🧪 5 Exciting, New Best Ball Findings

In this week's P.O. Box:

We are living in the golden age of Best Ball. The drafting action started earlier than ever this year, which led me to streaming all 150 of my Best Ball Mania IV drafts as I attempt to Chase Kerrane.

The explosion of Best Ball has resulted in many smart people coming out of the woodwork to build impressive tools and to try to solve this budding game.

It’s why I was very excited to partner with Ben and Nick from Fantasy Data Pros to host the inaugural Best Ball Data Bowl and spotlight more of the great work bubbling up around the best ball space.

We’ve been showcasing some of the BBDB (why does that sound so dirty as an acronym?) submissions between drafts on Best Ball Breakfast, but we finally narrowed the 20+ submissions down to 5 impressive finalists.

Check it out…

⛷️ Should you capitulate to the WR Avalanche??

This one hits close to home. I gave an overview of the WR Avalanche Era last week and shared my “bro science” taeks on how to combat them, but Dan’s submission actually quantifies these dynamics in current Underdog Draft rooms.

One wild finding from his research: “BBM4’s current ADP through 10 rounds would be the sixth heaviest WR room in all of BBM3.”

Read the full submission & follow Dan on Twitter

🦄 Is it okay to reach for unique player combos??

I loved the relevance of this submission. A lot of players in the early rounds of drafts become correlated specifically because of their ADP and no other reason, which begs the question whether we should reach ahead of ADP to secure unique combos. It’s something Erik Beimfohr and I had success doing on our BBM2 team that finished 8th where we reached for Davante Adams at 1.2 to secure unique combos with our 2/3 turn players.

Aidan doesn’t force a conclusion based on a small sample size, but he does nudge drafters to prioritize uniqueness more at the end of drafts than at the beginning.

Read the full submission & follow Aidan on Twitter

📚️ How to stack optimally

I thought Chris had one of the submissions with the most clarity and directionally actionable takeaways:

• It rarely makes sense to stack more than 5 players from the same team

• The more players you stack from the same team, the more important ADP value becomes

• Completing stacks with a QB raises your expected advance rate

• Large ADP value on a stack is more beneficial for the regular season than the playoffs

Read the full submission & follow Chris on Twitter

🛠️ Fixing Advance Rate

This was arguably the most original and inventive submission of the bunch. We rely on advance rate data a ton (how many teams you progress from the regular season to the finals) to determine the success of all kinds of things—roster constructions, when to draft, player selections, etc.—so it’s very important we are using it correctly.

This new way to calculate advance rates removes a lot of noise from the existing data (like bad players having positive advance rates solely because sharper drafters were targeting them while still building good teams otherwise) and gives us a cleaner view of player impact on a given roster.

Read the full submission & check out Sackreligious on SpikeWeek

⚰️ Is Value-Based Drafting Dead?

Nick essentially reinvents the concept of “Value-Based Drafting” in his impressive submission and explains why starting lineup requirements dictate that we can’t simply take the biggest value at each pick. It seems like a simple takeaway on the surface, but his work reveals lots of inefficiencies to how drafters approach value and filling out a starting lineup (Spoiler: Beware of the Elite QBs this year).

Read the full submission & follow Nick on Twitter

If you’d like to see them explain their findings, they all hopped on a show yesterday to share:

And if you’d like to learn the skills to tackle similar fantasy projects, you can get 25% off the Fantasy Data Pros python course for fantasy football with promo code Pete:

LouDog—who didn’t know how to code previously—took the course over the past few months and turned what he learned into a very cool BBDB submission looking at whether bye weeks matter:

Looking forward to see what everyone comes up with next year. Maybe a study on why streaming all your drafts isn’t optimal…

📺 BBM4 Drafts: #113 & #114 Best Ball Breakfast, #115 Splash Play, #116 w/ Kerrane, #117 w/ Siegele, #118 Swolecast

🎡 The Scott Hanson Randomizer. RedZone's Scott Hanson joins for a hilarious draft where he delivers play-by-play with a witch, cuts a nihilist Arby's ad read, gives Pete hosting coaching, dances the Ickey Shuffle, and refuses to take a bathroom break:

🏫 How to build a million dollar best ball portfolio. Explained three cool ways you can leverage Fantasy Life’s free Best Ball Hub to manage your portfolio down the drafting home stretch:

💡 Best Ball Tips. #34: Beware of Dumb Steam (sorry Calvin Ridley stans)

🚀 3 Rookie TEs dominating camp. I’m starting to get excited about these guys (yes, even Kincaid a little).

🚢 Chasing $1,000,000 in the FFPC Main Event. We kicked off our managed league action with a surprise alpha stack from the 1.03 slot in an FFPC Main Event Draft ($2k buy-in) with the Stat Chasing crew, DricoOut and Sackreligious. We stay true to the brand with a Zero RB-ish build, argue about Damien Harris, and load up on a ton of rookies

🔥 Weekly Winner strategy (& insane taeks from Jack). The Club returns to recap the Underdog Cardio Club event, discuss Jack's new podcast with Marlon Humphrey, and rip a Weekly Winners draft on Underdog Fantasy. Hot taeks abound.

The Underdog Cardio Club event in Brooklyn last week was a big success:

We’ll have some video out soon. Excited to launch my new career as an agro best ball spin instructor…

No Best Ball After Dark this weekend. It’s my 10 year wedding anniversary so I’m logging off and celebrating. See ya Monday.

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