Welcome to (almost) August, fantasy footballers! We’re going to cover every angle of the best ball landscape on Underdog, so I hope you’re ready to lock in and win with the SportsEthos crowd.

I’ve spent the past two-ish months researching and drafting around 100 teams to get an understanding of where players are going, where we need to snag our positional studs, and where we can wait and grab great value late. I want to impart that wisdom on you and so much more. What we’ll cover:

• General strategy/tips (contest selection, roster construction, etc.)
• Stacking (benefits and limitations)
• Handcuffs
• Late Round Strategy
• Top stacks for 2024 **PREMIUM ONLY**
• Schedule analysis for 2024 **PREMIUM ONLY**
• Round-by-round player targets **PREMIUM ONLY**
• Top Handcuffs for 2024 **PREMIUM ONLY**
• 16 Top Builds with Multiple Stacks **PREMIUM ONLY**
• Exciting news? More to come…

General Strategy

First, you need to decide what you’re willing to invest in this. Realize that in most contests, the top two teams of a 12-team league will advance to the next round. That’s a 16.67% chance to get any kind of return on your investment, so playing it safe isn’t a winning strategy here.

The most popular contest is sure to be the “Best Ball Mania” which requires a $25 entry for a shot at a $1.5 million prize. We’ll look at advance rates after the first round for that specific contest. After the first round, your entry’s outlook gets even more bleak as you have to finish first of a 13-person group (7.7%). In round three, you have to wind up first in a 16-person group (6.25%). If you get lucky enough to make it that far, you’ve won yourself a 1-in-539, or 0.185%, chance to win that $1.5 million! Well, you also “win” $3,750. But still.

This gives each entry a 0.08% chance to reach that final group and a roughly 0.00015% chance to win over a million dollars. If you were to max your earnings, reaching the final group would win you your money back ($3,750) But hey, it’s better than the lottery (roughly 1-in-300 million or 0.0000003%). And these numbers are all assuming we can’t increase our odds, or “create an edge” as we like to call it.

So how do we create an edge? We come in prepared by knowing what contests we’re going to attack, what players we want to draft, and why.

However, it’s important to note the above and understand you have a VERY LOW chance to even recoup your money. This isn’t the “smartest bet.” Not by a longshot. The ultimate prize pays our 400:1, which in betting would translate to +40000 odds. Sounds sexy, but translating that into implied odds means that placing 150 bets would have a 0.25% chance to win that 400:1 windfall, when in fact 150 entries would have just a 0.0225% chance at winning the grand prize. And you would have only a 12% chance to win back your money. It’s a bad bet, no matter how you slice it.

But it is fun and it can certainly lead to windfall if things break right. Plus, we can stack the odds a bit and make it make a bit more sense.

Contest Selection

The above math is why I truly believe that entering any of these contests is a “losing bet,” but we can obviously increase our odds with some simple steps. The first one is to limit our competition. How do we do that? We enter “limited entry” contests. If a contest opens with just a single entry allowed or three entries, or even 20 entries, I’m going to have more interest since you will be competing against a smaller number of competitors and hopefully less variance. The second part of that sentence is far more important. More on that later.

At the writing of this article, the Corgi is live which is a single-entry contest that costs $5 and returns $25,000 to first place. That would translate to a 0.0044% chance to win, assuming we have no edge. That’s actually not as far off from the expected 0.02% return of such a bet placed on a sportsbook. That’s only off by a factor of four or five as opposed to a factor of roughly 11 in the BBMV.

The far more important thing, though, is that the limited field cuts down on the insane variance we may see in extremely large fields like the BBM. When you have ~670,000 entries, you’ll have a very large field of players going in the 15th round or later, and any of them can catapult to a top-50 player or even higher, given the right circumstances.

So, for example, let’s say Cordarrelle Patterson, who is already giving us nightmares because Arthur Smith is talking him up in Pittsburgh, finds his way into a large offensive role and scores somewhere in the RB15-20 range. Is it likely? Of course not. But consider the fact that Puka Nacua was a 17th-round pick for the majority of last season, and you’ll understand that this is entirely possible.

If you’re in a field of 670,000 entries, the number of entries that selected Patterson in the 17th or 18th round is MUCH LARGER than a contest with 22,500 entries, like the Corgi. Maybe 100 entries will have Patterson in the Corgi as opposed to 1,000 in the BBMV. Those teams have a much better chance to advance because of the “breakout” of Patterson, and there’s no way I’m going to advise you to choose Patterson this season so we wouldn’t have the advantage due to not rostering this “ridiculous” player.

So, we limit our competition and variance by entering contests with limited entries allowed. 

We can also create an advantage by choosing a unique format like weekly winners or Superflex. Since these are lesser-known formats, we can beat casual players with more consistency so long as we do our research and prep work. I will not be covering those unique contests this time around.

We also want to pay attention to the payout structure of our contests. A “flat” payout structure will pay out more entrants, meaning you have a better chance of winning back your money. The drawback is that typically the top payout is less exciting. A “sharp” or “top-heavy” payout structure has an attractive first prize, but fewer entrants are paid out.

In Best Ball Mania, the top 112,112 win a prize out of 672,672 entries. We’ve already done that math, but that translates to a roughly 16.7% chance to win anything whatsoever. The Corgi rewards just 75 of 22,500 entries, which is only a 0.33% chance. However, we only need to invest $5 to enter the Corgi and the first “tier” of payouts would return 50x our entry fee ($250 won from a $5 entry). The first tier of the BBM pays out just 1.4x our entry fee ($35 from a $25 entry). So, we should think about all these things before we just randomly enter every Underdog best ball contest.

One last note is to pay attention to the rake. The rake is the percentage of the overall pot that the entity putting on the contest is taking to run it. Luckily, Underdog lists this for each category and there isn’t much difference. However, you’ll see that the BBM5 has a 10.8% rake whereas the Corgi has an 11.1% rake. The difference isn’t big enough to sway my opinion.

Roster Construction

There’s no magic number of QBs, RBs, WRs, and TEs to draft, but there are some general rules to get you to the possible optimal construction.

To begin, let’s take a look at how standard scoring weeks play out. The standard roster spots that are scored week-to-week on Underdog are as follows:

QB
RB1
RB2
WR1
WR2
WR3
TE
FLEX

That’s it. You will draft 18 players, but only eight will matter week-to-week. So when thinking about how this works, you’ll want to think about your roster in terms of “strength” or “confidence.” That’s what helps me. For example, if you start off RB-RB in rounds 1 and 2, you don’t need to worry about being “deep” at the RB position. If you draft three WRs in the first five rounds, you also can focus on other spots for the next several rounds. If you draft two elite RBs, there are only two RB spots that can be slotted in each week. If bye weeks didn’t exist, you could go the rest of the draft without snagging another RB and you could wind up with the optimal lineup.

Of course, bye weeks do exist. More on that later.

I attack this by attempting to fill out all of my “starting spots” before I go over two RBs, three WRS, or one TE. QB is a little different, and we’ll cover that more in the “stacking” section. But in general, if you’re confident in your picks in the first 5-7 rounds, you shouldn’t worry too much about who is behind those guys on the bench.

The rosters that have found success have typically had 2-3 QBs, 5-6 RBs, 7-9 WRs, and 2-3 TEs. I find myself winding up mostly with 2QB, 5RB, 8WR, and 3TE builds. But we can also have 3QB, 5RB, 8WR, 2TE builds, 3QB, 5RB, 7WR, 3TE builds, and many more that vary ever so slightly. The general note you should keep in mind is to roster at least two QBs, five RBs, seven WRs, and two TEs.

Again, this roster construction will come down to the strengths and weaknesses of your team. If you find yourself going with a “zero-RB build” for example, waiting to grab your first RB until the 7th round or later, consider grabbing six or even seven RBs to give yourself more shots at high scores from that position. Basically, whichever position you fill out last should have the most bench players behind them in hopes that you can get spike weeks that will leap up into your starting lineup.

If my first RB drafted is Rhamondre Stevenson and I back him up with Zamir White, there’s a better chance that my RB6, someone like Audric Estime or D’onta Foreman, can get a score that matters in any given week. My WRs in this scenario are likely something like AJ Brown, Chris Olave, and Stefon Diggs. Even if my WR4 is Amari Cooper, his high scores may not matter since my top three guys will occupy my WR1-WR3 spots.

Of course, there’s a bit of a wrench thrown in here as there is a “flex” spot that accommodates an extra RB, WR, or TE. You can nearly never guess which one will wind up slotting in, but it is totally fine to take your third running back or your fourth wide receiver before you take a QB or a TE, if you feel like you have some “value” (a guy going past ADP) or someone who will occupy that flex spot a majority of the weeks. So, you can take a third RB or fourth WR in Rounds 4-7 if you identify a strong “every week flex.”

However, if you go this route, you should strongly consider going with a “balanced” build with 3 QBs, 5 RBs, 7 WRs, and 3 TEs. Since you plan on having the same starting RBs, WRs, TE, and flex each week, you can load up on all upside in Rounds 8-18 and take equal shots on each position.

The last thing to consider is bye weeks. I wouldn’t fret too much about this, but you certainly need to have replacement players when your main guys are on bye. That’s why we recommend at least five RBs and seven WRs, but you should always have at least two RBs and three WRs available for every week. Put another way, you shouldn’t roster more than three RBs with the same bye week or more than four WRs with the same bye week, and even those two scenarios are pushing it and I much prefer to keep it to two RBs with the same bye week or three WRs with the same bye week. If I go over those marks, I grab an extra player in that position.

Underdog Specifics

You should note that Underdog contests are half-ppr contests. That means you get 0.5 points per reception from your skill players. This is different from DraftKings, for example, which is a full-ppr contest. You get a full point per reception on DraftKings. There really isn’t a huge difference between these two, to be honest, aside from pass-catching running backs getting a minor bump on DK.

When looking at the ADP on Underdog, it’s also important to note that there appear to be 31 receivers in the top 50 players drafted. In looking at the last five years, there are typically about 15-16 WRs that finish in the top 50 players in terms of total points in half-ppr. QBs and, to a lesser extent, RBs both have depressed ADPs on this platform. My favorite start is to grab two RBs in the first three rounds or to snag one of the elite QBs in the first 3-4 rounds. Most players are leaning into WRs early and often.

So, don’t hesitate to grab a QB in the first 5-7 rounds, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re stacking with guys already on your roster. More on that in a minute. Don’t hesitate to snag an RB in two of the first three rounds either, if your targets fall to you

Other Tips & Tricks

• Take breaks and make sure you’re not going overboard. If you’re losing focus, you’ll make mistakes. Others certainly are. So maybe don’t rattle off 10 best ball drafts over 6-7 hours if you haven’t eaten all day and have other responsibilities. If you want to take it seriously, take it seriously. Set aside the time and focus just on the draft. Otherwise, do a slow draft and then you can draft on your own schedule.
• Leave your homerism at the door. Have a player you hate? Get over it quickly. Have a player you love? Get over that too. You should draft with your brain, not your heart. Your feelings should be left at the door and you should make logical decisions. It will be an edge for you.
• Set your queue early and often, no matter if you’re doing a slow or a fast draft. You never know when something may come up or you may become distracted. You should have a queue.
• Have a stable internet connection. Seems pretty straightforward, but if you get disconnected it takes a much longer time to get back into the draft room than you would anticipate.

Stacking

Okay, now let’s get to the fun, or “advanced” part. Let’s talk about stacking. What is stacking in fantasy football? It’s very simple. All “stacking” means is taking a quarterback with their favorite passing target in order to “double your points” on any big scoring play.

So, if you own both Garrett Wilson and Aaron Rodgers, and they connect on an 80-yard touchdown, you will score 21.7 points on that play alone. Here’s how it breaks down:

Garrett Wilson: 0.5 pts (reception) + 8 pts (80 receiving yards) + 6 pts (receiving TD) = 14.5 pts

Aaron Rodgers: 3.2 pts (80 yards thrown) + 4 pts (throwing TD) = 7.2 pts

That would be quite a healthy chunk of points for you for that week, but you can see above that if you only own Wilson or Rodgers alone, you don’t get as many points. Worse, someone else in your league is getting the points you’re missing. You can see how that may be a problem, right?

This is why many sharps target at least two stacks per team, ensuring they get maximum points on scoring plays. Now, I understand the math here, but I also don’t like to go out of my way to stack if I don’t have to. Yes, it’s true that stacking and maximizing your points is the best way to get the best score for a given week, but we also are looking to outscore out opponents over a 14-week sample size.

I’ll give an example where the lack of a stack doesn’t hurt you. Let’s say Aaron Rodgers throws four touchdowns instead of just one in a given game. He throws one to Wilson, two to Breece Hall, and a last one to Tyler Conklin. I’ll give these realistic yardages as well.

Garrett Wilson: 0.5 pts (reception) + 8 pts (80 receiving yards) + 6 pts (receiving TD) = 14.5 pts

Breece Hall: 1 pt (two receptions) + 3.2 pts (32 receiving yards) + 12 pts (two receiving TDS) = 16.2 pts

Tyler Conklin: 0.5 pts (reception) + 0.5 pts (5 receiving yards) + 6 pts (receiving TD) = 7 pts

Aaron Rodgers: 4.68 pts (117 passing yards) + 16 pts (four passing TDs) = 20.68 pts

We can see that Rodgers outscored anyone else on his team with these scoring plays, and if he happens to run in a touchdown or pass for a ton of yards to Mike Williams and Xavier Gipson in the process, then having a “naked” Aaron Rodgers isn’t really a problem. Naked just means I don’t have him stacked with anyone.

Of course, this would be a big game. Rodgers had three such games (four passing TDs) two seasons ago. There are certainly some specific requirements to make this work out in our favor, but I just wanted to show you that it is possible. The next thing to think about is how the contest changes once you reach the playoffs. If teams with Aaron Rodgers advance to the playoffs, there is a high likelihood that those teams are also rostering Garrett Wilson. If you get to that point, and Rodgers has a Week 15 where he throws three TD passes to Xavier Gipson, or Wilson gets injured in the first quarter, your naked Rodgers is likely beating a Rodgers/Wilson stack since you have a different WR1 on your team.

The percentages and likelihoods are what they are though, and the data supports the fact that you should attempt to stack your quarterback whenever possible. You should aim to stack at least one QB, but preferably two.

It is far more beneficial to stack players that are likely to go off in Weeks 15, 16, and 17 since those are the playoffs and are “do or die.” I have analyzed the schedule through that stretch for all 32 teams and given you the top 20ish pairings in the premium portion of this article. So be sure to subscribe to our incredibly cheap subscription packages to unlock them.

Another, lesser known, strategy for stacking is to take players in playoff weeks and stacking them heavily. So, if we can identify three or four positive game environments in the final, and most important, week, we can stack players in those games to maximize our score. Someone on Twitter recently gave me a whole “lesson” on this stuff because I posted a lineup where I drafted a naked Joe Burrow. What he probably doesn’t know because he is too “stack-pilled” by consuming so much best ball content, is that I have Burrow having the third-best, third-best, and fifth-best games against the pass in Weeks 15-17. I would have loved to get Ja’Marr Chase, of course, but I’m still happy to get Burrow and I drafted him after Chase and Higgins were off the board. I have next to no interest in Jermaine Burton or Mike Gesicki. To me, this was the best play on the board at the time. Sorry, Twitter bro.

If we look at the past BBM winners, all millionaires now probably, we can see that there is still some luck and variance involved.

BBMI: Matt Ryan/Calvin Ridley stack. Only Ridley counted. Tom Brady/Gronkowski stack that went big in Week 17. Burrow/Boyd stack that didn’t do anything.

BBMII: Rostered a Josh Allen/Cole Beasley stack and a “naked” Justin Fields. In Week 17, Allen’s score counted, but Beasley’s did not, so the stack did not help at the very end. However, he DID stack eight players in high-scoring games for Week 17.

BBMIII: Tom Brady and Chris Godwin stack that came through big time. Tua/Waddle/Mostert megastack. Only Mostert contributed in Week 17. Daniel Jones/Saquon Barkley stack that did nothing at the end, though Jones nearly beat Brady’s score and supplanted that stack. Fell a little over a point short.

BBM IV: Rostered a Jordan Love/Jayden Reed stack that also happened to crush it in Week 17. He also had Christian Watson and wasn’t targeting Reed at all. He had a Tua/Mostert stack that didn’t matter much in the end. He also had a naked CJ Stroud.

As we can see, some element of stacking was always used, but it wasn’t always necessary. Stacking is something you should try to do as much as possible.

Handcuffs

What is a “handcuff?” There are a few situations where a back doesn’t have a solid handle on the starting job, either due to the situation of the team (focusing on youth over veterans), injury history (injury-prone starter), or simply a downswing in explosiveness or ability. That’s the classic example of a handcuff. However, this term has been a bit bastardized in recent seasons due to the NFL splitting the workload of running backs. We now have far more situations where there’s a “1-2 punch” of sorts, with one back being an “early-down” back and the other being a “passing down” back. We also have situations where one back is clearly the “goalline back” and it may not necessarily be the starter.

Here’s the main thing I’ll say about handcuffs in best ball: They don’t matter, always. You shouldn’t concern yourself with handcuffing anyone and everyone. There are only a few that are important to nab, and it makes more sense to nab them if they’re going late in drafts. If you have to invest even an 8th-round pick and a 10th-round pick to nab a backfield, like in the case of Zack Moss and Chase Brown this season, there’s just too high of an opportunity cost when you consider the other players you could have nabbed. Don’t be afraid to snag a high-end “handcuff” without the other back in that backfield, as that increases the ceiling of your team.

There are, however, a few handcuffs that you should absolutely nab if you nab the current starter in order to lock down the backfield production of a particular team. What’s the difference? The play composition of that team is going to lean heavily on the run, and the scoring opportunities will likely come via the ground. That depends on many factors, such as the offensive coordinator, the strength of the offensive line, and even which receivers get the most work and their ability to break tackles.

Take Amon-Ra St. Brown from the 2022-23 season for example. He was tackled at the 1-yard line the most of any receiver, which helped the Lions backfield secure a bunch of 1-yard touchdowns. However, it wasn’t the “lead dog,” D’Andre Swift, who was a first or second-round pick at the turn in best ball that season, but it was his handcuff Jamaal Williams that wound up being the goalline back and leading the NFL with 17 touchdowns on the season. Five of those touchdowns came off of ARSB being tackled withing a few yards of the goalline. Several other touchdowns came off of other players being tackled close to the end zone.

A few observations above: First, it would have been HUGELY beneficial to draft Swift’s handcuff without drafting Swift, highlighting the fact that if we could identify that ARSB was going to struggle to reach the end zone, it would have been a league-winning observation. Second, luck is involved here, which is why it was very easy to predict ARSB’s touchdowns doubling from 2022-23 to 2023-24. But the fact that Swift was going, ostensibly, in the first round highlights how high the community was on the offensive line. Jamaal Williams should have been on your radar regardless.

I will give premium members my list of high-quality handcuffs with clarification on whether it’s necessary to handcuff your early-round pick to secure production.

Late-Round Strategy

This section will be pretty simple, but in best ball you should target upside 99% of the time with every pick, and try to stack as much as possible. You know my takes on stacking, so the second part is far less important in my opinion. However, you need to understand that the odds of a 16th-18th round pick getting into your lineup is very low and they likely will only count once or twice over a 14-week sample size. Therefore, taking a guy like Javon Baker (WR3 for the Patriots, at best) or Keaton Mitchell (RB3 behind a workhorse back like Derrick Henry) have virtually no upside. Could they take off? Sure. Given an injury or a trade, or any number of events, they could surely climb into relevancy in large player fields, but will they reach the top-100 range in any given week? It seems unlikely unless things break exactly right.

Because that’s what we’re looking at here. Each team gets eight starters (QB, RB1, RB2, WR1, WR2, WR3, FLEX, TE) each week, which comes out to 96 players. Of course, we won’t have exact optimization, so we’re looking at something like the top-150 players week-to-week in truth, but if each optimal player was rostered every week, it would only be 96 players that would matter. So the range is somewhere between the top-100 (roughly) and the top-150 that we’re looking at. Each NFL team utilizes one QB, two backs, 3-4 WRs, and 1-2 TEs. That’s about 256 players in play. With players shuffling in and out of lineups due to injuries and fatigue at an even more rapid rate as each season passes, we can probably extend that to something like 280 players.

So ultimately you must ask yourself: Does this player have the ability to reach the top-150 in any given week?

There are a few things we can look at to help us determine this, and none of it has to do with the player’s skill. It has everything to do with the player’s schedule in relation to the field and the overall offensive environment of the team. The “lowest hanging fruit” is an injury-replacement player. So, if Adam Thielen finally succumbs to his older age, will it be Xavier Legette (ADP 141.4), Jonathan Mingo (ADP 216), or Terrace Marshall Jr. (ADP 216) that will step up? If you can accurately guess this, then that player is someone to consider heavily late in drafts.

The more complex fliers are the guys who have talent, but haven’t been in the right schemes or utilized in ways that maximize their output, but now find themselves in new situations. An easy example for this is a running back who runs well in a man gap scheme or a zone running scheme. The offensive line will block differently and running backs can be more or less successful in each blocking scheme.

Alexander Mattison was a popular target last season in fantasy, but one thing we may not have considered in touting him is that he’s a far better runner in a zone run blocking scheme as opposed to a man gap blocking scheme. This season he’ll be in a zone run scheme in Las Vegas. Do you wonder why they haven’t added anyone behind Zamir White? The workload there may be more split than people will want.

Top Stacks for 2024

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