Best Ball Strategy. Underdog Fantasy Weekly Winners Breakdown.

Underdog recently launched a new, mind-bending best ball contest format called Weekly Winners. It’s an entirely different beast that requires new strategic angles to consider. Today, Pete dives into the myriad ways to attack this unique contest…

What if you could enjoy both the fun of best ball drafting with the immediate gratification of weekly DFS payouts?

That’s exactly what Underdog Fantasy accomplished with their latest new best ball format—Weekly Winners.

Unlike Best Ball Mania IV and other tournament offerings where Week 17 is largely all that matters, Weekly Winners pays out $205,000 of the $3,500,000 prize pool each week.

With $20,000 going to first place every week for 17 weeks, drafters will get to sweat cash prizes on a weekly basis, as opposed to only in the fantasy playoffs.

This exciting wrinkle to traditional formats presents us with an entirely new puzzle to solve.

And let me tell you…as you start to peel back the Weekly Winners onion, you quickly realize that there are about a million different ways to attack this…

Ceiling is all that matters

In traditional best ball formats, we are forced to balance resiliency alongside ceiling. You need a team that can outperform 10 other teams in Weeks 1-14, then beat 15 more teams in Week 16, beat 15 more teams in Week 16, and then beat 440 teams in Week 17. This gauntlet of essentially four uncorrelated tournaments presents interesting roster construction challenges.

But in Weekly Winners, we are battling against 260,999 other rosters each and every week. Sure, the top 1001-7315 teams each week will (almost) get their money back ($10), but the real goal is to finish Top 10 and 200x (or better) our buy-in:

To do this, we can throw safety and floor out the window. Who cares if Jameson Williams misses the first six games of the season? Weeks 7-17 are worth just as much as Weeks 1-6.

Draft like you are right…on steroids

One thing we discussed a lot last year in our Best Ball summer school pieces was drafting like you are right. One big mistake new drafters often make is wanting to cover all of their bases and reduce risk:

Well, what if Patrick Mahomes gets hurt? I’ll want to have another good QB in case…

This line of thinking results in not maximizing a roster for upside and instead optimizing for safety. When you take Mahomes early, you must work under the assumption that he is going to be in your starting lineup virtually every week, meaning your second QB will rarely be utilized. That pick should instead be used on another skill position player who can strengthen another portion of your starting lineup.

Jan 7, 2023; Paradise, Nevada, USA; Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (15) runs the ball as Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Clelin Ferrell (99) moves in during the first half at Allegiant Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

In Weekly Winners, this line of thinking is even more paramount. Because we are competing against so many other teams, we need to engineer our teams even more intentionally around our early-round picks.

Nearly any positional start in this contest is viable—3RBs, 3WRs, QB/pass catching stack, etc.—but every pick you make in subsequent rounds should complement how you started your draft.

The elite onesies are king

Over the course of 14 weeks in the regular season vs. 11 other teams, or in a playoff pod competing against 15 other teams, you don’t need to have the perfect team to advance.

But in Weekly Winners, it is very likely that you will need not just one or two, but a handful of the highest scoring players at each position in a given week to win.

Extending that thought, it is very likely that you will need one of the highest scoring QBs and one of the highest scoring TEs to crash the top of the leaderboards.

Because of this, we want to be prioritizing both the Elite QBs and Elite TEs whenever possible:

QB: Jalen Hurts, Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Justin Fields, Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert

TE: Travis Kelce, Mark Andrews, T.J. Hockenson, George Kittle, Kyle Pitts, Darren Waller, and Dallas Goedert

My favorite teams have one QB and one TE from this cohort. When you do land these elite onesies, it is unnecessary to take any more QBs and TEs. In the spirit of drafting like you are right, you are now tasked with building a team that can win when both your QB and TE are the highest (or near the highest) scoring players in the same week.

P.S. The Mahomes/Kelce pairing is nearly impossible to get based on their ADPs, but you can still get Hurts-Goedert and Jackson-Andrews fairly easily. Example of one of my drafts from the 2 hole:

Optimize for a single week?

With Best Ball Mania, Week 17 is truly all that matters, and drafters construct their teams accordingly by stacking up specific games in hopes of reducing the number of things they need to get right.

With Weekly Winners, you can apply that game stacking logic to literally any week.

Did you start your team with the aforementioned Jackson-Andrews stack and later select Treylon Burks? Congrats, you have a premium stack and bring-back for the Week 6 matchup between the Ravens and Titans. Maybe avoid Packers and Steelers in this build because they are both on bye in Week 6.

See what I meant about peeling back the onion??

The most simple way to accomplish this is to keep the NFL schedule pulled up as you draft so you can dial up some game stacks around your most important pieces as the draft progresses.

One other fun strategy that dovetails with this concept is stacking up teams who all have the same bye week. Say you exclusively take players who are on bye in Week 7 or Week 13 (12 teams), you can essentially punt these two weeks while having a full 18 players available for every other week.

Draft players who can truly pop off

Drafting for “upside” is a catchall term that gets tossed around loosely in the fantasy sphere, but it truly is important in this format.

In a season-long format, getting a bankable 10+ points from your RB2 or WR3 can be the difference in advancing to the playoffs and getting bounced.

But in Weekly Winners, we need players who can put up monster weeks.

Underdog’s Hayden Winks published a really good piece on this concept recently. A couple key findings:

The top-7 QBs in current Underdog Fantasy ADP accounted for 69% of the QB spike weeks (30+ fantasy points)
The top-7 TEs in ADP have accounted for 53% of the TE spike weeks (19+ fantasy points)
41% of the RB spike weeks over the last two seasons came from top-11 RBs in current ADP. That goes up to 65% for the top-24 RBs in current ADP
47% of these WR1 spike weeks over the last two years came from the top-16 WRs in current ADP.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that the best players also present the most upside, but we can also extend this filter down the draft board.

Dec 26, 2021; Seattle, Washington, USA; Seattle Seahawks running back Rashaad Penny (20) rushes against the Chicago Bears during the fourth quarter at Lumen Field. Mandatory Credit: Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports

A perfect example of a Weekly Winners poster boy archetype is Rashaad Penny. Oft-injured and hardly reliable, no one ever wants to spend a premium pick on Penny. But his boom/bust profile is exactly what we are looking for in the double-digit rounds of this contest.

In 2022 he had 4 games with less than 10 points and another with 28.7 points.

In 2021, he had 6 games under 8 points and two over 26 points.

One simple thing to do when you are on the clock in Weekly Winners is ask yourself, does this player have a chance at scoring 20+ points? If the answer is no, they probably shouldn’t have a place on your roster.

The weather matters

Our very own Chris Allen has been breaking down the impacts of weather on fantasy scoring, including whether wind matters and outdoor game environments later in the season.

A few things we know from this research:

Vegas totals drop consistently as we get to the colder months compared to earlier in the year

Games with 15+ mph wind speeds occur with increased frequency after Week 5
Taller stadiums provide a more natural barrier against the elements

One smart strategy is simply to avoid potential weather risks as much as possible. Some ways to accomplish this:

Focus on teams who play in a dome or in warm-weather locations year-round
Stack up games in Weeks 1-5 when the weather is still nice across the country
Stack divisions who meet this criteria (the entirety of the NFC South plays in domes and/or warm-weather locations)

It might seem absurd to apply this level of detail to your teams, but weather is a factor, and targeting game environments that are conducive to high-scoring shootouts is an edge that needs to be considered in this format.

Find ways to get unique

Because of how many teams will be competing each week, it is very likely that many similar teams will be jockeying for first place because they share many of the same players.

In the same way we try to get an underutilized differentiator on our DFS lineups to get unique, we can apply similar principles here.

Unlike DFS, though, the majority of the top players will all be rostered equally by the field (8.3%) because they will be selected by one of the twelve managers in every single draft.

But not all players will go selected in most drafts. We should be willing to push outside of our comfort zone in the final rounds of Weekly Winners and intentionally target players who don’t regularly get drafted.

Example: I recently drafted a team built around Josh Allen. Instead of adding Khalil Shakir in the late rounds—a player who gets drafted in nearly 100% of drafts—I took Trent Sherfield instead. I prefer Shakir to Sherfield in a vacuum, but when you consider Sherfield rarely gets drafted, it tilts the scales in his favor for this contest. If Allen goes off, I have a chance to differentiate my teams in a logical way from all of the other “chalky” Allen stacks that utilize Shakir or Deonte Harty.

The thing to remember is that after pick 150 or so, all of the players remaining are thin bets to deliver week-winning scores. Because of that, we should prioritize the ones that are rarely drafted because of the uniqueness boost.

The other place you can focus on unique combinations is at the top of the draft. A lot of players will naturally be paired together because of their ADP, and we can deviate from ADP to build teams with more unique combos than the majority of the field without sacrificing ceiling.

Example: Amon-Ra St. Brown and Nick Chubb have ADPs right around the 1-2 turn and are often paired together. Tony Pollard goes at the 2-3 turn in most drafts. Pollard has a similar (if not higher!) single-game upside as both ARSB and Chubb. Feel free to reach for him at the 1-2 turn knowing most ARSB and Chubb teams won’t be paired with Pollard.

Supercharge builds by matching structure and season windows

In addition to optimizing for a single week, another really fun thing you can do in Weekly Winners is optimize for a specific portion of the season and supercharge that bet with a corresponding structure.

Example: One of the reasons to take RBs early is because of the projectable volume. As the season progresses and chaos kicks in (injuries, depth chart shake-ups, etc.) that volume becomes harder to project.

Jan 21, 2023; Kansas City, Missouri, USA; Jacksonville Jaguars running back Travis Etienne Jr. (1) runs the ball against Kansas City Chiefs cornerback L'Jarius Sneed (38) during the first half in the AFC divisional round game at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports

If you want to build hyperfragile teams (3 early RBs through 5 rounds), it makes sense to optimize that team around the early portion of the season (Weeks 1-6).

One way to do this would be to look at our strength of schedule tool and find combos of early RBs with good early season schedules. A few that stand out.

Christian McCaffrey or Bijan Robinson (Round 1)
Travis Etienne (Round 4)
J.K. Dobbins (Round 5)

On the flip side, we know that Zero RB builds (no RBs through 5 rounds) often get off to slower starts, but get stronger down the stretch as league-winning backs emerge from the double-digit rounds (i.e., Rashaad Penny in 2021, Rhamondre Stevenson in 2022).

Stacking up cheap (often rookie) RBs with favorable schedules weeks 14-17 would be another viable strategy. A few that stand out:

Tyjae Spears (Texans twice Weeks 15-17)
D’Andre Swift and Penny
Bears RBs (Khaliil Herbert, D’Onta Foreman, Roschon Johnson)

Putting it all together

We often joke in fantasy that your lineup “needs to tell a story.”

I’m not sure that has ever been more true than it is with this new Weekly Winners format.

As you can see from above, there are so many different ways to smartly attack the contest.

The key is to make sure your lineup is telling a coherent story for the specific way it is trying to win.

Think about each team you draft having its own theme. Whatever you do in the first few rounds is largely going to determine that theme, and it is then your job to stay on that theme for the rest of the draft.

Once you do that, you can sit back and enjoy the weekly sweat.

You can dip your toes in the new Weekly Winners format on Underdog Fantasy and get a 100% deposit match of up to $100 when you sign up below with promo code LIFE!