The P.O. Box
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💸 A $3M Reality Check

💸 A $3M Reality Check

Reset expectations...

Peter Overzet
December 22, 2023

In this week's P.O. Box:

It’s hard to turn $25 into $3M
Stream roundup: Playoff sweats are here
On my radar: I look like an elf?
On tap: Block Party, Off & On The Clock, DFS After Dark, Week 16 Cram

The harsh realities of playing a tournament with 677,376 entries finally set in this week.

If you spend anytime on X or in fantasy football Discords, it’s been impossible to escape the frustrations of drafters who watched large swaths of their best ball portfolio get wiped out in Week 15.

And you know what, I get it…to an extent. These teams become our babies. We draft them, we sweat them, we love them, we envision their path to the $3M, and we get emotional when one of our most drafted players scores a TD:

ive got no power, ive got no internet, but the vibes are high around the jsn prayer circle this am. a candle flickers, a week 15 td. i feel warmth
— pete joeverzet (@peteroverzet)
2:02 PM • Dec 19, 2023

So it naturally sucks when we lose them. But a lot of the discourse this week reads way more like sour grapes than anything else.

Some of the conversations are productive—interesting tweaks to the Best Ball Mania format have been suggested by many—but a lot of it reflects a gross misunderstanding of the contest and the tradeoffs that come with being able to turn $25 into $3,000,000.

For those not familiar, Best Ball Mania is Underdog’s flagship contest and it’s ballooned in size every year to keep pace with an ever-growing player pool, as well as marketing demands.

The tournament has a very unique structure where the top regular season teams are randomized and put into individual pods for the playoff rounds. After each week of the playoffs (Week 15 and Week 16), the top teams in each pod advance to a new pod until the finals in Week 17.

This year’s version of the tournament with well over a half million entries features an even tougher gauntlet to the finals than in previous years. I spelled it out in a piece for Fantasy Life earlier this year:

Think about it this way. If you were a drafter with average skill and you max entered the contest with 150 entries, this would be your expectation for advancing teams:

2/12 teams advance in Round 1, Weeks 1-14
- Your Expectation: 2/12 * 150 = 25 teams to Round 2
1/16 teams advance in Round 2, Week 15
- Your Expectation: 1/16 * 25 = 1.56 teams to Round 3
1/16 teams advance in Round 3, Week 16
- Your Expectation: 1/16 *1.56 =.097 teams to Round 4

That means the average 150 max drafter will have a nearly 10% chance of getting one team to the 441-person finals.

I spent a lot of time on shows this summer harping on these realities and trying to help drafters set realistic expectations for a lottery-sized contest, while also preaching contest selection if ROI was a drafter’s only goal.

Despite this (and despite the rules and structure of the contest being very clear), there still seem to be lots of drafters who feel like the tournament isn’t properly rewarding their drafting skills.

We talk about this dynamic on LOLz all the time. Some of the best giga-brain, sim Lord DFS players in the world have never won the Millymaker. They are better players than 99.9% of the field, and yet they are still a big dog to ever win it in their lifetime. The tournament is simply too big and the sample sizes are too small for their edge to ever be realized in that specific contest.

Imagine if every ETR subscriber started complaining to Levitan and Leone about not winning the DK Milly because they consume their content and use their projections. They’d laugh and tell you to play better contests with less entries and smoother payout structures.

And yet, this is essentially what’s unfolding with BBM4 complainers.

There are lots of reasons why these reactions are occurring and I think Matt aka TheFFChild hit on a few key ones in his thread here:

It feels like the best ball pod discussion has bubbled up much more than usual. My guess is A LOT of people sprinkled in entires last year. Got hooked. And really blasted off this year. They consumed limitless content and thought all that content gave them a 3rd eye advantage…
— Matt (@Theffchild)
4:06 PM • Dec 20, 2023

This year we had the perfect confluence of new best ball players (who are also new to large-field tournaments) and a recognizable champ who made the idea of winning the contest feel far more achievable than it actually is.

Hey, if I just draft a bunch 150 teams like Kerrane, dial up some stacks with Week 17 correlation, and run pure, I’ll get first too!

Chasing Kerrane was a tongue-in-cheek bit for me, but I now worry that it legitimately distorted reality for many players who feel entitled to top finishes simply because they drafted +EV teams.

Unfortunately, having an edge doesn’t mean you always realize that edge and increasing your odds doesn’t always mean you win...especially in a massive, large-field contest.

I’ve been on both sides of it in BBM and I’ll continue to be on both sides of it going forward. Last year, I only had one team out 150 make the semis. It sucked, but you move on. This year, I’m sun-running five to Week 16 (more on those below). This variance is a feature, not a bug. I spent more time refreshing the ‘dog app on Monday night than I have in a long time entirely because of the pod dynamics.

When you start complaining about your misfortune in a contest with the same number of entries as residents in the city of Boston, you really show your ass. When does the complaining stop? When you advance a team to the Finals? Ok, how about when you finish 401st out of 677,376 teams and earn a cool $1,000 for assembling the greatest team of your life? How about when you finish in 101st and your prize still doesn’t cover your $3,750 in entry fees from maxing the contest? Or are we complaining all the way until we’ve secured a Top 5 finish and a 6-figure prize?

If you find 16 team pods upsetting because you didn’t advance out of them, wait until you hear how big the final rounds are…
— Tom Strachan (@NFL_TStrack)
8:40 PM • Dec 20, 2023

There are so many other nuances to this discussion that we could unpack (like how your specific drafting style will impact how you fare in the regular season vs. the playoff pods and how there are truckloads of different contests offerings out there beyond BBM that you can choose to play instead), but we can table those for the offseason.

Fwiw, I’ll find the arguments for tweaking the format far more compelling when they are less emotionally-driven and distanced from what specific injustice occurred in your pod (aka the guy in your home league who demands you remove defenses because he just lost his matchup on a pick six).

It’s pretty obvious that many of the current complainers who want to retroactively bend the BBM rules in a way that would benefit them will also be first in line to re-bend the rules in their favor again next year.

For now, let’s just try to enjoy the randomized chaos of BBM…after all, that is what we signed up for when we entered the contest.

Week 15 treated us pretty well in the fantasy streets. Here is what advanced to Week 16…

🐶 UNDERDOG:

Best Ball Mania: 5/33 teams advanced
Big Board: 8/44 teams advanced
High stakes contests ($100+): 2/7 advanced (incl. the Bulldog team I wrote up for Fantasy Life)

If you want to check out any of the BBM4 teams and their corresponding streams, I put them all in a thread here:

i streamed all 150 of my best ball mania drafts on @UnderdogFantasy this summer
145 are dead, but 5 still remain
here they are with links to the individual streams:
— pete joeverzet (@peteroverzet)
9:28 PM • Dec 19, 2023

And here our my exposures for each of my BBM pods, thanks to EZ’s free companion sheet tool:

Not a bad start for that first squad thanks to the Derek Carr double stack hitting last night…

🚢 FFPC & NFFC W/ SHIP CHASING:

I’ll leave it to Steph’s breakdown, which covers all of our high stakes teams.

Also, congrats to Steph on her new gig.

💎Hidden Gems: Week 16 Underdog Picks. It’s a tricky slate, but we always can unearth some plays to scroll down for in Battle Royale. I got two Zero RB guys and a veteran WR to target…

⭕️ The Harsh Realities of Large-Field Contests. Bric and I expanded on the stuff I discussed in the intro of this post, and also dove into some of Bric’s recent bad beats in big DFS contests.

🏆️ Fantasy Life roundup. Tilted about Arthur Smith for the millionth time, previewed the Ravens outlook over the next few weeks, and marveled at the rollercoaster year for Jonathan Taylor.

💪 Swolecast: Draftkings Week 16 DFS picks. How the release of Teair Tart flipped the Week 16 slate on its head.

🚢 A Shocking TD, Missing On Kyren & New Orleans Tips. Cootterdoodle from Fantasy Life joins us to sweat the Saints/Rams games, give Gretch tips on his forthcoming trip to New Orleans, make an impulse purchase after a certain TD, and breakdown her ongoing battle with the New York Times over an important word. We also hit our core pick 'em entry, which unlocked a $300 giveaway and catch up with Steph about our surging high stakes teams.

☕️ We’re Running Hot In BBM4. Week 15 was rough for us in the DFS and Battle Royale streets, so we instead focus on our BBM4 portfolio sweats heading into MNF. We also reviewed our DFS lineups in the Spy and Deposit Kingdom league, plus Battle Royale contests on Underdog.

📈 Late-Breaking Fantasy Stars, Playoff Prep & 2024 ADP. With Sackreligious having a happy holiday in Hawaii, Drico is joined by fellow Ship Chaser Ben Gretch to breakdown another week of trends and usage heading into Week 16. They take a glimpse of where they see ADP settling in 2024 best ball drafts.