Intro to Best Ball

Welcome to the blog. This blog will be about a lot of things. Probably a lot of sports and things related to sports. Maybe some travel stuff. Okay, probably some travel stuff too. Whatever I find interesting at the time. At the moment, that thing is best ball fantasy football.

What is best ball?

Okay, so what exactly is best ball? It’s a format of fantasy football that allows you to only do the most fun part of fantasy football, drafting. It is a format that allows you do is draft and each week of the season, your best possible starting lineup is selected for you. No sweating which second string RB may fall into the end zone this week. No constantly scanning X for injury updates or other player news (although with best ball you might be doing some of that in the preseason). No fielding ridiculous trade requests from that person in your league who tries to sell you on how their Kyle Monangai is more valuable than your Jaylen Waddle. You just draft and that’s it.

Why play best ball?

I covered that a little bit already, but to me the best part of fantasy football is the draft. You can hand craft your team to your liking. The other thing I enjoy is the portfolio management of it. If you just play in a couple standard leagues, you’re only able to draft a handful of the players that you like. But with best ball, you’ll be able to get everybody across your portfolio and weigh the percentage of your teams that have each player (called “exposure”) based on your thoughts on the players. For example, I’m high on Ladd McConkey this year and he is my highest exposure. If Ladd plays well this year, then that is a big boost to my portfolio and chances of advancing to future rounds.

How does it all work?

Best ball generally works in a tournament format. The tournaments can have different structures, but generally the drafts have 12 teams, which form your “league” for the first 14 weeks of the NFL season (because byes run the first 14 weeks). You need to finish in the top X teams out of 12 to advance to the next round of the tournament, where X is based on the specific tournament structure. The flagship contests on Underdog and DraftKings require your team to finish in the top 2 of 12 to advance to the next round. Then in weeks 15 and 16, you need to finish the top X again, depending on tournament structure. Week 17 is the money week, where the bulk of the prizes are awarded.

How much does it cost?

Tournaments all have different entry fees, ranging from $1 up to $1,000+. I mostly stick to under $5 plus some flagship contests in the $25 range, but there’s a little something for everybody. I see it as a fun way to spend 40 minutes or so and have a stake in the NFL season, which makes games more entertaining. At least that’s my justification for what is most likely a money losing proposition. Just being honest, you’ll probably not make a profit. But you could! That’s why we keep coming back. The allure of a $2 million grand prize. Somebody has to win it, right? That could be one of us! You can’t win if you don’t play.

Are you convinced?

Have you become a best ball convert? If not, that is totally fine. We’ll have some general fantasy football content coming up and being added to the website. At the moment, there is a Best Ball Mania exploration page where you can look up users and how they performed in each round of the tournament. I’ll be adding more in the coming days and weeks. Hopefully you’ll stick around to see what is to come.