🧬 The Evolution Of The Best Ball Bro

In this week's P.O. Box:

Over the years, I’ve done a handful of “bro” parody videos (DFS Bros, Top Shot Bros, NFT Bros), but the “Best Ball Bros” series is always my favorite one to make.

I made the first edition back in June 2021 and it’s honestly incredible to see how quickly both best ball itself—and by extension, the best ball bro—has evolved over the years into an entirely different animal…

The 2021 Best Ball Guy was Chasing Herzig in Best Ball Mania II, only knew Liam Murphy as my chess coach, cared deeply about optimal roster constructions, hated handcuffing, grappled with the pitfalls of streaming while drafting, and used promo code Pete to get free BBM2 entries.

Then things really escalated. The 2022 Best Ball Guy was Chasing Liam in Best Ball Mania III, became uber-focused on Week 17 correlation, tilted Influencer 1.01s, battled with bye week bros, “barbelled” their drafts to maximize EV, worried about everything, maxed a tidal wave of various dog breed-named Underdog contests, fell in love with Underdog Cardio Club, drafted teams on their honeymoon, and crowned David Kitchen as the premiere Best Ball Thought Leader.

Which brings us to the 2023 Best Ball Bro—a highly evolved species who views Chasing Kerrane as a lifestyle, manages a portfolio, seeks out closing line value, predicts weather patterns nine months out, utilizes the ill-advised Davis Mattek Star Method™️, bleeds the slow draft clock for an information edge, scrutinizes a poker player’s best ball sims, puts their marriage on the line while drafting hundreds of teams, and prefers specific player archetypes in Weekly Winners to Best Ball Mania IV while still fully admitting that “we just don’t know” and are likely to lose no matter what we do.

Oh, and has sex on camera. That too.

Anyways…

We hit 15k subs on my YouTube channel on Tuesday evening—a goal I set out to hit this summer when I decided to stream all 150 of my streamed drafts. I rarely set concrete, metric-based goals, so this felt very satisfying to hit (even if I had to incentivize commenters to hack the algo with a relentless wave of comments all summer).

To celebrate, I’ll be making “Best Ball After Dark” available to everyone this afternoon and we’ll do the drawing at the end of the show.

Rob Coakley (Spike Week, WSOP sun runner, singer of Shantys) will be my guest and we will be drafting a Bulldog team ($500 entry) together. Show kicks off at 2pm ET:

📺 BBM4 Drafts: #125 Best Ball After Dark w/ Erik Beimfohr, #126 & #127 Best Ball Breakfast, #128 Splash Play, #129 w/ Kerrane, #130 w/ Siegele, #131 Swolecast

🎡 The Mike Leone Randomizer. Leone makes a controversial second round selection, apologies to Evan Silva, does the lawn mower dance, checks his Christmas lights, fires Drew Dinkmeyer, and gets freaky in the spreadsheets:

🚑️ 3 Dicey WR Injuries (& How To React). The preseason has been pretty rough for injuries so far. Here’s how I’m handling McLaurin, JSN, and Chark.

🕵️ 4 BIG Clues To Backfield Mysteries. Preseason Week 2 brought more clarity to some backfields.

🚲️ Underdog Cardio Club Live Event Vlog. Check out some highlights from the UCC live event in Brooklyn where I led a spin class, drafted an awful team, and interviewed a few of the attendees from the post-game bar.

🚢 Chasing $1,000,000 in the FFPC Main Even with Crakrok. It's the show you've all been waiting for. We joined forces with the infamous Crakrok to draft from the 1.03 slot in an FFPC Main Event Draft and ended up pissing yellow, timing out on a crucial pick, punting QB, and, of course, cranking purple all while being regaled with tales from Crakrok's investigative beat.

🚢 A high stakes NFFC draft for $250,000. We also drafted a wild team in the NFFC Primetime contest with our Discord friends, the Buckeye Boomers. We went RB heavy early after some heated debates, but then secured a bunch of high upside WRs and TEs in the mid-rounds to stick the landing.

🧠🤖 Niche DFS Sports & Next Gen Sims. We welcomed Sean Newsham and Alex Hardin from ETR to discuss their new College Football DFS product and the niche sports life. Later, Justin Freeman from RTS joined to talk Sim wars and what Run The Sims is doing to keep up.

🔥 How to attack Weekly Winner & what’s up with Friend Tech? A new crypto social media site dropped and Andy helped us make sense of it before we hop in a Weekly Winners draft on Underdog Fantasy.

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