Underdog (UD) released the format for Best Ball Mania IV (BBMIV) gradually over the week preceding the NFL draft. The big shakeup is that the contest has taken on a brand-new identity when compared to the previous three iterations, which is going to be the focus of this course and serve to guide the theoretical discussions held herein. Regardless of your personal feelings on the new format, the bottom line is that the contest is now entirely new and requires a fundamental change in approach (or does it? We’ll see…). While that doesn’t necessarily remove all the theoretics and analytics we, and the rest of the industry, have uncovered to this point surrounding this format, it does require us to reevaluate the process of putting together a Best Ball team.
The reasoning is simple – with the change in payout structure, advancement criteria, and other pertinent rule constructs comes a change in expected value (EV) for each entry we submit. Whether you like the change or not is immaterial. The contest has changed, and so must we. This course will focus on the governing factors in the updated contest structure, which we will then leverage throughout the remainder of the Spring and into the Summer with the bulk of the teaching portions of this package (the podcasts, or, said another way, the virtual one-on-one training sessions).
