QB Stacking in Best Ball Mania II
If you’ve played bestball or DFS before, you’re probably familiar with the concept of stacking. While we shouldn’t be going overboard with stacking in bestball drafts to the point of sacrificing value, at least some degree of it should be used when trying to construct a team that can take down a large field tournament. Stacking, or rostering multiple players from the same offense, allows you to realize more upside when a given event occurs, and reduces the number of things you need to “get right” when assembling your roster.
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The most common form of stacking is pairing a QB with one or more skill position players, since any catch for the receiver can award you yardage and touchdown points for both players. With the launch of Underdog’s massive Best Ball Mania II tournament which features 155,000 entries and $3.5 million in prizes (including $1,000,001 to first place), I’ve been looking at different types of QB stacking strategies in order to better plan out drafts as they progress.
Rather than comparing QBs by ADP ranges or their playing style, the way I find most useful to break down QB and stack targets is to look at the team’s stacking options as a whole and how they fit together on draft boards. Does the QB typically get drafted before or after their main stacking options? Do they have one high end WR going early? Or are there several ADP ranges where you can complete a reasonable stack? To me, these are the things you need to be focusing on, starting in the first couple rounds. For example, if your gameplan is simply “I’m going to target one of the top five QBs as my QB1”, it doesn’t help you much if by the time you get to round 6, Kyler Murray is the only one left available, you realize that you missed out on a good stack by taking AJ Brown over DeAndre Hopkins in the 2ndround.
Below, I’ve broken down most of the league’s starting QBs into five different groups based on how their stacks tend to play out in BBMII drafts, along with some notes on how to approach each group and examples to help show how you can factor these into your decision making.
Note: For the purpose of these groupings, I do not consider RBs in the stacking options with their team’s QB. That’s definitely not to say they aren’t good options, or that nobody in this tournament is making QB-RB stacks. But from how these drafts tend to play out, drafters will almost always include a WR in their team stacks, and if not, a higher volume TE. Part of the game theory which we’ll explore in more detail is monitoring your competitors and which stacks they may be targeting as well, so I tend to put less weight into what RBs others have on their teams when it comes to this. You should definitely still consider throwing an RB into your stacks when it makes sense, but pure pass catchers should be the primary drivers of stacking since they correlate much more strongly with their QB. For example, if Jonathan Taylor and Calvin Ridley are my first two picks, I’d highly prefer targeting Matt Ryan over Carson Wentz, unless I also land a Colts WR at a later point.
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Group A
QB’s with one primary/early stack option drafted before them
The primary WRs of these QBs are ones to make note of in the early rounds as you plan out the rest of your draft, as each one you select gives you a great QB stacking option while disincentivizing other drafters from selecting them. The latter point is crucial, as you need to be trying to squeeze value out of as many picks as you can in a tournament this size. You lose ground on the field by reaching on a QB to complete a stack, as there will be literally tens of thousands of other teams in the tournament with the same stack, and most will have gotten them at a lower cost than you.
Example: If you go with Stefon Diggs and DeAndre Hopkins at the 1/2 turn, you can try and let Josh Allen and Kyler Murray slip past their ADP and hopefully be able to select one of them a round later.
Group B
QBs with multiple early stacking options drafted before them
For the most part, these are QBs that you will ideally want to at least double stack, as their upside scenarios likely involve high passing volume and efficiency. The top pass catchers for these QBs are still good targets in the early rounds, but in a different way than in Group A. They give you the optionality to stack with their QB if they fall to you at a value, or if you miss out or pass on the QB, it creates leverage against the other teams with those stacks in a potential scenario where that pass catcher outproduces their ADP expectations to larger degree than their teammates.
Example: You draft Ceedee Lamb but miss out on Amari Cooper and Dak Prescott. Cooper ends up missing the majority of the season with an injury, leading to a stronger season overall for Lamb. All of the Cooper teams suffer from the injury, especially all of the Prescott stacks that included Cooper.
To apply this more generally to draft strategy, don’t worry if you’re targeting a specific team stack and the QB doesn’t fall to you. Instead, consider the ways that the players you have from that team can pay off for you more so than the opponent that has the QB stack, and look to the rest of your roster and/or the players still available to find alternative stacks.
Group C
QBs with multiple tiers of stacking options drafted before them
These QBs differ from Group A and B in that they have stacking options being drafted before them in different ranges of the draft. Some of them do have a primary pass catcher with a high ADP like in Group A, but the QBs are going so late that it opens up a window where someone may have one of their secondary weapons and also be targeting the QB stack. Just like with Group B, this group may be harder to stack since you may have other drafters vying for the same team stack, but it can also give your roster some uniqueness on the tournament field since there will be several different stacking variations for each of these teams. Additionally, the more stacking options you’re able to select before their QB, the less likely others will be to draft them, giving you the chance to let the QB slide and take them at a better value.
When I’m trying to stack with these QBs, I always want to include players with lower ADPs, especially if there’s a wide gap between them and the highest drafted option on their team. Most people understandably want to make stacks with good players, but if any of these QBs/offenses are going to exceed expectations, the secondary options are more likely to return excess value than the players who were already being drafted highly with the built-in expectation of a highly productive season.
Example: With the Chicago Bears, we’ve seen that the offense can disappoint overall while Allen Robinson is still able to deliver strong production and win rates. If Justin Fields ends up performing like a top 10 passer this season, it’s not going to just be because of Robinson. In that scenario, someone like Darnell Mooney is also going to play a big role in Fields’s ceiling outcome, so it’s naturally optimal to take stabs at these kinds of combinations.
Group D
QBs with top stacking options drafted after them
Jackson and Hurts are early QBs to target if you aren’t able to get a stack with one of the other premium QBs in the first six rounds, as in a tournament of this size, you’re not going to win without somehow getting high-end production at the QB position. These two QBs project to absorb a large amount of their team’s offensive production via the running game, so single stacking with either of them is definitely viable, while a triple stack would start to become suboptimal.
Example: Jackson typically gets drafted in the same range as Mark Andrews with Andrews being the later selection, so if you go with Jackson in the late 5th round, you’ll have a decent chance of running it back with Andrews in the early 6th. If you miss out on Andrews, you still have good opportunities to stack later onin Marquise Brown and Rashod Bateman. The same goes for Hurts, where he has Devonta Smith and Dallas Goedert going within a round after him, but also has Jalen Reagor as a nice contrarian fallback option.
Group E
QBs with no early stack options
This group of QBs are all absent a pass catcher with a premium ADP. If you’re fortunate enough to pull off a solid primary stack with an elite QB, the pass catchers on these teams are ones to monitor as you progress through the middle and late rounds to find an opportunity for a backdoor secondary stack. Their piecesare so cheap overall that you should probably be at least double stacking with any of them. If you’re going to bet on them having a big year as a passer, they can easily have two pass catchers outperform their later ADP.
Example: If Mac Jones ends up starting Week 1 and we see the offensive scheme shift closer to what it was pre-Cam Newton, players like Hunter Henry, James White and Jakobi Meyers could all see a very healthy volume of targets that are disproportionate to their prices. If you can get Mac Jones plus White and Meyers all in rounds 14 and later, that frees you up to scoop up value throughout the middle of the draft rather than forcing a pricier stack.
