making the week 17 payouts much flatter.

Many people had been calling for this, as the top-heavy structure of past BBMs was suboptimal from a fun, EV, and growth of the best ball space standpoint. Personally, from a fun/EV standpoint, I love it. And strategically, I love it even more, as the flatter structure also opens up a huge leverage opportunity.

Week 17 is no longer all that matters

As someone who plays best ball at a high volume, one of the first thoughts I had upon seeing the flatter payout structure (and the distribution of EV that follows it) was that week 16 would be more important than before. It seemed to me that while week 16 would be more important, week 17 would remain king. But after posing that question to statistics guru Neil Farley, Neil came back with a pretty remarkable takeaway.

Essentially, if you assume we can affect week 16 and week 17 win rate at a similar rate (and I think we should be able to), then Neil’s analysis indicates that week 16 is probably slightly more important than week 17. However, as Pete Overzet notes in the below video (that breaks down the math at an easily understandable level), the larger pool size of week 17 (539) vs week 16 (16) means that correlating for week 17 is probably remains slightly more optimal.

Pete concludes that we should probably correlate for both week 17 and week 16, but that week 17 probably should be our first choice in a vacuum.

In a vacuum, I agree with Pete. But… we don’t draft in a vacuum.

Is Week 17 correlation table stakes?

As we’ve seen with so many of our other edges, once they are widely adopted, the edge is reduced and they start to become table stakes. Luckily, as of 2022, game-stacking week 17 had probably not become table stakes. However, if the BBM format had remained the same this year, it’s almost certain that the percentage of drafters game-stacking in week 17 would have increased again, especially after back-to-back winners relied on week 17 game stacks to power them to first place. Now, with the flatter payout, structure, some sharp drafters will likely shift to stacking both week 16 and 17, or perhaps even shift to only stacking week 16.

This decision between week 16 and week 17 reminds me of a choice we regularly make in DFS.

In DFS, if two players are projected for roughly the same number of points, but one is likely to be 30% owned while the other is projected for 10%, the 10% owned player is (usually) the better play. The hard part in making this decision is determining what the ownership numbers will actually be.

In choosing between week 16, week 17, both, or neither, we face a similar choice. Per Neil’s and Pete’s analysis, the benefit in game-stacking week 16 vs week 17 is close. So, the question becomes, which is likely to be game-stacked more?

Based on the increase in game-stacking rates in week 17 over the last few years, and the aggressive risk tolerance of most people drafting tournament best ball teams, I think it’s highly likely that drafters will game-stack week 17 more. If that’s true, and the ratio of week 17 correlation drafters is more than week 16 correlation drafters, I’d assert that primarily correlating week 16 is optimal.

Will that be the case? Much like DFS ownership projections, we won’t know until lock.

How I’m playing it:

Overall, I think it’s perfectly viable to game-stack week 17, week 16, or both. I doubt you are giving up a massive edge regardless of which approach you take (unless you are still living in the stone first age of best ball and not game-stacking either week 16 or 17). My preference is for week 16, as I think the market will strongly prefer week 17, opening up leverage potential. However, I think there are other playoff levers we can pull that will help us decide which week to game-stack in each individual draft, and that just happens to be central to my next article.

Until then, thanks for reading and happy drafting.