If you’ve already been eliminated from your fantasy football playoffs but still want to get that fantasy football feeling, you might want to check out playoff best ball. This unique format allows you to build a team to compete through every round of the NFL playoffs. Read on for an introduction to the format and a discussion of two key strategy elements: roster construction and positional allocation.
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Introduction to Playoff Best Ball
Playoff best ball tournaments involve drafting one 10-player roster for the entire NFL playoffs. Each round of the playoffs is scored individually; once a team is eliminated from the NFL playoffs, players on those teams can’t score any points.
On Underdog their flagship playoff best ball tournament is The Gauntlet. The Gauntlet has 90,000 entries and has three rounds, one for each round of the NFL playoffs, before the final round in the Super Bowl, which will have 500 teams competing for the top prizes.
In the Wild Card and Divisional rounds, you’ll be competing with five other teams (so six teams total per pod), with the highest scoring team advancing to the next round. In the Conference Championship round, the pod shrinks to five teams, with once again only the highest scoring team advancing to the 500-seat final for the $500,000 top prize.
Playoff best ball is a unique contest in that it places equal and potentially more importance on selecting the right teams to stack as it does selecting the right players. Because all money is in the final round, it’s extremely important to ensure you can field a full starting lineup in the last round, which means having a full starting lineup of players competing in the Super Bowl.
We also need to account for the Wild Card bye weeks, as players on bye can’t help your team advance. However, the number one seeds are the most likely to reach the Super Bowl, so this is a balancing act. Using sound roster construction and proper positional allocation will allow us to survive the Wild Card round while still being able to field a strong team in the Super Bowl round.
Playoff Best Ball Roster Construction
Simply put, roster construction is important to ensure we don’t draft dead teams in the Wild Card round while also enabling us to field a full starting lineup of five in the Super Bowl round. As mentioned, first seeds are important because they have the highest likelihood of making the Super Bowl … but if we only draft players on the one seeds, then we’ll have no players in the Wild Card round and all our teams will be eliminated.
The same can also apply to simply stacking too many players from the same time. Having all the players from an elite team (even secondary and tertiary options) might be great if they make the Super Bowl. But that fantasy roster might be weaker than a roster that includes a few fantasy studs from lesser NFL teams, lowering your chances of advancing. Blending the proper mix of stacking one seeds or other top-tier teams while still being able to have enough players to advance out of the first pod is the needle we have to thread to win this contest.
Quarterback and Running Back
Underdog requires that we start one quarterback and at least one running back. This is a tournament where it’s extremely beneficial to stack our quarterback with our running back. If our quarterback and running back are on the same team, as long as that team continues to advance in the playoffs, we have two of our five starting spots locked up.
This also gives us positional certainty if we take the quarterback and running back from a one seed; now we know that we’ll need to fill those positions for the Wild Card round. If we then do a quarterback/running back stack with another team from the opposite conference, we naturally begin to set up our first Super Bowl round game stack. In general, stacking around one team from each conference is a good way to set yourself up for a full lineup in the key final round.
Pass Catchers and Flex
Along with a QB and an RB, each team is required to start two pass catchers, which can be a wide receiver or a tight end, and a flex. This is where positional allocation and roster construction come into play. We want at least one pass catcher to pair with our primary quarterback/running back combination.
We can also add a second pass catcher from our primary stack. This limits the number of things we have to get right, but reduces our number of Super Bowl matchups. Drafting just one pass catcher from our primary stack opens up more Super Bowl matchups, but requires us to get more things right (every additional team you draft from is an additional chance at a guaranteed zero in the later rounds).
The Wild Card round is still important to consider here: If our primary stack is from a one seed, we will want to make sure we’re covering the pass-catching slots during their bye.
Roster Construction Final Thoughts
The key thing to remember is that the two most important rounds for roster construction are the Wild Card round and the Super Bowl. The prizes are all in the Super Bowl, so we want to be capable of fielding a full five-man starting lineup there. Drafting multiple players from more than two or three teams makes this near-impossible.
And with the number one seeds on bye in the Wild Card round, we need to ensure we have a full starting lineup to cover those byes before we get reinforcements. If our primary stack is a one-seed, we need to make one of our secondary stacks from the opposite conference and cover the Wild Card round.
In general, we want a quarterback, a running back and at least one pass catcher from our primary stack. Our remaining two or three secondary stacks should be potential Super Bowl opponents for our primary stack.
The strongest roster builds include three or four players from our primary stack, then two players from three potential Super Bowl opponents, or four players from our primary stack and one player from six other potential Super Bowl opponents.
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David Leonard is a fantasy football contributor for PlayerProfiler. Find him on X at @RealDelcoDave
