512: Best Ball League Strategy

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Speaker 1: This is the Lab podcast with your host JJ ZACHERAJJ Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharice and the editor in chief at fandle and at Number five dot com in this episode five hundred and twelve of the Late Round podcast. On many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network, thanks for tuning in getting different perspectives on anything is important, and that's no different in fantasy football. I've done a couple of Best Ball Strategy episodes in the past. Some may remember them with Mike Beers, who's formerly of Rodoviz. But because Bestball leagues are so popular, and because you guys keep emailing me about Best Ball episodes, I figured I'd do it again. I'd do another Best Ball League Strategy episode, and I'd bring on a guest to give some tips on how to optimize your Best Ball drafts. That guest is my good friend, Mike Leoni. Mike works for the fine folks over at Established the Run dot com and he's been doing great work over there on bett Ball League strategy. For those of you who aren't into Best Ball leagues yet the concept of them is pretty simple. Instead of drafting a team where you set your lineup each week and you play waivers. Best ball leagues will optimize your roster for you each week after games are over, so each week you'll get the best scores from the players on your roster. That naturally brings forth a whole lot of strategy that we don't really get in typical season long leagues. When I sat down to talk to Mike, I asked them about optimal roster construction, how to properly stack, whether zero RB is a viable approach and strategy, and so much more. Like I said, Mike's been doing a ton of research on this topic, so you're bound to learn something new from the interview. Now, before we get into that interview, I want to remind you guys about Fandel's special free to play game centered around PGA Tour events. Make golf prop picks on the final round of any PGA tournament on CBS. For your chance to win a share five thousand dollars. Prior to the start of the final round, go on the Fandels Sportsbook app and submit answers to all the games prop questions. Answer the most correctly for a chance to win money prizes. So head over to fandle for the next PGA Tour event and pick some props for the final round.

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Speaker 2: Agent location restrictions apply.

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Speaker 1: No purchase necessary, void where prohibited payouts paid a non withdrawable site credit that expires seven days after receipt. For more information, visit fandle dot com, Slash free Games, slash Swing for the Green. Now let's listen to Mike Leoni drop some knowledge about Bestball leagues. So obviously different platforms for Bestball leagues, they're gonna have different rules in scoring, and they'll have a different number of roster spots as well. But generally speaking, Mike, do you approach each draft with the same roster construction or do you find yourself being flexible sort of based on how the draft unfolds.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I hate to get the cop out answer, but it's a little bit of both worlds. You certainly don't want to go in where you're so rigid that you're passing up values to fit a predefined structure. But at the same time, there are a few things I try to accomplish each draft. I like to get at least one elite player at one of the onesie positions, whether it's a really high end, tight end or a quarterback. Maybe not super early, because you don't really want to be taking a quarterback in the first five rounds or so, but one of the pretty high upside quarterbacks a QB you know, four through eight, maybe even four through ten, that has that ceiling. I like to do that because it gives you an edge at that position, but it also affects your overall roster construction, where you can devote less roster spots then to that onesie position, you know, and a lot of leagues. If you're taking a quarterback or tight end early, that lets you only take two you know, you don't have to take three. Some of that depends on the exact structure, so I try to accomplish that. My big rule with running backs is you can take running backs early. You can take a lot of running backs, but you can't do both at the same time. You kind of have to make a decision if you're going to take running backs early. You do not want to be drafting a lot of them. You just start to waste capital and you think you're building a robust team, but really you're just sacrificing upside and do your risk, isn't you know? It's still present. And then you know, if you do maybe not a full zero RB team, but if you devote less capital early to running backs, you know it's okay to take you know, six seven of them late. So those are kind of the main tenants trying to accomplish going into each draft.

00:04:22
Speaker 1: So on more of the individual player standpoint, and from that perspective, it feels like a lot of people make a really big deal out of a player's ceiling.

00:04:31
Speaker 2: In best ball.

00:04:32
Speaker 1: Do you think that people should be avoiding players who may not be able to provide spiked weeks that seem necessary to win in a best ball league, like maybe something like slot receivers who have low average at the targets or do you think that the way people sort of perceive and look at ceiling is just generally skewed.

00:04:48
Speaker 3: I think it's skewed, you know, I do know there's the hashtag better and best ball movement guys like Mkole Hardman and Will Fuller, and there probably are exceptions where guys are more valuable and best ball because they have these really high weekly ceilings. But in general, we're pretty bad at predicting distributions for players, and you know, you mentioned slot receivers. I draft a lot of these guys for on one hand, targets, you know, leads, and that volume leads to a better weekly ceiling than you might think. You know, if a guy's going eight for eighty, he sneaks in a big play, he sneaks in the end zone, you've got a pretty big ceiling week. So I think sometimes it's underrated how those slot receivers with low aight dots actually do have a decent weekly ceiling. And the other reason I'm really big on drafting structurally, and one of the big things, one of the big reasons you get upside from a best ball team has more to do with your overall roster construction than it does the individual players. So if you have guys that are just churning out usable weeks, especially if you're doing let's say a team where you draft running back heavy early and you just want to draft a lot of receivers to fill those scores, kind of bank on wide receiver heavy, more variance at the position, having guys like I don't know, col Beasley, Russell Gage, you know, some of these slot receivers that seem like, oh they you know, I don't want to take them as they don't have upside. Being able to churn out those usable weeks is huge, you know. Taking no zeros or really low scores over the course of an entire season adds up a ton and it actually does provide your team holistically with a pretty high ceiling. Yeah.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: I think the other thing too, is that a lot of people when they're viewing a player's ceiling floor combo in terms of projecting, you know, the following season, they're just looking at like what happened the previous season and like looking at a player's standard deviation, and they're saying, this guy is consistent or this guy is not consistent. But realistically the sample size is way way too small to draw those types of conclusions. So I think that makes total sense to sort of approach it the way that you talk through there. Let's talk about stacking. Stacking is something that you know, when best Ball's first started, I feel like people weren't really thinking about stacking, you know, years and years ago, and now that's all people think about. So how important is stacking in best ball leagues and how much more important is stacking when you're in more of a tournament format.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I looked at a lot of stacking data from last season, wrote an article about it unestablished the run, and the big thing is you noted is people are onto stacking. You know, it's not a hidden strategy anymore. For every twelve team league, you know, ten to eleven teams are stacking in some fashion with their quarterback, like completing at least one minimum stack. And you're definitely at a disadvantage if you're that team that is unstacked. But you have to be pretty cognizant of the value you're getting on stacked. So as bad as it is to be unstacked, if you're reaching on a stack consistently, if you're sacrificing like more than a round round and a half in ADP value for your stack as a whole, your win rates start to dip below the point where it's actually better to not have stacked at So that's something to be really cognizant of. And it matters too at what point in the draft you're in. You know, early on, if you're able to complete a stack and get like good ADP value or value by your rankings, that's going to help your win rates a ton. But if you're doing that with those premium picks, and you're reaching around on a guy in round five or six to make a stack. There's so much opportunity cost at that point in the draft that you're actually doing yourself a disservice. Now you start to get in the double digit rounds, you take a wide receiver in round twelve that you would have normally taken around fourteen, that's not as big of a deal. So I do think it's important. I think it's particularly important with that second quarterback that you're taking because your cost on that quarterback is generally cheaper, and along with that, the pass catchers are generally cheaper, so you usually have a lot more flexibility to make your stack. You know, you think about this season Baker Mayfield on the Browns. You know you can get Odell Beckham, Austin Hooper, Jarvis Landry at really cheap prices, and you can get some combination of those guys too. You're not tied to a specific guy. Baker himself doesn't have a high cost. Not saying that's the biggest upside stack out there, but it's a pretty achievable stack to make without sacrificing value. Whereas that first quarterback. You know, if you're taking a high end quarterback like Kyler Murray, if you already miss DeAndre Hopkins, like you know, it's okay to have Kyler Murray that huge rushing upside on stacked, I want to absolutely kill yourself. I would probably try to get Ronde more someone in the double digit rounds, but I'm not going to make a huge leap or if I take DeAndre Hopkins, I guess is the better way to look at it in round two. I'm not taking Kyler Murray in round four, you know, there's way too much opportunity cost. If he falls them in round six, that's about the time I'll start to jump on it.

00:09:46
Speaker 1: The other thing that I remember you wrote last year in the stacking article that you did, is how when you draft a quarterback late, let's say, and you're stacking that quarterback, what you're really buying into also is that if that quarterback hits, that means that his teammates are also going to hit right or more than likely, you know, they'll have a higher likelihood to hit. So with stacking, you're not only just getting that weekly upside, but you're getting the season long upside too, because if that offense does end up hitting, then that means that the skill players and the quarterback on that team are going to hit as well.

00:10:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, the simplest way to look at it is if the offense rolls, everybody rolls, so to speak, so and you get a combination of the season long correlation and then if you do are able to have multiple stacked quarterbacks. I do think there's something where just based on randomness and how numbers turn out, like your distributions end up like lined up pretty well, where it's actually like a good floor ceiling combination. And you ask me about tournaments and how important it is for tournaments, there's definitely added value because you get all those benefits of the season long correlation and the weekly distributions, but then you also get kind of the DFS tournament style once you get to the playoff rounds. Those are just added benefits on top of the benefits you're already a chief. I will say though, again going back to the point about if you're reaching too much for stacks, it's gonna be tougher for you to get into those playoff weeks to begin with, because you're hurting your win rates. And I'm a big believer in the biggest edge in these basketball tournaments out there is making it to the playoff weeks at a higher rate than average, you know, getting as many teams as you can there. And then once you get there, the way these tournaments are structured, a lot of the times your regular season scores out the window and it becomes kind of like three uncorrelated tournaments in a row. And at that point there's just so much variance already that it's just hard to strategize too much and give too much emphasis on those playoff weeks when the skill element, in my opinion, is just making it there in the first place.

00:11:48
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna keep the topic around stacking here and keep talking about this. But instead of thinking about quarterback to wide receiver to tight end, et cetera, let's think about backfields. I get this question all the time, talking about whether or not someone should be a fantasy manager should be drafting multiple running backs from the same backfield and stacking that backfield, because hypothetically, let's say that you're looking at San Francisco this season, and you know that San Francisco over the last two years with Kyle Shanahan, they've had top three fantasy numbers as a team at the running back position. So someone might say, you know what, I'm gonna get Raheem Mostert, I'm gonna get Trey Sermon. I'm gonna stack this backfield and I'm then guaranteed fantasy points to some degree.

00:12:27
Speaker 2: Do you agree with that? Should people be stacking their backfields?

00:12:31
Speaker 3: I was talking about this just the other day actually with Evan Silvan Justin Herzig Justin a really good Best ball player, and her Zigg's take on this, which I agree with, is if you're going to do it, you really want to have realistic routes to both of the running backs beating their ADP in the same season. You don't want them cannibalizing each other. And that's especially the case in bestball leagues that, let's say, are like eighteen rounds without a defense or twenty rounds with the defense events, and those every single roster spot at that point is so valuable you cannot waste a roster spot. So to the point about Moster and Sermon, like, maybe you can make an argument that the San Francisco offense could completely roll, and you know, it's kind of like Baltimore in terms of both rushing. You know, it's like Baltimore running backs at a discount kind of because you don't have the huge cost of Dobbins does. I'm not sure I do it. I could maybe buy it. I definitely want to do it in tournaments. This is kind of where I would look at tournaments differently, where I really want that huge upside of just one of those backs hitting and dominating the backfield. But the situation I feel even more strongly about is like, let's say you take Ezekiel Elliott at the back end a round one. I'm not taking Tony Pollard to handcuff him, right. You know, it's just because if you're getting useful weeks out of Pollard, that means Ezekiel Elliott didn't hit. And if your first round pick doesn't hit, your win rates are dropping a ton to begin with. This is where I think, Yeah, I think people try way too hard to be robust, and all they do is they sacrifice upside and their risk is higher than it seems.

00:14:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is exactly what I've talked about on the show for years now, is that if you really are planning on getting a handcuff type running back, one of the higher end handcuff type running back who doesn't necessarily have standalone value without that injury or without that player completely busting, then get a handcuff from another stud running back and really maximize the upside on that roster. You know, if you get Dalvin Cook, don't get Alexander Madison, and get Tony Pollard, and then all of a sudden, if something were to happen to Zeke and Tony Pollard then elevates, then all of a sudden, you have two potential RB ones on your team.

00:14:37
Speaker 2: So totally agree.

00:14:38
Speaker 1: That makes a ton of sense, both in Best Ball and in season long regular season long redraft leagues too. You kind of alluded to this, but in best ball formats, are you drafting usually two or three quarterbacks.

00:14:52
Speaker 3: Most of my teams so far have been two quarterback teams. I've been trying to draft a lot of kind of like the leftover of tier. If I'm drafting at the back end of the first round, a lot of times there's this, you know, Tier one with Kyler Dak Josh Allen. You know you're never gonna get Mahomes, but you can get some of those guys at the five to six turn sometimes you can get Herbert even later six seven, I'm okay taking one of those guys at that range and only drafting two quarterbacks. And even if you dip a little bit further, if you get like a Jalen Hurts who has a lot of upside, uh, you know, in around seven or eight, I'm okay with with just taking two. I really like the roster flexibility that it does for you, And I do think fantasy is changing a little bit where some of these quarterbacks with the rushing up side and high volume passing attacks, actually you know, start to separate in a way that matters a little bit more from you know, your median back end quarterback. So I'm more open to that, whereas last year I was kind of not taking any quarterbacks really that early. I do think too, you know, pairing one of those quarterbacks with one of the rookie quarterbacks that has a lot of high end upside towards the end of the season, I think it's a really good strategy and just going with two because you can get generally Lawrence Fields and Lance in the double digit rounds, even Zach Wilson later, and if you've taken a stud quarterback early. It's okay if these guys don't start for a few weeks out of the gate, because you know you've got Dak Prescott for three to four weeks, you're going to be fine. If I'm taking three quarterbacks, what I like to do is take them more in the double digit rounds, you know, rounds maybe nine through thirteen, somewhere in that range. And I like to take guys that I'd like to be able to complete three stacks, even if they're not huge stacks. There's going back to the stacking research. You know, two quarterbacks in general is better than taking three if you hit on the quarterback. But if you do take three and you can get them all stacked, you kind of have an edge over it. Like that was the highest win rate among three quarterback teams just completing a minimum stack. And again that comes back to just the way the distributions tend to work out. You know, with the correlation there, you kind of end up building in a flour in a ceiling. It's unlikely that all three quarterbacks bust on the same week. You do lose a little bit of that very high end ceiling where these guys probably aren't giving you. You know, even together, they're not giving you the ceiling of Kyler Murray has, but obviously your cost was less.

00:17:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you alluded to this a little bit earlier too, But what do you think is the optimal way to approach the running back position?

00:17:30
Speaker 2: Obviously zero RB.

00:17:32
Speaker 1: There's a lot of discussion on social media every single year about the viability of it, but it seems like there's a lot more evidence each and every season pointing towards zero RB working a lot better than people expect in Best Ball formats?

00:17:45
Speaker 2: Is that usually the approach that you take?

00:17:48
Speaker 3: So last year I wrote an article on running back strategy and I tried to do it from scratch, kind of like going in with no preconceived notions, And the takeaway I had was I was really skepedarticle of zero RB for a few reasons. One in Bestball Week one const the same as Week thirteen, So you don't have this benefit of having a monster team at the end of the year like you do in to manage the zero RB works, and you don't have the benefit of waivers and making, you know, getting some of those benefiting from some of the chaotic situations that occur like guys like James ro like David didn't get drafted.

00:18:27
Speaker 2: In a lot of Best Ball leagues last year.

00:18:30
Speaker 3: With all that said, when I looked at the actual win rates a year ago, zero RB teams did pretty well, and I do think that it works. I think what you want to do going into a zero RB drafting Best Ball is be really cognizant of mixing your running back archetypes. I know Jack Miller's working on an article for US at ETR where he looks at kind of the failability of upside. And this is something you've talked to me a lot about before too, like what is actually defining upside? And it's I said, are going to give you points and again usable weeks. You know, if you're drafting as your RB team, you hopefully have a huge adjet wide receiver in the flex you know built in already, probably an ijet one of the onesie positions. Just don't get killed at the running back spot. So you can mix a pure handcuff huge upside like Tony Pollard with a pass catching back like Nikim Hines. You can take a two down back like Ronald Jones that's gonna have some big weeks in the right game script, so you can mix these different running back archetypes to give you a good balance of floor and ceiling. If you're just gonna take five handcuff running backs, you're going to be you know you're going to be in trouble. The strategy I do more often, it's just harder now because it's become popular. And the strategy I came up with last year when I was doing this from scratch, was like, let's take running backs early and not take a lot of them. And Mike Beer's, one of the original kind of best ball gurus, was on this hyper fragile running back strategy where you take three out of the gate and then you only take like four running backs total, And it sounds really scary, but essentially what you're saying is if my running backs I take early stay healthy, like that's almost it. If they stay healthy and don't completely bust, I've got my running back scores covered for the entire season, and I can make up for a lack of wide receiver quality with quantity. That's something you can't do and managed leagues, but you can do it in bestball leagues. If you look at the correlation of ADP to season long scoring for running backs and receivers. It's pretty similar if you look at the correlation from ADP to weekly scoring. It's a lot lower for receivers because it's a lot more variant week to week and guys don't need the huge volume to pay off, right, Like a guy sees a few targets, but he can go to eighty and one and get in your score. So you can take a ton of receivers by only having a few running back roster spots. I've since tailored that to like even be a little riskier, like only take two running backs early and still stop at four, and you can take a chance on you know, Ronald Jones or a Pollard late and still sneaking an elite wide receiver.

00:21:02
Speaker 1: So you talked about your tight end strategy a little bit, that you like to go after the elite tight ends.

00:21:06
Speaker 2: Is that what you do in almost all of your drafts.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: And if you don't get one of those elite tight ends, are you just waiting and waiting and then drafting three?

00:21:13
Speaker 2: Is that generally your approach?

00:21:15
Speaker 3: It really depends on the player pool. What I've done so far this year, So this is a little specific to this year. But if I don't get I guess like, if I'm at the one two turn, I absolutely love getting one of Waller or Kittle. I haven't gotten a lot of Kelsey in any drafts because he goes really early. You know, he's going like middle of the first round. Now if I'm at the back end of the first round, at the five to sixth turn, I don't mind grabbing Hockinson, Pitt's, Mark Andrews there. You know, I just love to build structurally so much that I reach out. I do reach on those guys a little bit, maybe even a little bit more than my rankings have to get the structure. There's just so much evidence that if you get a tight end that's churning out, you know, T one scores consistently and you don't have to waste the spot on a third TI tight end, it's really pretty big if I miss out on those guys. I feel like Tyler Higbee has been like a unique value that it's changed my strategy where I still go to But three tight ends is fine if you get into the double digit rounds and you just wait and you get three tight ends, and at that point you're like, Okay, I'm gonna sacrifice my ceiling at tight end, but I'm gonna devote such little draft capital to it and still get churnout usable weeks just because I'm taking three instead of two.

00:22:26
Speaker 2: So I'm gonna I'm gonna ask one more question for you.

00:22:29
Speaker 1: What do you think drafters mess up the most when drafting their best ball teams?

00:22:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've talked about this a little bit, both with the draft running backs early draft a lot of them but don't do at the same time, and also with the handcuff situation. But I think what people mess up most is they try to be too safe structurally and too risky on individual players, And we should be doing almost.

00:22:54
Speaker 2: The exact opposite.

00:22:56
Speaker 3: Where we should be banking structurally on like some of our early picks, we should just kind of be assuming they work out. Like That's how we milk the most value out of our early picks is making the optimal construction assuming our first round pick hits. You know, you can't and a lot of times what people do is they'll really try. You know, they'll take six running backs even they took two to three early because they're worried if they get hurt or they bust you know they want to be covered, and it just ends up situation where if those running backs early get hurt, their win rates drop anyways, and if the running backs stay healthy, well they've wasted roster spots because they're never using those running backs. Of course, so running backs like the best example of this, but people play it too safe structurally and then too risky with individual players, which is kind of like the ceiling conversation. You know, they reach on guys that think have this huge ceiling and they devalue just having a ton of usable weeks. So kind of like risky structure, but within that structure, just making sure that you're you know, really optimizing around your early round picks and you know, not devaluing just getting usable week out of your entire roster.

00:24:02
Speaker 1: Awesome, awesome stuff, Mike. I really appreciate you hopping on. If any of you aren't following Mike in his work, you can find him on Twitter at two Hats one Mic. That's the number two hats number one Mike, and definitely check out his work over on establishtharun dot com and you can find me on Twitter. I'm at late Round QB. And make sure you're subscribed to the Late Round podcast, which you can pretty much find anywhere podcasts.

00:24:23
Speaker 2: Can be found. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll catch you later in the week.