⛷️ Zero RB & The WR Avalanche Era

In this week's P.O. Box:

People used to hate our Zero RB teams.

I remember a draft Pat Kerrane and I did three years ago on Ship Chasing with Blair Andrews and Hasan Rahim where we selected only one RB (in the 6th round) through nine rounds.

The comments were apoplectic. People could not wrap their head around taking additional WRs when you still had other starting roster spots to fill.

We continued to draft Zero RB teams on stream while simultaneously tilting large swaths of the fantasy sphere.

“A Zer0 RB team ha$ neV3r won a ToUrNaMeNt” was a popular refrain on Twitter.

You know what happened next…

King Kaapital won the Best Ball Mania III regular season prize for $1,000,000 with a true Zero RB team.

The Go Bills drafting conglomerate won a million dollars in the 2022 FFPC Main Event contest with a true Zero RB team.

The Piss Boys had gone mainstream. They earned their own merch line:

We joked at the end of last season that Kerrane winning Best Ball Mania III with a Double Anchor RB build was the ultimate, red herring gift —despite Zero RB crushing in 2022, RBs would go earlier than ever with people trying to replicate his winning formula, right?

Wishful thinking.

Instead, we witnessed WRs going earlier than ever in all of the first six rounds:

Zero RB bros won big money in 2022 and the culture war. The masses capitulated. And for better or worse, the 2023 drafting landscape was flipped on its head.

It’s a dynamic that I didn’t fully appreciate before announcing my 150 streamed draft challenge.

Not only would I be drafting in this new, extremely WR-heavy meta, but the insatiable thirst for WRs would be further exacerbated in my streamed rooms where the Piss Boys line up in droves to compete in a game of WR one-upmanship.

My draft rooms were a disaster, entire rounds were drenched in yellow:

But if there’s one benefit to streaming literally a hundred+ drafts, it’s that you adapt. You explore new strategies. You take a couple RBs for the first time in your life. You get clever. You find a way to survive a WR Avalanche.

In my newest video on the Deposit Kingdom Youtube channel, I explain how we arrived in the WR Avalanche era and provide three specific tactics you can employ in drafts to not only avoid getting buried by an avalanche, but defeat it with supercharged teams.

And yes, the irony is not lost on me…

📺 BBM4 Drafts: #106 & #107 Best Ball Breakfast, #108 Splash Play, #109 w/ Kerrane, #110 w/ Siegele, #111 Swolecast, #112 BBAD w/ Sanderson

💡 Best Ball Tips. #33: How To Combat The WR Avalanche (bite-sized version)

⛔️ 3 QBs with the same bye week?? What’s the opposite of a best ball tip?

🏫 Why Week 17 is still all that matters. Wrote up a piece for Fantasy Life as part of our Best Ball Summer School series:

🎭️ Drama in Indy. This JT situation is fascinating. Broke it down in the Fantasy Life newsletter. Also, looks like we are finally about to get clarity on the Alvin Kamara suspension.

🎡 The Kendall Valenzuela Randomizer. Kendall drafts a wild best ball team where she calls her mom, does a fake ad read, flys like a Seahawk, and does a few TikTok trends.

🏆️ We set the world record. We teased it last week, and we delivered. An epic, history-making performance by the Deposit Kingdom crew.

⏲️ The World’s Fastest 34-Round Draft, too?! We had to keep the epically fast drafts rolling on Ship Chasing, where we completed a 34-round NFFC draft in 80 minutes. S/o to Kevin Tompkins, who not only was part of the World’s Fastest Slow Draft, but also paced the group in this draft with a blazing sub-2 second pick time average. Thank you for your service, thank you for facilitating my sleep.

☣️ How the DFS site sausage gets made. This week on LOLZ we tune in for the big Run Pure Sports announcement, hypothesize what kind of deal it took to land JBC, and talk through the financial dynamics of sites like ETR hiring specialists to run a niche sports package on their site.

🍹 Best Ball After Dark w/ Jakob Sanderson. Talked with Jacob about music, the bizarre fantasy content ecosystem, and why you still need to draft Jonathan Taylor.

Speaking of Zero RB, we fired up our annual OTC Minisode series on Ship Chasing where we hop in a high stakes ($1800 buy-in) slow draft on FFPC and talk through our decisions at each pick:

We drew the 1.11 and have been funneled to a true Zero RB build that has resulted in some fun discussions and tough decision points.

The video version of the episodes are available for YouTube members, and the audio version is posted on delay to the podcast feed.

No shows until Monday’s Best Ball Breakfast as I’m off to Brooklyn for the Underdog Cardio Club event.

Also, I’ll have a very fun guest announcement for next week’s Randomizer show on Monday so keep an eye out for that.

And while we are it, here is the full Ship Chasing streaming schedule for the next month:

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