In this week's P.O. Box:

One hilarious side effect of best ball exploding is the overreactions to what happens in Week 1.

Sure, fantasy footballers have been overreacting to small sample sizes since its inception, but there is way more intensity to the overreactions this year. It makes sense when you consider that there is 1) way more people playing, 2) way more money on the line, and, most importantly, 3) way more people jockeying for attention and social capital.

In traditional fantasy football, victory laps are actual “victory” laps. You talk shit to your buddy for beating them in your H2H. But best ball is different beast. No one really cares about how they are doing in any one specific league/pod. Our “Round 1” lasts 14 weeks. That means our victory laps take a much different form because best ballers care about other things…like our portfolio…our takes…our…get ready to throw up…personal brand.

Most of the Week 1 victory laps in the best ball sphere revolve around people touting their individual exposures to players. If you logged onto X last Thursday night after the BAL/KC opener, your feed was littered with Isaiah Likely bros flexing their clairvoyance.

I enjoy these types of posts. The are entertaining and harmless because they have very little to do with actually being a good best ball player or winning tournaments. They are just a fun fact, like something you’d read on the back of a Snapple cap.

Not to mention, for every 21% Isaiah Likely screen grab, there’s a conspicuously absent photo of 28% Deshaun Watson.

Nailing your top exposures will certainly boost your advance rate (and min-cashes), but when you show up to the BBM finals with one team (something you’ll be lucky to do once every 8 years if you are an average drafter), you’ll have the same number of Likely shares as everyone else.

If you don’t believe me, check out the BBM4 champ’s exposures from last year. Yes, the guy with 17% Kenny Pickett and 18% Jerick McKinnon and 16% Malik Davis (I could keep going) won $3M because he drafted the perfect team, not because he had the perfect basket of exposures.

It’s why I have no problem taking Ls on my hysterically low Likely exposure or eating the early shit on fading Saquon Barkley. It’s funny and I know it doesn’t have anything to do with what I actually care about—getting a team, not a player—to the finals.

But the victory laps didn’t stop there this week.

I also witnessed many victory laps dancing on the graves on structural strategies like Elite TE and Zero RB. Structural strategies, which are, ya know, designed to help drafters win tournaments…four months from now.

For those of you not familiar (and I have no clue how you are still reading if that’s the case), most of these best ball tournaments are structured like this:

So Round 1 is 25% of the tournament. And Week 1 is 7% of Round 1. So Week 1 represents…1.75% of the entire tournament. Lol.

Trying to victory lap a structural strategy not working 1.7% of the way into a contest would be like celebrating the under on a game total hitting one minute into the first quarter.

These victory laps reveal the same schism that we see over and over again in the fantasy tout space: people want to be right online wayyy more than they want to win money.

And it’s very easy to be right in Week 1 about something that is not intended to to be right in Week 1.

It’s pretty similar to the dynamic we’ve previously discussed in DFS too:

In a lot of ways, this is the beauty of DFS. There is immediate feedback. People give their takes and those takes are immediately settled hours later once the games are played.

But the months-long duration of a best ball slate is the opposite. And because most people lose anyways, the entertainment and community aspect is what people gravitate to as a way to justify the financial, emotional, and time investment made. Grabbing a quick W on X becomes a way to squeeze out additional “equity” in the experience because there’s nothing else to do until the slate is settled.

I really don’t want to be the victory lap police. I legitimately love seeing the wild exposures (my guy Bolic in the Deposit Kingdom Discord has over 30% Jordan Mason in BBM!), but I find the celebratory posts far more endearing than the ones trying to tear other people down in exchange for a few shots of dopamine from the reply guys.

It’s a long season (and an even longer one if you aren’t playing DFS and spending every waking second staring at your best ball rosters), so get those takes off to stave off the boredom. I get it…I’m simply begging you to victory lap things that don’t make you look like an idiot.

💎 Week 2 hidden gems (5 DFS sleepers & 3 draft angles). We got five Week 2 sleepers (one at each position + a bonus) to scroll down for in your DFS contests on Underdog and DraftKings. Check it out on the Deposit Kingdom channel.

🏆Fantasy Life roundup. In addition to the newsletter, we debuted a new weekly piece where we be hand out DFS “awards” for my favorite plays on DraftKings and Underdog. Check out the Week 2 edition.

🤯 Week 2 DFS Strategy & Top GPP Plays w/ JMToWin. Come for the chalk RB/WR pairing, stay for the stack that made everyone puke.

⏰ Week 2 Battle Royale Strategy & Pick ‘Ems. A comprehensive stroll through the Week 2 Underdog slate, including small-field contest strategy (Deposit Kingdom league) and 12-person drafts (Dawg Bowl).

💪The Swolecast: Week 2 DFS first look. Entertaining and informative!

🚢 James Cook Explosion, Bills Insights & Moon Chasing. A rough first ShipCast, but we did our best.

📈 Week 1 Usage, Buy Lows, & DFS Plays - Stat Chasing. 3+ hours of stat goodness.

🤓 Week 1 Victory Laps & Panic Buttons - ADP Chasing. Spicy Kyle Pitts debates.

☕Time to panic on Elite TE? (Week 1 DFS Recap). Deposit Kingdom smashed in Week 1.

2 shows on tap this weekend, both available for Youtube members.

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