The Biggest Lie in Fantasy Football

We’ve shined the light on a lot of lies and myths over the years, but this year brings us a new one!

I recently heard an ad for Underdog Fantasy, which features a $10 million best ball tournament. If you’re not familiar with the best ball format, you draft a regular team, similar to season-long fantasy, but your roster is locked – no waivers, no free agents, no trades. Each week the site automatically scores you based on your top scoring players at each position. You usually draft more players overall, giving you more chances to land a high-scoring player each week. It follows then, that your goal in best ball is to draft players that have a chance of being the top scoring player at their position in a week. The more weeks they can do that, the better they are for your team.

So what’s the lie?

The ad described drafting a best ball team as the best way to practice for your season-long drafts. Wrong.

You’re Blueprint people, so you already know the best way to practice for your draft is by planning different scenarios with our innovative draft-pick overlays. But that’s not why we’re here today.

The real reason this ad is a lie, is that you’re drafting an entirely different type of team than in your season-long leagues. In season-long you usually draft a mix of stability and upside, leaning toward more upside in later rounds.

In best ball you’re drafting almost exclusively for upside. That slot receiver that gets you a reliable five catches a game for 50 yards – hello Keenan Allen – may never be the top WR on your team. The natural variance of the position means you’re going to have other players that have boom and bust weeks, and those boom weeks are going to put them ahead of Keenan Allen on your team.

As a quick example – this is not meant to be a stats deep dive – we can look at the Chargers last five games.

Here’s Keenan Allen.

Here’s Mike Williams.

Keenan Allen only finished as the top WR on his own team in one of those games and he didn’t have any true upside games, like the two Mike Williams had. With plenty of other WRs on your best ball bench, Keenan Allen, as reliable as he has been in his career, isn’t the greatest best ball player, but he’s still a really nice season-long player.

So if we can’t use best ball to practice for our season-long drafts, what can we use it for?

DFS!

Read what I wrote above again and you’ll realize that the players you’re targeting in best ball drafts are very similar to the players you want to pick in daily leagues on FanDuel or DraftKings. You want players who have the potential to be the top scoring player at their position that week.

By looking at our best ball rankings, we can start to see who is being drafted higher in best ball than in season-long drafts, and we can start to shape our week one DFS player pool. At the beginning of the year we don’t have as much knowledge about team strategy, player usage, pace, etc. But we can use our best ball rankings to start looking at what type of players we should be targeting, then as we get closer to week one, we’ll be able to narrow the list.

The table below shows the player’s best ball rank on the left, season-long rank on the right, followed by the gap (delta) between the two. The more negative a player is, the more their skillset (and opportunity) makes them a better best ball player than season-long.

We see players like Melvin Gordon (who we told you wasn’t dead last year). Javonte Williams might start getting more of the work this year, but guess who still isn’t dead? And guess who can still put up a high-scoring week?

Devin Singletary was almost a secret last year, lost in the weekly RB shuffle in Buffalo, but he really started to emerge and he has the breakaway play-making skills needed to put up a top score in best ball (and DFS!).

If we look at the bottom of the list we can see Tyreek Hill… wait, what? Tyreek Hill is one of those rare players that can put up a top-scoring week any week and is also pretty consistent, so he’s ranked highly in best ball and season-long. Great option, but you know what he is in DFS… popular. We can use popular plays, but we prefer using less popular players that also have a lot of upside.

When you get into Week 1 DFS and you see Devin Singletary going way cheaper than he should be, think back to this table and lock him in. Anyone want to play Miles Sanders? Didn’t think so… lock him in! You think the average player is going to be forcing Davante Adams into their lineups? You bet. Go get Josh Jacobs instead!

You get the idea. The top 100 players are shown below. But you can also check out the top 300 best ball players here and see how they compare to their season-long rank. You can go deeper, uncovering even more high-upside gems for your DFS player pool or even for your season-long late-round picks.

Next week, we’ll use this same table to revisit one of the other biggest and most controversial lies in fantasy football…

Click here to get access to this and more with our early-bird special!

Rank	Player	Team	Pos	Season-long Rank	Delta
62	Joe Burrow	CIN	QB	81	-19
84	Kenneth Walker	SEA	RB	102	-18
90	Matthew Stafford	LAR	QB	105	-15
74	Tony Pollard	DAL	RB	87	-13
88	Melvin Gordon	DEN	RB	101	-13
100	James Cook	BUF	RB	113	-13
52	AJ Dillon	GB	RB	64	-12
37	Travis Etienne	JAC	RB	48	-11
61	Miles Sanders	PHI	RB	72	-11
99	Michael Carter	NYJ	RB	110	-11
43	Breece Hall	NYJ	RB	53	-10
73	Devin Singletary	BUF	RB	83	-10
80	Dak Prescott	DAL	QB	90	-10
96	Rhamondre Stevenson	NE	RB	106	-10
27	Cam Akers	LAR	RB	36	-9
34	Josh Jacobs	LV	RB	43	-9
68	Damien Harris	NE	RB	76	-8
76	Tom Brady	TB	QB	84	-8
18	Javonte Williams	DEN	RB	25	-7
42	J.K. Dobbins	BAL	RB	49	-7
59	Clyde Edwards-Helaire	KC	RB	66	-7
64	Kyler Murray	ARI	QB	71	-7
79	Chase Edmonds	MIA	RB	86	-7
12	Leonard Fournette	TB	RB	18	-6
44	Justin Herbert	LAC	QB	50	-6
49	Elijah Mitchell	SF	RB	55	-6
35	Kyle Pitts	ATL	TE	40	-5
19	Nick Chubb	CLE	RB	23	-4
23	James Conner	ARI	RB	27	-4
71	Jalen Hurts	PHI	QB	75	-4
51	Courtland Sutton	DEN	WR	54	-3
86	Russell Wilson	DEN	QB	89	-3
93	Treylon Burks	TEN	WR	96	-3
5	Najee Harris	PIT	RB	7	-2
9	Joe Mixon	CIN	RB	11	-2
11	D’Andre Swift	DET	RB	13	-2
20	Saquon Barkley	NYG	RB	22	-2
36	Antonio Gibson	WAS	RB	38	-2
58	Lamar Jackson	BAL	QB	60	-2
75	Cordarrelle Patterson	ATL	RB	77	-2
78	Kareem Hunt	CLE	RB	80	-2
3	Austin Ekeler	LAC	RB	4	-1
8	Dalvin Cook	MIN	RB	9	-1
15	Alvin Kamara	NO	RB	16	-1
28	A.J. Brown	PHI	WR	29	-1
67	Rashod Bateman	BAL	WR	68	-1
77	Elijah Moore	NYJ	WR	78	-1
1	Jonathan Taylor	IND	RB	1	0
2	Christian McCaffrey	CAR	RB	2	0
17	Aaron Jones	GB	RB	17	0
30	David Montgomery	CHI	RB	30	0
32	Ezekiel Elliott	DAL	RB	32	0
45	Patrick Mahomes	KC	QB	45	0
4	Cooper Kupp	LAR	WR	3	1
6	Justin Jefferson	MIN	WR	5	1
7	Derrick Henry	TEN	RB	6	1
13	Stefon Diggs	BUF	WR	12	1
25	Mike Evans	TB	WR	24	1
48	Mike Williams	LAC	WR	47	1
57	Darnell Mooney	CHI	WR	56	1
66	Gabriel Davis	BUF	WR	65	1
70	JuJu Smith-Schuster	KC	WR	69	1
94	Rashaad Penny	SEA	RB	93	1
98	Brandon Aiyuk	SF	WR	97	1
10	Ja’Marr Chase	CIN	WR	8	2
16	Travis Kelce	KC	TE	14	2
33	Josh Allen	BUF	QB	31	2
53	Amari Cooper	CLE	WR	51	2
54	Marquise Brown	ARI	WR	52	2
60	Jerry Jeudy	DEN	WR	58	2
87	Drake London	ATL	WR	85	2
22	Deebo Samuel	SF	WR	19	3
24	Mark Andrews	BAL	TE	21	3
29	Keenan Allen	LAC	WR	26	3
31	Tee Higgins	CIN	WR	28	3
14	Davante Adams	LV	WR	10	4
38	Michael Pittman	IND	WR	34	4
41	D.J. Moore	CAR	WR	37	4
63	Amon-Ra St. Brown	DET	WR	59	4
65	Chris Godwin	TB	WR	61	4
83	DeVonta Smith	PHI	WR	79	4
40	Jaylen Waddle	MIA	WR	35	5
47	DK Metcalf	SEA	WR	42	5
72	Dalton Schultz	DAL	TE	67	5
97	Aaron Rodgers	GB	QB	92	5
21	CeeDee Lamb	DAL	WR	15	6
26	Tyreek Hill	MIA	WR	20	6
39	Diontae Johnson	PIT	WR	33	6
50	Darren Waller	LV	TE	44	6
46	Terry McLaurin	WAS	WR	39	7
95	DeAndre Hopkins	ARI	WR	88	7
91	Dallas Goedert	PHI	TE	82	9
56	George Kittle	SF	TE	46	10
81	T.J. Hockenson	DET	TE	70	11
69	Allen Robinson	LAR	WR	57	12
55	Brandin Cooks	HOU	WR	41	14
89	Tyler Lockett	SEA	WR	74	15
92	Hunter Renfrow	LV	WR	73	19
82	Michael Thomas	NO	WR	62	20
85	Adam Thielen	MIN	WR	63	22