Best Ball Plays & Strategy

While many stacks have seen their ADP soar in recent weeks, the premium Eagles pairing is going in the other direction (QB11 and WR36). Fade the noise. There’s no denying Jalen Hurts’ accuracy issues last year, but he flashed the ingredients of a fantasy superstar last year. Devonta Smith is a substantial upgrade to Philadelphia’s barren wide receiver room. He’ll also give Hurts a reliable target he never had last year, and bump the remaining Eagles weapons into more favourable roles.

At QB14 in ADP, Joe Burrow’s injury risk is fully baked in being drafted behind less mobile quarterbacks Tom Brady and Mathew Stafford, who project to throw less often. With no meaningful WR4 or tight end to draw targets from the WRs, Tee Higgins could replicate or improve upon his 20.2-percent (No. 36 among qualified wide receivers) Target Share and parlay this into 120-140 targets. Given the breakout potential of second year WRs, Higgins is the preferred stacking partner in Cincinnati.

True ‘upside’ is most effectively captured by making positive assumptions in ambiguous situations. Tournaments are won on the tails of your range of outcomes, and the easiest way to maximize your tail is to increase your variance. When looking for a league-breaking stack, we should search for stacks with as many factors of uncertainty built into their price as possible. These stacks have the most room to crush their ADP because the range between their ceiling and floor outcomes is widest.

Chase Claypool was by far the most efficient Steelers receiver on a per-route and per-target basis. If he is entrusted with a full-time role in 2021, it is quite conceivable he outhits his WR26 ADP by a wide margin, and drags Ben Roethlisberger to a more efficient 2021 season. If Roethlisberger provides round 10-12 value as your QB2 drafted in round 16, you benefit from your stack crushing ADP.

Michael took advantage of the Cam Akers injury news, jumping all over Darrell Henderson in Round 6 after starting out with an Anchor-RB approach. Pairing Henderson with Saquon Barkley at pick No. 69 could prove to be the pick that puts O’Connor ahead of the field. Henderson is now going off the board almost two rounds earlier at pick 46.3, ahead of Miles Sanders, Travis Etienne, and Mike Davis.

Currently going off the board at pick 116.0 on Underdog at QB14, Joe Burrow was stacked with Tee Higgins and Joe Mixon at pick No. 75, off the board at QB7. Feeling a surge at QB, Chris Buonagura reached for the Cincinnati stack. One can only wonder if he would have made it back in Round 8.

Like with Julio Jones, the only “logical” debate against Emmanuel Sanders is age. Sanders totaled a 2.23 (No. 15 among qualified wide receivers) Yards Per Route Run clip last season, one of the most predictive stats for fantasy football purposes. He’s not washed. He now joins the Bills, who targeted receivers at a league-leading 74.9-percent clip. For context, the offense targeted backs at the fourth-lowest rate and TEs at the third-lowest.

A bet on Sterling Shepard this season is a bet on a jump in play from Daniel Jones. The Giants offense has 134 (No. 15) vacated targets, or 26.8-percent. With the arrival of alpha receiver Kenny Golladay, the hope is the newly-signed receiver raises the lid of the offense. With Golden Tate gone, Shephard should play more in the slot.

Season-long correlation benefits gamers in both best ball and traditional leagues. Whether you’re setting your lineup or not is entirely irrelevant to wanting your top players’ probabilities of outperforming their expectations to be correlated. You want your team to score the most points in both formats, and by drafting a set of players whose individual outcomes are dependent on as few variables as possible, you are increasing your probability that all of them hit.  

We posit that the strength of stacking in best ball formats stem almost entirely from season-long correlation rather than week-to-week correlation. On the other hand, by stacking in traditional leagues, you benefit from both season-long correlation and week-to-week correlation. By implication, we expect stacking in traditional leagues to have a larger increase in your win probability than in best ball leagues. 

The clearest difference between best ball and DFS tournaments is the length of the play period. This affects how you analyze variance. In DFS, maximize volatility within a single game to increase your ceiling. Between two players with similar weekly medians you will always opt for a Mecole Hardman over a Hunter Renfrow. This has been accepted as a perfect translation to best ball and I don’t understand why.

Have you ever heard the term “play whoever you want” in DFS? It’s often misinterpreted. Nobody recommends filling out lineups with $1,000 salary left over in the milli-maker because you wanted to ‘get your guys;’ yet this attitude has been adopted by many in best ball. ‘Play whoever you want’ actually means ‘any set of correlated pieces can be viable in a given slate as part of a constructed lineup.’

Football is a grueling sport to predict, and this is where stacking enters the fold. Stacking allows us to limit how many different variables we have to get correct each week. In a sport where so many variables are outside our control, it’s nice to only need to root for one team’s offense to succeed to ensure that two or more players enter our best ball lineup with spike weeks.

Stacking is not the only way to succeed in fantasy football, you can of course just pick the right players. However, player-centric analysis is difficult, comes with large error bars, and is extremely time-consuming. The beauty of stacking is that you don’t even need to do much player research. You can just focus on stacking players from teams you expect to pass a lot.

New Rams RB1 Darrell Henderson will skyrocket up draft boards until likely settling in as an RB2 in the middle rounds barring a major addition by Los Angeles. With over 60,000 entries filled, 5,000 teams in Best Ball Mania II roster Henderson. Your odds of drafting him after today’s news and building a better team than any of those are low. There are only two outcomes for a team drafting Henderson today:

Whether Los Angeles brings in another competent running back, and whether his own passing down role expands, will define Darrell Henderson’s 2021 ceiling. The fact that he’s never reached a 60.0-percent Snap Share tells us it’s unlikely he possesses a ceiling in the range of Akers.’ Nonetheless, this is a capable player on a top offense thrust into immense opportunity.

Looking back to 2020, both running back and wide receiver proved to return subpar value in the deep rounds. Running backs drafted after the 12th round finished as an RB1 only 4.95-percent of the time. Wide receivers drafted in the same range were only a WR1 3.39-percent of the time. The fall off is drastic compared to quarterback (17.09-percent) and tight end (12.66-percent). This suggests that QB and TE are actually deep and that WR/RB are the shallow positions in drafts.

On Underdog Fantasy, there are about 15 tight ends currently being drafted in the top 12 rounds. It is reasonable to expect about half of them to bust in 2021. A conservative projection would suggest that there are at least five available after Round 12 that can score at least 100 points. With the overall poor quality of the tight end position, it is reasonable to push off chasing TE depth until the later rounds in Best Ball.

Tevin Coleman (Underdog ADP: 176.7) is being drafted of Ty Johnson (ADP: 213.2) in best ball. Coleman, who averaged 1.9 yards per carry last year, is being billed as a possible ‘starter,’ but has almost zero chance to emerge as a league-winner at this stage of his career. If you draft under the assumption of a winning lineup, how will Coleman’s eight-point ‘usable week’ help your team? Take a flier on the higher-ceiling Johnson instead.

You are in Round 10 of your best ball draft and see Joe Burrow available well past ADP, so you snatch him despite having no Bengals players. Burrow has a top five season, helping vault you to the Best Ball Mania II final. However, if Burrow performs well, your score increases, but so do all the other entries rostering Burrow that week. The odds he hits his ceiling in a given week without a top performance from at least one of Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, or Tyler Boyd are low.