The 2024 drafting szn is upon us! As DFS players grind through the “dog days of MLB summer”, right now is the perfect time to get caught up on all things fantasy football. More specifically: Best Ball on Underdog Fantasy.
- Use Code “RotoRadar” to Draft and Play Daily Fantasy + Higher/Lower Pick ‘Em contests on Underdog Fantasy
- View our Top 200 Best Ball Rankings Guide
While there is plenty of content on what TO DO regarding drafting fantasy football teams, in this article we’re going to take a second to focus on what NOT TO DO while drafting Best Ball teams on Underdog Fantasy.
If you are unfamiliar with how Best Ball works or what it is, please refer to our Best Ball 101 article page prior to reading below.
1. Do Not Come Into Drafts Close-Minded…Be Flexible, Like Gumby
Like mentioned above, there are a ton of people and sites telling you what to do and to follow that process to a T. But, what happens when “Joe Schmo” takes Christian McCaffrey a pick before you were going to select him and your entire draft strategy is thrown out the window?
You need to be flexible.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with going into a day of Best Ball drafts with contingency plans and strategies. You definitely should do that. But, if your targeted team stacks start to fall off the board, you shouldn’t be reaching or going out of your way to put out a fire you didn’t start. Spoiler alert: everyone and their mom will want to draft Travis Kelce/Patrick Mahomes stacks if they have the chance. Just like traditional fantasy football, adaptability is one major aspect to winning your leagues. You need to be able to quickly pivot and adapt where necessary.
Going into the draft wanting to roster Bengals and Eagles is a great starting approach (fantastic actually), but those strategies can quickly get dismantled if you are unable to get to a Ja’Marr Chase or A.J. Brown in the first/second rounds respectively. In the event that you do snag those players, another thing to consider is trying to avoid “mindlessly” selecting running backs just because you “need” them until you get to your Dallas Goedert or Joe Burrow correlation options when trying to acquire these two offenses.
2. Do NOT Draft 3 Quarterbacks and Tight Ends If You Have The “Elites”
As an add-on to point number #1, while we need to be flexible and open-minded, there are two big ‘no-nos’ that I see a ton of people make all the time…
If you draft an elite Tight End or an elite Quarterback in the first few rounds of your Best Ball tournament, you SHOULD NOT be drafting a third player at either position to finish your teams in the late rounds.
If you draft an elite QB (Mahomes, Allen, Hurts to name a few), the cost of drafting such an incredible player at that position is incredibly high (and should be rewarding). While you will still need that secondary QB in the later rounds to account for your QB1’s bye week or surviving a few down weeks, selecting a third QB in an effort to complete a team stack is something that is a glaring mistake many people make. When opponents draft a third QB, they not only take away a pick for another RB or WR, but they also select a QB that is highly unlikely to be relevant. Just because the correlation looks sexy doesn’t mean that it’s league-winning in the long term.
The same thing applies to drafts that start with Travis Kelce or Mark Andrews as a TE1 selection.
IF your QB3 or TE3 becomes relevant and starts being a focal point of your draft, it is most likely due to your QB1 or TE1 getting hurt or having a down year, which in that case, means your draft is pretty much sunk anyway.
Referring to our Best Ball 101 article, we recommend you follow this rough allocation of players:
Quarterback: 2-3 (3 at most, 2 is preferred)
Running Back: 5-7
Wide Receiver: 7-9
Tight End: 2-3 (again, 3 at most, 2 is preferred)
3. Do NOT Reach For Your Stacks
While team stacking is one of the most important factors in rostering league-winning Best Ball teams, a word of caution needs to be said when doing so, as it can break your team as easily as it can make it.
Team stacking is 100% important, but like rostering a QB3 or a TE3 like the point above, going out of your way to stack for stacking sake is going to hurt the overall upside of your roster. Another huge mistake when stacking is trying to grab a stack counterpart with a Quarterback at the expense of not rostering a better player at that point of the draft. A perfect example of this happens when drafting an Eagles stack: if you’re able to draft A.J. Brown and Jalen Hurts within your first five rounds of your draft, it would be unwise to select Saquon Barkley/DeVonta Smith to complete the team stack in the rounds before Hurts when A) you will need to draft running backs (in Saquon’s case, how much ceiling is there when Jalen steals touchdowns?) and B) selecting Smith as the second Eagles player in round 2 probably isn’t a 2nd round value.
Finally, you should not justify a QB3 because it completes a team stack. An example of this would be rostering a low-end QB such as Will Levis to pair with a DeAndre Hopkins/Chig Okonkwo team stack when you ALREADY have two team stacks rostered. Most weeks, the bottom 10-15 QBs will not win your league, but the skill players on that team stack certainly could. Additionally, you’re once again “wasting” that QB3 play on a QB that will be irrelevant for the majority of the year where you could be selecting a skill player that could provide value in a bye-week scenario or save you if better players get injured for a few weeks.
View our Top 200 Best Ball Rankings Guide Here and Happy Drafting!
