The Scroll BB+ 2023

Welcome to ‘Best Ball Plus’ 2023!

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HILOW’S BEST BALL COURSE(!)*

*free course for all BB+ members!

Rankings by: Hilow

Last Updated: 5/10/23

Rankings by: Mike Johnson

Last Updated: 6/2/23

Written by :: Mike Johnson

Something that is often discussed in weekly DFS theory and strategy is the “story” your lineup tells. Basically the idea is to think about what the recap of the day would have to be for each particular lineup to have been the “right” combination of players that gets you to a first place finish on that slate. I like to do something similar when drafting Best Ball rosters, thinking about the “story” that the roster is telling about how the NFL season will play out with each pick that is made. 

At every selection in a draft, there are a variety of reasonable options available and whatever choice you make also implies some things about the other players you passed on. Similar to price point or positional pivots on a regular DFS slate, we want to be aware of the scenario where your picks are “right”. While everyone understands team stacks and most of the industry is focusing on late season correlations and balancing exposures, very few are actively trying to leverage the decisions made for a particular roster with their later round picks by using these indirect correlations. Below is a summary of a draft I did on the day the Draftkings NFL Best Ball $10M Millionaire contest opened.

Picking from 12th slot

Picks 1.12 & 2.01: AJ Brown and Ceedee Lamb — I loved getting two high end WR’s at the turn here as these two are both in my second tier of wide receivers. Saquon Barkley and Jonathan Taylor were available here as well, but I decided to take the two WRs because I love doubling up (taking two players from the same position) on picks at the turn and there are some solid RB’s that I am high on in the Rounds 6-12 range that I expect to have their ADP’s rise as the season draws nearer.

Picks 3.12 & 4.01: Justin Fields and DK Metcalf — Fields is the 6th QB off the board at this point, so I love getting his upside after so many of my counterparts took their first QB. 

Metcalf is a polarizing player, but I specifically like rostering him on a team like this where there are two other stud WRs who should contribute good weeks consistently, helping the team stay strong even through Metcalf’s inevitable down weeks. I also went this direction because Andrews and Hockenson were both off the board, so I’ll be using my “Blind Squirrel” strategy at the tight end position by taking four of them late. I expect a couple of solid RB’s to be on the board at the 5/6 turn. 

Written by :: Mike Johnson

Something that is often discussed in weekly DFS theory and strategy is the “story” your lineup tells. Basically the idea is to think about what the recap of the day would have to be for each particular lineup to have been the “right” combination of players that gets you to a first place finish on that slate. I like to do something similar when drafting Best Ball rosters, thinking about the “story” that the roster is telling about how the NFL season will play out with each pick that is made. 

At every selection in a draft, there are a variety of reasonable options available and whatever choice you make also implies some things about the other players you passed on. Similar to price point or positional pivots on a regular DFS slate, we want to be aware of the scenario where your picks are “right”. While everyone understands team stacks and most of the industry is focusing on late season correlations and balancing exposures, very few are actively trying to leverage the decisions made for a particular roster with their later round picks by using these indirect correlations. Below is a summary of a draft I did on the day the Draftkings NFL Best Ball $10M Millionaire contest opened.

Picking from 5th slot

Round 1, 1.05: Cooper Kupp, WR, LAR – I was on the fence between Kupp, Tyreek, Bijan, or Ekeler. Ultimately decided that 1) I wanted to go WR here because based on how the rankings look, I like the RBs I could take at 2.08 more than the WR’s that will likely be available there (I usually don’t ever want to go first 2 picks w/o a WR in this full PPR format) and 2) I can stack Stafford with Kupp for a pick 5 rounds later than I can stack Tua with Tyreek.

Round 2, 2.08: Tony Pollard, RB, DAL – I am glad I made the WR pick in the first round, as Pollard is a tier above all the other remaining RB’s on the board here. Side note, the Cowboys play the Rams at some point this year. As Hilow noted in his first Underdog Wednesday theory pod, we don’t know the schedules yet, but we can take some educated guesses. I could potentially have some correlation at some point during the playoffs with Pollard/Kupp.

Written By :: Alex Pendergrass

Last year, I compared and contrasted the 2021 finalists from DraftKings’s Play Action tournament to those from Underdog’s The Puppy 2. In doing so, I tried to impart some basic lessons on how to play the 2022 best ball contests on the less popular DraftKings platform, differently than one ought to on Underdog. The main takeaways:

• Draft more balanced rosters than you might on Underdog, taking advantage of the two extra roster spots on DraftKings to take more swings at the QB & TE positions
• Draft with DraftKings’s scoring bonuses and full PPR in mind

This article will serve as a follow-up of sorts, although this time I’ll be looking at the 2022 flagship tournaments from the respective sites: Underdog’s Best Ball Mania III and DraftKings’s $3.5MM (aka The Milly Maker). Best ball data from DraftKings is not publicly available, but luckily yours truly qualified for the finals so I had access to it in my contest history (I finished 125th, if you’re curious).

First, a quick reminder of the tournament structures of the two tournaments. DK’s Milly Maker had a field size of 837k and $5 per entry (150 max), with a $3.5mm prize pool ($1mm to 1st). Unlike BBMIII, the Milly Maker’s playoff structure remained the same each round. If you qualified, you were randomly sorted into a new 12 team group in which you had to place 1st that week to advance further until you advanced to the 969 entry final.

UD’s BBMIII had a field size of 451k and $25 per entry (150 max), with a $10mm prize pool ($2mm to 1st in the playoffs, $1mm to the regular season points leader). If you qualified for the playoffs, you were sorted into a 10 team group for Week 15. If you won that group, Week 16 you were in a new 16 team group that you also had to win to advance to the 470 entry final.

Now onto an examination of the roster constructions for the finalists of each tournament. 

The most common lineup construction among the 470 UD BBMIII finalists:

Written By :: Mike Johnson

Closing line value (CLV) is a term used in the gambling world to describe when someone places a wager on an event with a specific spread or line and that number subsequently shifts in the direction of the side the person chose. For instance, a bettor who places a wager on a football team at a spread of +8 has gained two points of CLV if the game closes with that team having a line of only +6. For Best Ball purposes, CLV relates to where someone selects a player and the average draft position (ADP) of that player when the contest closes. There has been a lot of research done across the industry that shows the dramatic impact CLV has on the expected advancement rate and expected value from rosters in Best Ball tournaments. With this in mind, I will be periodically providing you with this article where I discuss the players at different points in the draft whom I expect to provide the most CLV at that specific moment in time.

Rounds 1-2

Tony Pollard, RB, DAL: Pollard is being drafted in the middle to late second round right now, but realistically could end with an ADP around the 1st/2nd round turn by September. Pollard is incredibly efficient and explosive, and the Cowboys have lost over 1,000 yards and 12 touchdowns from their backfield from last season.  Right now, you can usually pair Pollard with some of the top guys on the board (Jefferson, Chase, CMC) – something you likely won’t be able to do in a month or two.

Rounds 3-5

Written By :: Alex Pendergrass

Welcome to this year’s first installment of this series of articles designed to help inform your contest selection. Like last season, I’ve been maintaining a table of every tournament offered across the best ball landscape since the NFL draft.

Here it is (as of May 7, 2023):

With this first installment, I’m also going to note some of the changes or trends for some of the mainstay contests compared to last season.

THE STATE OF INDUSTRY

It’s really too early to monitor overlay right now, so I’m abandoning that aspect of this article for this first installment to take a moment to talk about best ball’s growth.

At one point in late September last season, my contest table had 52 contests in it, including one pre-draft contest with a $50k prize pool and five in-season contests (like Underdog’s Resurrection) with $725k in payouts between them. All told, these 52 contests paid out just over $27 million dollars.

This season, my table has 13 contests on it that launched post NFL draft. The combined prize pool? OVER $34 millions dollars.

That’s simply astonishing.

RAKE

We should all be conscious of the cost the contest providers charge us. Underdog, DraftKings, Drafters and the rest need to churn a profit to keep providing us with these fun contests, but we should pay attention to it. And for those who may not feel the desire to chase down a high profile contest, or those with a more limited bankroll, tracking the rake will help you find better value for your entries.

Inflation has hit the best ball industry too. Last season, the two Drafters tournaments were costing users below 10% in rake. This season they’re slightly above 10%, with the Million II contest seeing a full percentage point increase (9.1% to 10.11%). Still, Drafters remains the cheapest of the big three platforms to play on.

Over on Underdog, BBMIV has a very slight increase to its rake (.07%). Likewise for some of the less popular platforms.

Mixed credit is due to DraftKings, however. Their flagship contest has more than doubled in prize pool and flattened its payout structure (more on that later), but the rake on the Milly Maker went from 15.85% last season to 14.95% this year. Plus, should you max enter, you’re effectively refunded 10% of your entry fees via a promotion. That said, the $555 entry fee contest (called The Playmaker last season) 2.5x its prize pool, quadrupled the top prize to $1mm (now allocating 38% to 1st when last season it was 25%), and raised its rake by 1.26%.

In terms of rake, the best bang for your buck remains at FFPC. They’re charging a little more than last season, but if you can deal with tight-end premium scoring (and super flex for their cheaper contest offering) and you don’t have lofty aspirations of becoming a millionaire come Week 17, no other platform comes close…at least until Underdog drops their essentially rake-free Pomeranian contests.

STRUCTURE

Look, we’re all dreaming of taking down a major tournament. We enter each draft with the mindset that this is the roster that’ll crown me as the winner of Best Ball Mania IV. But we also know that just qualifying for the Week 17 finals is against the odds, and once we’re there we are helpless against variance.

So having a flatter payout structure is often preferred so that the sting of making it to the end but coming up short can be lessened.

DraftKings made a concerted effort to flatten their Milly Maker tournament this season. As noted before, the prize pool ballooned and yet none of the gain went to first place. Instead, should you come in 10th, you’re walking away with a cool $100k this year when 10th place last year only made $20k. That $100k is of course exactly one tenth of what first place nets you.

On Underdog, meanwhile, 10th place gets $30k compared to first place who will leave as a millionaire three times over. In other words, they’re getting just one percent of the champion’s winnings. Ouch. Of course, Underdog is instead paying out a full third of the prize pool to the top 1.5% of regular season scorers. So hopefully they’re making some there (although no guarantee by any means).

The flattest payouts belong to NFFC, which is all fine and good so long as you like drafting D/ST and kickers. Oh, and you don’t mind the rake.

Do you want Superflex? Defenses and kickers? Small field tournaments?

The best ball landscape is exploding with options for any preference. I’m certain we’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards!