Yards Per Fantasy University: Best Ball 101
If you’ve played fantasy football before then you know drafting is one of the most fun parts of the entire process. You also know that fantasy football requires maintenance of your team throughout the season through waivers, trades, etc., which needs discipline and attention for the whole season.
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What if I told you there’s a format where you can have the fun of the draft and then do nothing except watch for the rest of the season? That’s best ball!
What is best ball?
Firstly, best ball is built around the same principles as any other format. You have a starting roster that has to be filled with players from certain positions (e.g. one Quarterback, two Running Backs, three Wide Receivers, one Tight End, two Flex spots), and whatever scoring rules are set up for that particular league (exactly as any other league – remember to always check your league rules and scoring settings).
There are two key differences to other leagues though.
- There is no waiver wire, no trading, no changes to your roster. Once you’ve drafted your players, that’s it, you don’t touch your team again
- The highest scoring players in your squad will automatically be placed in your lineup every week, within the confines of the roster construction (i.e. if you have one Quarterback spot then it won’t put a second Quarterback in there even if they score more than other players)
Highest Scoring Players
This is the most fundamental part of best ball. Once the week is over, your lineup will automatically be populated with the highest scoring players in each of your roster spots. You don’t have to decide who to start and sit, you get the best scores from your roster no matter what. When filling out your roster in the draft, the key to focus on is being able to get consistent weekly scores at each position (you want to avoid ever getting 0’s at a position in any week), while mixing in players with high weekly upside that can put your team over the top. Best ball leagues are typically won purely based on which team had the most points across the entire season, so finding the right balance of consistency and upside, along with avoiding roster construction mistakes, is the recipe for best ball success.
Building a Roster
By now it might already be occurring to you that you need a roster that gives you depth to cover injuries and bye-weeks but also potential down-weeks. You can’t just draft a starting lineup and worry about covering those gaps later, you need to plan for them now. This means some kind of depth at every position including tight end and quarterback.
However, remember what your starting lineup looks like. If you only have one Quarterback spot and you select one of the elite Quarterbacks, then drafting four backup Quarterbacks is going to be a complete waste of roster spots that could be used on other players with upside.
In formats where you start one Quarterback and one Tight End, you should only ever be drafting 2 or 3 of each position, depending on the relative strength of the players you’ve drafted. If you draft Patrick Mahomes as your QB1, you will need to draft a backup to account for Mahomes’ bye week and potential down weeks, but a third Quarterback is unlikely to provide any benefit to your team.
The number of Running Backs and Wide Receivers to draft can vary quite a bit depending on your overall draft strategy and starting lineup requirements. A traditional “balanced” approach usually consists of 5-6 Running Backs and 6-7 Wide Receivers. However, alternate strategies like hyperfragility might have as little as 3-4 Running Backs, and as many as 9-10 Wide Receivers. In leagues that include Defense and Kickers, it’s typically best to draft 3 of each.
Strategies
There are a number of different strategies that you can use when constructing your best ball roster. Whilst there are different approaches and views on them, it’s important to remember that you shouldn’t lock yourself in to a strategy if the draft board falls differently and value presents itself.
It’s also important to understand the league you’re competing in. If it’s a big tournament then you’re going to want to shoot for the stars, draft the upside and ‘boom’ players and assume that your best players won’t get injured. If you’re in a smaller league then you can afford to be more balanced.
Stacking
One of the most common phrases you’ll hear when it comes to best ball is stacking. The concept is fairly straightforward and involves drafting multiple players from the same team, most commonly a Quarterback and Wide Receivers. Stacking is a much bigger consideration in larger tournaments as opposed to standard leagues where you may only need to beat 11 other teams.
While you shouldn’t be going overboard with stacking to the point where you’re choosing worse players because of it, this allows you to capitalize on an offense that accumulates a lot of yards and touchdowns. For example, if you’ve drafted DK Metcalf early in the draft and he goes on to have an extremely productive season (e.g. WR1 overall), it’s almost certain that his Quarterback (Russell Wilson) also had a very strong season. In that case, you can boost the upside of your team by selecting Wilson later, which also reduces the number of things you need to “get right” in trying to build a super team capable of winning a big tournament.
Stacking can also be successful when combining members of both the passing and running game (e.g. Quarterback and Running Back) if the offence is high-scoring enough to sustain both. For example, if you stacked Ryan Tannehill and Derrick Henry in 2020, on a weekly basis the two players stole fantasy production from each other on a weekly basis, but from a season-long perspective they were both very valuable fantasy assets, and teams that stacked them together had exceptionally high win rates in best ball leagues.
Zero-RB
Zero-RB, or Zero Running Back, is a common strategy that involves focussing on other positions in the first few rounds of the draft and then drafting lower tier running backs later on.
The theory is that running backs are far more fragile and have a high bust rate compared to the other positions. Instead, you load up on wide receivers early with at least one quarterback or tight end in the first five rounds, then find running backs with upside for high scoring weeks without paying high draft capital. The ultimate goal is that by the end of the season, we have returned just as much RB value as our competition. The difference is, we also have stud wide receivers and tight ends because we drafted top-tier guys early.
In best ball, the viability of this strategy is bolstered by not having to choose which upside running back to start in any given week. If you have enough of the right types, it increases your chances of one of them hitting value every week. However, this benefit is also offset by the fact that you don’t have the benefit of in-season waivers to acquire running backs after the draft. This means that you need to identify who these strong Zero RB targets before the season starts.
We’re looking for running backs with standalone value (are not traditional handcuffs), come from ambiguous backfields, are pass-catchers, have touchdown upside, are athletic, and play in good offenses.
See the Zero Running Back course for more details on zero RB strategy.
Hyperfragile
This draft strategy takes the opposite stance of Zero RB, where you embrace the fragility of the running back position and select a handful of them in the early rounds of your draft, and generally avoiding the position afterwards. With a hyperfragile approach to the running back position, you essentially draft the rest of your team under the assumption that all of your early running backs stay healthy and don’t bust, allowing you to spend more draft picks on other positions, particularly wide receiver where you won’t have as many high-end players as your opponents. When executed correctly (i.e. if you don’t continue to draft several running backs later who likely won’t contribute anything to your team), this is another strategy that has had above-average best ball win rates.
You can now enter those best ball leagues with confidence on how to approach them and which way to turn.
And of course, you can always ask the Yards Per Fantasy team for help and advice any time with our Ask The Expert feature.
Professor: Follow @cody_steyaert
