Please navigate to the Drafters Top 250 in the Best Ball Scroll for the link to this year’s Drafters Tracking Document and follow the directions below to utilize it.
Instructions:
1. From a desktop PC, Log in to Drafters and Navigate to “Player Exposures” on the drop down menu
2. Select “Email Pick Data CSV” in the top right corner
3. Navigate to your emails and download the data
4. Open the CSV/Excel from Drafters.
5. On a second tab/monitor/screen also open the Blank “Drafters Tracking” Spreadsheet
6. On the “pick-data” download from Drafters, delete column E (pick number), as well as columns H (team) through M (rank).
7. In the pick-data spreadsheet, select cells A1 through F1 and click the “Filter” functionality in Excel.
8. In the pick data sheet, navigate to column D, and select only Round 1
9. Copy and paste the data in columns A thru C on the “pick-data” spreadsheet to the blank drafters tracking spreadsheet, beginning in cell A2 (to avoid pasting over the column headers in row 1).
10. Then copy/paste the data now populated in column E into column D (Round 1) on the Drafters Tracking sheet.
11. Navigate back to the pick-data sheet, and update column D to now be sorted by Round 2.
12. Follow the same step as above and paste this data into Column E (Round 2)
13. Complete this same step for sorting by round 3 and pasting the data in Column F (Round 3) on the Drafters tracking spreadsheet.
14. Now, is when the process gets more manual. Back on the Pick-Data CSV, choose ‘Select All’ in the sorting of Column D. This should now show a lot of data.
15. We will now sort Column F (Position) to only sort by QB.
16. Since everyone drafts a QB in different rounds each draft, you will have to manually add the corresponding highest drafted QB for each draft to the Drafters Tracking Spreadsheet.
17. Repeat steps 15 & 16, sorted for TE and manually populate the spreadsheet.
18. Doing this for 200 rosters took me about an hour, so while it is manual/painful, it’s doable.
The payoff:
In your ensuing drafts, you can easily now sort by the player you select in the first round, and it will populate the first 3 picks, QB and TE of your different previously drafted combos. This will help you from continuing to draft very similar teams over and over.
Finally, now that the data is populated into your spreadsheet, you want to manually continued to update as you continue to draft more teams
Lastly – Hope to see you and your OWS avatar at the top of a Drafters leaderboard come December!
Low-risk, high-reward. In any walk of life, that should be the goal. Best Ball is no different.
I believe that drafting in Best Ball is more of an “Art” than a “Science.” ADP and rankings are things that are often discussed, but rarely do people dig into “why” they are what they are. Rankings (by most sites and touts) are derived from projections and usually those projections focus on “median” outcomes, meaning what is the middle range of how things play out. Situations of uncertainty are hard to project, however, and the result is often that multiple players have a median outcome that is underwhelming, but it is highly unlikely that they will all end up in that median range. Essentially, the “Bear” cases for these players can’t ALL be true (barring complete team/organizational meltdown or massive injury situations). This creates an opportunity for us, especially in situations where we can have relative certainty in the offensive approach and/or level of quarterback play. These are the situations we must seek out and exploit, especially earlier in draft season when less information is available and before the market adjusts to that information. Below are five situations that are standing out to me early in the draft season as spots where I believe most of the players are valued at or near their low-end outcomes (assuming health) and all of the players have huge upside from their current ADPs.
STORYBOARD #1 (DRAFTERS)
STORYBOARD # 2 (DRAFTERS)
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PUBLISHED ON :: 5/21/25
The definition of a “False Flag” is: “an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on another party.” While the term is most often used in discussing political and/or world events, the concept is one that seems relevant to Best Ball.
In Best Ball, a “False Flag” to me is when the rankings/ADP and/or consensus expectations of a player/situation are making grand leaps or assumptions that I feel are based on a false, or at the very least very fragile, premise. We see this often in spots of uncertainty, especially when young, “exciting” players are involved. As the fantasy football landscape gets flooded with more and more content providers, the groupthink tends to really go into overdrive on many of these spots and the community often jumps to conclusions that change a player from a great, high-upside sleeper to an overpriced bet with mostly downside from where they are being selected. In this article, we will dive into five such situations and the dynamics around them that make them spots that we can exploit.
Cam Skattebo is a fourth-round rookie RB out of Arizona State. He was a versatile player and used in a lot of ways in college and was a lot of fun to watch. However, he is a player who is unimpressive from an athleticism standpoint and is on a team with a poor offensive outlook/projection. We are roughly a month removed from the NFL Draft and Skattebo’s ADP has steadily crept up over that time period, currently sitting around the 8th/9th round turn on all sites. Meanwhile, his teammate Tyrone Tracy Jr. – who is far more explosive and athletic, has a receiving background, and played very well in 2024 – continues to see his ADP drop. In most drafts right now, Tracy is selected 1-to-2 rounds AFTER Skattebo. Investing in backfields on bad offenses is already a tough sell, but what is the upside for Skattebo? How often do we see average athletes at the RB position post strong finishes on the season on a below-average offense? The answer is “very rarely.” Skattebo is currently being selected around RB30 on all sites, and that is roughly where we should expect him to finish *if everything goes right for him*.
Meanwhile, Tracy’s explosive skill set sticks out like a sore thumb in the Giants’ offensive skill-position personnel. After Malik Nabers, this is a roster filled with average NFL athletes. Tracy’s explosiveness fits the mold of a player who can help this offense be better than expected and he also has the skill set to produce at a top-15 or top-20 level over the course of the season if he is the primary RB. Let’s not forget that Tracy is also a player who played wide receiver on run-heavy offenses through 2022, playing running back for only one season in college. He is a great athlete who is versatile and still has a ton of room for improvement as he learns the position. I wasn’t high on Tracy early in the offseason, but as his ADP falls and he is often available in the ninth or even 10th round, he is a player I find myself feeling like I get great value on a round or two after Skattebo is off the board.
Porting DFS Strategies to Best Ball
As we’ve discussed recently on numerous pods, best ball is more a game of managing variance than it is knowing football. Within the commonly misunderstood term “variance” is hidden the weightier idea of information. This information guides our decision-making processes throughout the best ball draft season, within each confined “draft window,” and during individual drafts. It is our goal as seasoned best ball drafters to best match the available information to the timing of our drafts, yielding a fluid draft strategy that changes as we inch closer to Thursday Night Football in Week 1. Which brings us to the question at hand – how do we manipulate variance to best leverage common tendencies from the field in each distinct draft window? Since we’re talking about playoff-style contests like those present on Underdog and DraftKings, let’s first look at some common ways to manipulate variance in DFS as we know the bulk of the expected value (EV) in playoff-style contests comes from those all-too-meaningful playoff weeks.
