Becoming a Best Ball Bro: What Just Happened?

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Rich.

00:00:02
Speaker 2: We just celebrated the new year. You got any resolutions this year?

00:00:06
Speaker 3: You know what, I'm pretty focused on getting my adult things in order. Like today, I actually did some car insurance stuff that I've been putting off. I'm very proud of myself and yeah, twenty twenty five, I'm really trying to focus on being a productive adult.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: What about you, JJA, I have one resolution this year. It's to not invest in a Brian Callahan offense ever. Again. I'm JJ, and I've been playing in best ball leagues for years. But there are people out there who play a lot more than I do, and there are people out there who have won a lot more than I have, and I want to learn from them. This season, I'll be documenting my journey of max entering Underdog's Best.

00:00:45
Speaker 1: Ball Mania contest, and I'll be doing so.

00:00:48
Speaker 2: With guidance from some of the most successful best ball players on the planet. This is the year where things start to change. This is the year where I officially become a Best ball Bro. Welcome into another episode of becoming a Best ball Bro. I'm JJ Zacharieson and I am joined as always by my co host Rich Ryan Rich.

00:01:16
Speaker 1: What's going on?

00:01:16
Speaker 4: Buddy doing good Man.

00:01:17
Speaker 3: The last time we talked, the Jets hadn't lost a game yet, I hadn't burnt all my money on best Ball, I hadn't lost every season long fantasy championship. I was in hope, sprung eternal. But here we are, new year. Knew me JJ good to see Bud.

00:01:33
Speaker 1: That's right. I like the attitude.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: It's sort of the you know, like my my Jalen McMillan stance, you know, never wrong, just early right where that's right.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: I was in on Jalen McMillan this season.

00:01:44
Speaker 2: And I was I was still telling people to add him despite his point seven yards per route run rate, you know, whenever the Chris Godwin injury happened. But but things things turned around for McMillan. The funny thing about McMillan, this is a total tangent, but the funny thing about McMillan is that one one of his top comps in the ZAT model last year, and this is in the Prospect Guy, the late round prospect Guy from last year, one of his top three comps was Amen Ross Saint Brown and he kind of went, I mean not to the same degree that AARs B did, but the way he produced down the stretch was very Aman Ross Saint Brown esque. I'm really excited to see what he ends up doing. You know, moving forward, this is not a Jalen McMillan show, but uh it was now I mean even from even from a real football perspective, when it was third and gotta have it, who did Baker go to?

00:02:29
Speaker 1: That's right?

00:02:30
Speaker 4: What tire guy? Dalen?

00:02:31
Speaker 3: And and by the way, I still don't think Liam Cohen knows that Jalen McMillan is a slot player.

00:02:35
Speaker 4: He refused to put him in regardless.

00:02:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's the thing is that, like he can play inside out, Like he's not even playing the position that I thought and most projected him to play. You know, they threw Chris Godwin in there for good. I mean Godwin was eating before that injury, and that feels like a lifetime ago at this point. But uh, you know they throw in, uh, Jalen McMillan, and he was playing the perimeter for I mean, they Sterling Shepherd playing the slot a little bit. You know, they moved Mike Evans inside even more frequently than Jayleen McMillan.

00:03:05
Speaker 1: But I think those reps helped.

00:03:06
Speaker 2: And at the end of the day, now they're in the playoffs and we might be able to get a little McMillan action in the playoffs, which, by the way, everybody promo code late Round on Underdog. Right now, there are playoff contests. You can get a nice deposit offer at the moment if you go and you play. But I've been I've been doing some Mitten drafts. I started this week. Now I know that I've become a best ball bro but I did not get into the playoff contests until Week eighteen ended, only because of time from a timing perspective and stuff like, I just I needed to take a little bit of a break after the season long season ended. I have no time during the season long season, you know, and so you know, the holidays happened. I just didn't really sit down and I didn't want to join these contests having no idea what was going on. But for people who aren't aware of what's going on with some of these playoff contests, it's really fun. Like I've been doing the Mitten five dollars entries. You can max up to one fifty with some Mitten drafts today and I will all week long going to get I don't think I'm gonna max, but i'll I mean, the drafts go quickly, so it's really easy to just kind of go and just go and go and go with these drafts.

00:04:11
Speaker 1: But it's cool.

00:04:12
Speaker 2: I mean, it's a similar structure to what you experience if you made the playoffs and any of the contests for your season long best ball, where in round one you've got to advance out of your pod. Then there's a new one in round two, and so on and so forth. So you want to be cognizant of a team that has a buy like the Chiefs are the Lions, and not only stacking those teams, because you do need some production here in the first.

00:04:36
Speaker 1: Round, in the wild card round of the playoffs so.

00:04:38
Speaker 2: That you can then move on and then hopefully have your Lions and your Chiefs kind of enter the picture and help your lineups out. But it's really like it's a crazy mind game. The playoff contests are the first couple that I did. My teams were horrific, like just horrifically bad because I didn't have the flow to it. But once you start to see how things kind of go, oh, and you can download my rankings on the patreon, the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon. But once I saw how things kind of went, I started to get a little bit more comfortable. And it's fun to team I mean, you can team stack and you got to kind of stray away from ADP a bit in this more than usual, just because you want your teams to survive. If you draft the Buccaneers and a lot of Buccaneers and they lose this weekend, then that entry's dust, right, So there's a lot of game three, a lot of strategy to it. It's a lot of fun. Check it out Underdog Fantasy dot com. Are you doing any playoff stuff?

00:05:28
Speaker 3: I usually do one of those pools where you can only use a player once.

00:05:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have.

00:05:34
Speaker 3: I have a gridyin gamble friend that that runs one of those pools, and that's that's fun as well, because you know, you can only use a player once. If you save a player and their team goes bust, though, then you can never use that player. So yeah, a lot of fun stuff this summer year.

00:05:48
Speaker 2: It's fun, and you know, it's a little bit Those are I found at least a little bit easier than they used to be because of the seven teams instead of the six.

00:05:55
Speaker 1: When it was six teams.

00:05:56
Speaker 2: On each side, you you literally ran the risk of not having a quarterback in the Super Bowl, like if you didn't plan it right and or if there were some upsets you didn't expect.

00:06:03
Speaker 1: Now there's seven.

00:06:04
Speaker 2: I do one that's superflex, which makes it it's kind of insane and fun, right because you can you know, I'm generally if it's full PPR also, so I'm generally just kind of throwing a wide receiver in there in.

00:06:14
Speaker 1: Some rounds and stuff like that.

00:06:16
Speaker 2: But it does make it interesting because you could play two quarterbacks if you know, for instance, the Steelers are likely going to lose this weekend. You know I'm knocking out Wood though you know I still want I still want my team.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: To get the W.

00:06:26
Speaker 2: But if you know they're they're gonna lose this weekend, just throw Russell Wilson in that second super flex box. He's probably gonna score more points than you know, a lot of the wide receivers he would choose there. But really fun format that is the one and done ones. But definitely check out Underdog. Check out the tournaments and the contest they got going on but Rich, Today's episode is really about the question that I've gotten relentlessly over the last month. I'm not even talking about like since the season ended. I'm talking like once December hit and people more and more people were talking about Best Ball and their results of their Best Ball teams. People just kept asking, how are your teams doing? How are your teams doing? And I told them I am going to be doing a recap episode with Rich at the end of the season. I promise you I'm going to be transparent because this is a learning experience for me. Right, I can say on the season longside, things went well this year.

00:07:16
Speaker 1: Right, it was a weird year.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: In terms of, you know, because obviously there's a connection between Season long and Best Ball. It's not a one to one, which we'll get to, but you know, there was a it was a weird season from a running back perspective. But I preach hero RB, so I kind of play in the middle there where like it's not necessary to fade or you know, to just go zero RB. Although I did win a big industry league going zero RB this year. Thank you Chase Brown and Bucky Irving.

00:07:42
Speaker 4: Chase Brown, Yeah, of course, Chase.

00:07:45
Speaker 1: Brown was on it. Yeah, but yeah, it was.

00:07:47
Speaker 2: It was a weird year from a running back perspective, and that's what leads me to Best Ball and my best ball season. We had a lot of guests come on the show, a lot of pros, Best ball pros, and admittedly, and I don't think that they would hide from this, some of them had pretty poor seasons as from a Best Ball perspective, and my season from a Best Ball perspective was not very strong. I'd probably get give it a four out of ten if I were to rate it. I had a below average advance rate and BBM. What was interesting though, is that some of my advance rates, like the Big Board where I did I only did fifty one drafts in the Big Board. You know, you can max center that. I didn't max enter that because it was kind of early on in the season. I'm probably going through this year though, you know, my Big Board stuff was actually really good. I had a great advance rate, ended up getting a finals team in the Big Board. Also had a Mini Schnauzer I think the seventh Mini Schnauzer seven finalist and that I'm going to put that in my Twitter bio real quick. So you know, I had like the big Board team, so with BBM, I'll go to BBM with BBM low advance rate. But we saw in week fifteen a lot of the things that worked for teams from weeks one to fourteen did not work well in week fifteen. AKA, you know, I think Derrick Henry had a down game, Saquon Barkley headed down game, and that obviously hurts advanced rates. So for folks who don't recall or didn't play BBM, you know, weeks one to fourteen, you try to get top two in your league and your pod that's out of twelve teams. Then you advance forward and there's a new pod that you got to get first, right or first or is it first in the first all first?

00:09:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So you just keep getting first in these new pods.

00:09:24
Speaker 2: So so week fifteen you try to get first, Week sixteen you try to get first, and then week seventeen is the big five hundred plus team. You know, you need some volatility and some variation from the other lineups. Now, what was interesting is I had a below average advanced rate pretty well like a decently well below average. I lost seven teams. I think it was from Week fourteen to fifth, so like or week thirteen to fourteen, like, I was at like basically at expectation, and then everything went south that final week, which kind of sucked. But what was interesting was that after week fifteen I was back and I had two semi final teams in BBM, which is effectively what you would expect if you max enter BBM. So I don't know, it was an interesting sort of like roller coaster that I went through with this stuff where most of the year I was slightly because you can check with like BBM database. Props to the person who's running that, because it became like the go to resource for all of us best ball bros. But I mean I would share with you rich every week where my advance rate was. It was hovering like the twenty three to twenty five range for most of the season, and then it just face planted the last week and it was awful. It was terrible, But then I got two semi final teams. Those two semi final teams unfortunately didn't hit in Week sixteen, so I didn't get a Week seventeen team, but I did in the Big Board. That Big Board team was actually a little bit of a sweat going into that final game with San franciscoing Detroit. I had a Jared Goff, Jmo Amen Ross Saint Browns stack. If Jmo and Jared Goff would have connected, like Jamior Gibbs had that long touchdown at the end of that game, if Goff and Jamo would have connected, I would have probably been top fifty in the big board with that lineup. So it was really close. It was a fun sweat, and then the Mini Schnauzer was just like a kind of a whatever team. But overall, overall four out of ten wouldn't recommend going through what I just went through in terms of the results, but the experience nine out of ten, great experience.

00:11:21
Speaker 1: It was a fun time.

00:11:23
Speaker 3: Jamier gives another one of those players that he became the nuts after Montgomery got hurt, but his Week fifteen he only had thirty yards in a touchdown. So yeah, I'll say I only did across all Best Ball drafts. I did eighty and like you, I had a poor advancement rate, but then I actually had from advanced to semis. I was above weight, but my two semis were just absolute dust.

00:11:46
Speaker 4: I think if it as.

00:11:47
Speaker 3: Dead last in both both of my pods, and yeah, I'm very interested to dig into specifics of things that went haywire and things that we can learn about two things that definitely tanked me.

00:12:01
Speaker 4: But yeah, let the people know.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're going to go through all that. One thing, I do want to give a shout. So what was really interesting about this season? Well, you mentioned so we had a late round Fantasy Football patron, a subscriber, Coop, who had a stack he had He had gibbs in that final game going into that game against San Francisco. He ended up getting sixth place in BBM. Coop did props to him, he said that, and he put this in the discord in the Late Round Fantasyball discord. He said that he used the rankings and he used becoming a bestball bro you know, as as guidance. This was his first year he max entered and he walked away with two hundred and forty thousand dollars, which was sweet. Now it's funny because he had a really solid advance rate.

00:12:44
Speaker 1: I know that a better one than I did, much better than I did.

00:12:47
Speaker 2: And I was like, I talked about this with you privately throughout like the season and such and it's it's kind of interesting. So the way that I handled my Best Ball rankings for subs and stuff was that I took my season and I was transparent about this. I wrote about this in whenever I would publish the rankings, but I would take my season long rankings and I just wrote a little formula that would translate them to be Best Ball rankings, right, and you know, I'd eyeball it, make sure it looked good and people could or couldn't use them.

00:13:19
Speaker 1: If they wanted to use them, they could use them whatever.

00:13:22
Speaker 2: And what was interesting about that this leads me into sort of the number one thing that I think went wrong for me with Best ball Mania is obviously, in season long versus Best Ball on Underdog this season especially, you're going a lot more running back heavy than you would in Best Ball, Right. We talked about that all off season. How you know, the guests talked about it too. How you got to get you know, Hayden Wings had the four wide receivers through seven rounds, kind of rule of thumb you got to go wide receiver heavy or else you felt like you were really behind at the position, right, And so but in season long, it's a little bit different, right, It's the ADP is completely different. You're drafting running backs in different sp and so my season long rankings were pretty generically running back heavy versus what you would see in a BBM or any other Best Ball draft on Underdog, and my rankings in the formula that I used to translate my season long to best Ball ended up actually being a little bit more running back heavy than what ADP suggested at Underdog. And so actually a lot of the subs like Coop ended up doing well with those rankings. But I, the person who created those rankings, straight away from them way too much. And that's my number one lesson learned was I had too much structure with in particular my BBM drafts. If I look at my other contests that I entered where I kind of played around a little bit more, where I was kind of just getting reps and wanted to like try things out, I did better in those contests, And I asked myself why, and I think it's because I used BBM as sort of this. I put it on a pedestal and said, I don't want to waste any of these entries that I have, right, you know, I did the live streams.

00:15:01
Speaker 1: I was so focused on them whenever I was.

00:15:03
Speaker 2: Doing them and and all that, and I didn't mind the structure of the of the drafts that I that I you know, when I drafted them, But in hindsight, I didn't have enough variation of the structure itself. A lot of my teams were zero RB, A lot of my teams were hero RB. And what's really funny is that one of the things that we talked about on the last episode of this before the season started was what could tank our best ball season?

00:15:27
Speaker 1: Right?

00:15:28
Speaker 2: And one of the things that I mentioned was the Round two to Round four running backs, right, Kien Williams Derrick Henry. You know, I did make the stand that I had Derrick Henry over Kien Williams, which I think probably ended up being a W. Right that, like, at least that micro take was was a W. But the overall, me having like four percent exposure to those guys was was an L.

00:15:51
Speaker 1: Was a huge L.

00:15:52
Speaker 2: And you know, not only in that but a lot of the wide receivers that went in that range, the Houston guys or you know Amari Cooper who went in the fourth round pretty frequently, or like a lot of these players didn't pan out. They were they were pretty bad, and so I think a big lesson for me is not so much. You know, obviously this year was a very like pro running back year. If you drafted heavy earlyerund running backs, you had a great advance rate, you probably made money, you did a good job. I'm not really walking away from the season being like, we got to do that every single year. There's a lot to dissect, there's a lot to break down on me doing that in the podcast throughout the offseason. But for me, it's more so being more open within the BBM, you know, even though I have limited entries of one hundred and fifty, being open to really changing the structure around more than I did. Right, a lot of times I was just a robot going hero or zero RB with an elite tight end and maybe getting a quarterback in there as well early and then just kind of going with that structure over and over again. That's kind of a losing way of approaching.

00:16:54
Speaker 1: This in my opinion.

00:16:55
Speaker 2: Now now in hindsight, right while I'm doing it, I'm like, oh, this is what we've been talking about, and this is what the the pros were talking about. But a lot of the pros, you know, like Leoni is is almost infinite. Mike Leoni who was on the show, he was almost like infamous at this point for being for sort of flattening his exposure more than some of the other folks do. But he had a great advance rate because he chained structure up like he was cognizant to say, you know, I'm gonna get some Josh Jacobs here. I'm gonna be you know. And so that I think was probably the biggest mistake. If I were to hone in on one like high level thing, that would be the one thing.

00:17:30
Speaker 4: When you talk about structure.

00:17:31
Speaker 3: The thing that killed me is I went high variants at the quarterback position in that I literally never well, I think once I took more than two quarterbacks once. I was very married to two quarterback build. I was okay with the variants of if one of them goes down because I wanted to really attack running back, receiver and tight end. Unfortunately, that comes back to bite you when one of your highest done quarterbacks is JJ McCarthy and he shreads his acl for this season can even start, and it's annoying because Sam Donald did so well this year and this might sound nutty to people out there that I think JJ McCarthy could have put together a similar season. Like people are going to play captain hindsight and say, well, Sam Donald's great this year, and it's like, well, Sam Donald of qualifying quarterbacks since he was scrafted, Sam Donald in terms of EPA per play was fifty five of sixty two coming into this season. So it wasn't like Sam Donald was like some great player that came into the season predictively and had a great season. He was very much a product of KOC and that environment in Minnesota, and I think JJ McCarthy could have done some similar fectseimbly of that. So that's one thing that killed me, and the other in the samular vein with here areb is one of my favorite builds was mid late first round to go Bjon bresee one of those running backs as my hero, and then kind of dump RB until yeah, and the teams where I got Chase Brown later I did good, and the teams where I didn't. I had a hero RB that had a very poor season in either Bijon or Brice based on draft capital, and that kind of left being Nomanslain.

00:19:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Breece, especially like at least Beijon.

00:19:16
Speaker 2: I don't know what the advanced rates were, but Breece was definitely the big l I would assume out of the first round. You know, the way that they used him and his injury and all that, and the way that the Jets offense hold your ears, cover your ears rich, the way the Jets offense just imploded. Yeah, I mean, it's it's tough if you kind of skipped over the Jacobs the you know, Rashad White was actually kind of had like an underrated season and under valve like he was still okay, you know enough. Joe Mixon obviously had a monster season. So like that group and up until you know, you get to like Hyen Derrick Henry. You know, you could throw Saquon and Jonathan Taylor in there too if you want to. But if you weren't overweight on those guys, you you probably had a losing season, like at the end of the day, and they just so happened to be clustered the way that they did. The one thing I do want to point out, I don't think that it was a horrific process way of approaching this. To approach your drafts in a zero RB way or in that fashion because everyone looks back at the season and they're gonna say, oh, running backs were really good. These were early around running backs really good. There were a lot of really good hits late too. This was just a year of the running back period right where we did have Chase Brown, we did have Chewba Hubbard, we did have even James Connor who went pretty late in these drafts at times, like there were some really good Bucky Irving obviously being another one, Like there were some really really big hits that it was still a scenario of you know, did you get the right guy? And that's something that I do want to talk about though with my with another point here of what I did wrong and incorrectly is being too confident in player stances. And I don't mean that as in like, you know, obviously you know you can, you you you should and you can be bold right Like that's totally fine to be over exposed to a player that you truly truly believe. And I think that's what makes fantasy football awesome and fun, is you know, as much as I am a process oriented and game theory oriented analyst, player takes are important still like that, there's.

00:21:15
Speaker 1: No doubt about it.

00:21:16
Speaker 2: And but I do think that, you know, there is a very big difference between you know, what we see in season long where you go all in on Camani Videll in round thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, and being able to drop him after you see what JK. Dobbins does in the first couple weeks of the season, you know, versus what that happened, what that does in Bestball. And we talked about that pretty openly on this show. We talked about Videll in particular, and so like, I don't want to use him as you know the example here necessarily, but it is a good learning and it is a good example of you know, player stances, you know, understanding that there is this range of outcome where you could take a zero. And I don't think that I factored even that in enough to the point where, you know, I look at someone like Courtland Sutton for instance, where Sutton was someone who I'm like, oh, he doesn't really have that high of a ceiling. You know, he's playing with a rookie quarterback. Usually these kinds of profiles just don't get like they can hit, they can exceed ADP expectation, but they usually don't hit that that much, right, Well, it hit pretty hard for Courtland Sutton, Like it was a really good pick at the end of the day. But on top of that, even if it didn't go to the degree that it did, it still was a good pick. And this is what a lot of you know, some folks even brought this up, some of the guests brought this up on the show, that Sutton was a decent selection this year, and I kind of, I don't want to say, brushed it off, but you know, I went back to my season long analysis and I'm like, ah, this isn't the kind of profile that you really want to target and be heavily invested in. But realistically, you got to look at the floor ceiling comb and you gotta look at that floor. You got to really focus on the floor more than I was. That was one of the big struggles for me, you know, was not really separating best ball in season long enough from that perspective. But then also Rich I want to take that a step further and say the team element that the team perspective the looking at an offense and saying this is the offense that's gonna blow up this year. I don't think that we should be doing that in best ball, like I think in season long it's fine because you can make up for that mistake and season long, if you miss a fifth round pick, if you miss a sixth round pick, and I've written about this for a decade now, it doesn't sink your team. So if you went after Calvin Ridley, let's say it didn't really sink your team. Not that I was really high on him in general, but like if you got him, because you're like, hey, the Tennessee offense is going to be good this year because they got Brian Callahan and things are looking better. They're gonna be more up tempo whatever, and you know they will Levis who likes to chuck it down the field. If that was your stance and you drafted Calvin Ridley in season long, okay, Like he has a rough start of the year, he finished okay, But you're probably able to just pick someone up off the waiver wire and fill or someone on your bench like a Lad mcconkee that you got a couple of rounds later, and just slot them in and you're fine.

00:24:02
Speaker 1: It's no big deal.

00:24:04
Speaker 2: But I don't think that there's enough reason to go heavily and investing these like unknown entities at the team level when the ceiling for those teams probably is not going to be significantly high. Like, and this is what we should have had the conversation with more when we talked about the Titans a lot in the in the in the offseason and during the summer, was like.

00:24:27
Speaker 1: What is the what are the odds, what's the chance.

00:24:30
Speaker 2: That this Tennessee offense ends up being a top ten offense in touchdowns per game? Like, what is the real chance of that happening? And then look at the players in that offense, right, I mean, Tony Pollard had a good year obviously mostly I'd say that part of that was due to Tajay Spears being banged up throughout the season. But like, you know, the passing attack, DeAndre Hopkins, Calvin Ridley, look at the alternatives that were going in their ranges. You probably should have just been throwing darts at players in objectively good offenses in the jam Os of the world, right, Like, even if we didn't have a good backbone for him as a player, we knew that Detroit or someone said like George Kittle, Right, we knew that those players were going to be attached to an offense that had a floor that was more than likely an eightieth percentile outcome for the Titans offense, you know what I mean. And I think that is something that is more glaring in the best ball environment because you cannot make up for that mistake if you hit on that offense. Sure, and I don't know if there was that offense like very clear, like Washington was one of them, maybe you could consider like Denver, but don't I don't know if there was like that offense, and we might be just blanking and someone's just gonna come after us and be like you're I think.

00:25:45
Speaker 3: The only surprise offense quote unquote was the Carolina Panthers after Andy Dalton got into a car accident. But like, like, what how the way we got there, the way we got to Thiland being a value, you Tuba being of value, Like that was a very strange way of navigating to them being value. But yeah, I can't, off the top of my head think of the surprise offense this year.

00:26:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the big projects I'm going to take on this year for the draft guide and stuff, is going to be looking at, like what is the true range of outcomes for these teams that are entering the season after having a year with like, you know, thirty offensive touchdowns or twenty five offensive touchdowns something something low like that, versus an offense that is consistently you know, like like Detroit bucked any regression analysis that anyone did in terms of like scoring touchdowns this year. They're like one of two or three teams since twenty eleven that was able to improve upon their touchdown totals after being over fifty touchdowns in a season or three like three and a half touchdowns per game or something like that. So like they bucked the trend, but even still like San Francisco, San Francisco was still.

00:26:52
Speaker 1: Good offensively, Like it's not like George like that.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: That's the thing that really kind of haunts me to a degree, even invested in Jacksonville, which you know, we saw that work out with Brian Thomas, who was my number one exposed player in bastball wide receiver in Best Ball this year. But like I do think there is something to be said about just playing it a little conservatively in Best Ball in terms of the team environment and kind of picking players off of those teams and getting high exposure to them in your individual lineups. I know it sounds so obvious, but even look at like the Cincinnati backfield, we knew, we knew rich that that backfield was going to be fruitful if and when one of those guys won out right and we hitched our wage, like we ended up going with Chase Brown as our you know, are more of our go to I still got some Zach Moss, don't get me wrong, but like what if we were just bolder with that like idea and that notion, and instead of being at eighteen percent Chase Brown, we were at twenty five percent Chase Brown. That's the kind of stuff that I think the people have done this a while kind of just inherently know and don't vocalize enough. Because in season long, you can, again you can get away with trying to find that team.

00:28:09
Speaker 1: You know you can. It's not that big of a deal because when you do find.

00:28:12
Speaker 2: That team, you're gonna get a league winner, period, and it's gonna obviously help in best Ball too, But there's a lot more risk associated with trying to guess who that team is.

00:28:21
Speaker 4: I mean, speaking of Cincinnati.

00:28:22
Speaker 3: You just look at Saturday Night, Khalil Herbert basically comes off the couch and gets twenty carries in eight targets, right like, absolutely absolutely gets fed. I'm gonna get touchdowns per game. The only team that is a surprise maybe is Tampa. Tampa forth that that was a surprise for me. Yeah, I still, I mean it's that it was all Ripe, It's it's Evans, it's Godwin, Like Kate Totten is a tight end, We're okay with.

00:28:48
Speaker 4: Then Baker's gonna put the ball down the field, Like.

00:28:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think it goes back to what I've said, Like what I'm what I really want to study this offseason is injecting our subjectivity in our vibes to these teams versus just saying, like, were they good last year in terms of touchdowns per game? What does that look like year over year when there aren't certain changes going on in the offense, right Like, we didn't know what Liam Cohen was gonna be, Like, we didn't know that he was a god as an offensive coordinator, right Like, we.

00:29:16
Speaker 1: Didn't know that this was going to happen.

00:29:18
Speaker 2: And you know, I did send a tweet out showing that I had like eight percent Bucky this year in Best Ball and my BBM portfolio right before the season started, and four percent Rashad White. And I went on a journey with Bucky Irving to the point where, like I.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: My prospect model didn't like him. I wasn't that into him.

00:29:36
Speaker 2: And then the offseason starts to happen, you know, the summer starts to happen, He's getting some hype, and I'm like, I guess I gotta throw some darts here. So I at least was at market with Bucky Irving. But like, yeah, I think Tampa Bay is probably the team that if you hit on that team and Godwin was approaching you know, amazing godlike numbers, you know, for him this year before the injury happened. I just think that if you're able to play it more conservative and have your player takes within the scope of those teams and then just wait for the later rounds to throw those darts of those other guys, probably logical. Now, obviously ADP is gonna correlate with this, and like better teams are going to have players getting drafted earlier, But there is there was no reason in hindsight to even be remotely drafting Amari Cooper right like, like I was optimistic about the Browns offense passing attack because Ken Dorsey was a pass heavy coordinator, which we saw happen, Like, look at what happened when Jamis Winston took over.

00:30:36
Speaker 1: I don't feel bad about that take and that stance.

00:30:40
Speaker 2: I feel bad that the Deshaun Watson stuff was very much more a season long stance and a best ball stance, right Like. That's that's the problem is that you can make up throw it. Like someone on Reddit made fun of me for liking Deshaun Watson this past season and my draft guide.

00:30:55
Speaker 1: And I'm like, why would you not?

00:30:57
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter, it's free, it's a last round pick, and if he doesn't pan out, it literally doesn't matter, right best ball does? It matters a lot? And that was the You make way too many assumptions. This is another thing I do want to get to the last point. It's so easy to make assumptions with how you think a season and a team is going, like how a season's going to go down, and how a team is going to use their players and deploy their players. Deshaun Watson's a great example of that. Maybe he would have started the whole year, okay, But when a dude's bad, and you have to recognize, like I knew, in his range of outcomes, it could have gone that way.

00:31:34
Speaker 1: When a dude is that bad, you got to.

00:31:36
Speaker 2: Recognize that it could be that bad and it's going to impact everyone else on that team right now. Fortunately, I had a lot of Jerry Judy because of Deshaun Watson, and he popped off at the right time for everybody. But we'll accept the playoffs whenever Jamis Winston got bench. But you know, there's just a lot of like you know, nuanced all of that. But one of the things in this last point that I want to make, I think that we can't make assumptions either about what we think things are going to look like from a player perspective, individual player perspective in weeks fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen and seventeen and so on, you know, the latter parts of the season versus where we're at the beginning of the season. Best example of this rich the Panthers backfield. Okay, Cuba Hubbard was fine in season long in my opinion as a draft pick, because if you win zero RB, you knew you were going to get some production from him to start the season. And Best Ball I largely faded Cuba. I think out of my one hundred and fifty Best ball Mania teams, I had to Cuba Hubbard teams, which I'm saying that on a podcast of thousands of people, and you guys can all laugh at me and call me an idiot.

00:32:39
Speaker 1: It was a mistake.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: It was a massive, massive mistake. My season long teams I didn't do that. My Best Ball teams I did. And I'm out here drafting Jonathan Brooks in the eighth round, you know, around guys like James Connor because of what we could see towards the end of the year. What I think we need to do is just look at different archetypes instead of looking at the individual teams and the players playing those teams. So what I mean is throw darts in the later rounds at rookie wide receivers. I think that's still fine because in the second half of the season, you know, when you get into the into the playoffs and these Best Ball contests, if one of these guys pops off, which we see rookie wide receivers do pretty frequently, and Jayalen McMillan being a good example this year. That's a huge advantager you're going to have if your portfolio has a decent number of those guys.

00:33:26
Speaker 1: Don't go over, don't go crazy.

00:33:29
Speaker 2: With those types of players in the last in the latter rounds of your draft, because you're not going to get any production from them for most of the season, if at all. Right, because the hit rates are going to be super super strong, but when they do hit, it is strong. So sprinkle those guys in. But when it comes to saying this running back and this backfield is going to go this exact way. Therefore I'm going to have this insane exposure differential between the two. That was a really, really big mistake that was probably from a player take standpoint, the biggest reason.

00:33:57
Speaker 1: Why my best ball teams weren't strong this year.

00:34:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think one of the real killers on my rosters in terms of taking zeros were some of the rookie receivers that you you briefly alluded to, like right after the middle class elite rookie receiver Cliff Yeah, I mean it it just Jalen Polk, Jerome Baker, Jermaine Burton, Troy Franklin, Like, all right, pet, these guys, these guys absolutely tanked it. Where so here are receivers you could have taken after Jermaine Burton went. Last snapshot I took was pick one eighty two was Jermaine Burton after him. Some of these are sexier than others. Quentin Johnston, Jalen Naylor, Alec Pierce, Elijah Moore, Cedric Tillman, Juwan Jennings. You laugh, but Alan Lazard Lozard was absolutely cooking before his abdominal injury. And then the guy who crushed it at the end of the season. Old means a case. So yeah, some of these olds, some of these guys who we know they have a role. They've proven to us that they are functional professional football players, that they can go out and command targets and make use of them. Some of them fell to the wayside because we were so enamored by these mystery box items that didn't have the pedigree of a Lad mcconki, that didn't have the pedigree of a Jalen McMillan. Right, like we we we fell in love with these guys, and sometimes you just got to click the olds.

00:35:33
Speaker 4: In this part of the draft.

00:35:35
Speaker 2: I think it goes back to what I was saying too, where like I, I, you know this year to be I haven't done the analysis and run the analysis, but I do think that I would imagine that rookie wide receivers late because there weren't many good day three rookie wide receivers. I mean, I can't even think of one on the top of my head that you know, broke out and did like well right, and so because of that, we had a down year more than likely four rook late round rookie wide receivers. But that being said, there's such a volatile pick. It could go really well, it could go really south. But I don't think after going through this experience of becoming a Best Ball bro, I don't think that season long volatility is necessarily something that you need to embrace all the time in Best Ball, right.

00:36:17
Speaker 4: I think these zeros, man, they just they just thank you.

00:36:20
Speaker 3: They you look at your roster, you know it's week thirteen, You're like, oh, I need the outscore of this guy by thirty points. But I have this guy who it's literally and he's not even hurt. But this human being has no chance for getting me any point.

00:36:34
Speaker 1: You're zero.

00:36:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, at least at least there's at least there's hope if you got Alec Pierce or something. I mean, to be fair, you know, maybe Pierce isn't the bad because you know, we thought that ad Night Mitchell would have a bigger role than he did. But like there are plenty of guys you just mentioned and talked about that we're more locked in than some of the other rookies and such that that we're there. I think that getting rookie wide receivers is still a good idea. What I don't think is a good idea is.

00:36:58
Speaker 1: Going overboard with rookie wide receivers in the same team.

00:37:00
Speaker 2: And I also think that we need to be very cognizant when a rookie wide receiver in an undesirable situation who was not even an elite wide receiver, right, not talking Brian Thomas, I don't look.

00:37:12
Speaker 1: Lad McConkie to me wasn't.

00:37:14
Speaker 2: Like an elite prospect, but he was a saw like my model liked Lad McConkie similarly to Ricky Piersoll right, and then below them a little bit was like Keon Coleman, and then below him was Jalen Polk okay. Now Polk still graded okay because of teammates scorer and because of his.

00:37:32
Speaker 1: Draft capital, but Polk's ADP. And I remember talking.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: About this with people because this was one of the one of the rare ws that I had in Best Ball this year.

00:37:41
Speaker 1: His ADP.

00:37:41
Speaker 2: He was the one rookie wide receiver that was like significantly rising from the ladder ladder parts of the of the late rounds to like into the tenth round, like you know, into that eleventh round range where that didn't make much sense, like those are the land mines that I'm going to be very co was in weary of moving forward, whereas you know Ladi McConkey, who I wish I got more of. I wasn't four or against him, really, but Ladi McConkie at least had the situation in his favor, right, Like we knew that there wasn't much competition on wide receiver that he had justin Herbert Jalen Polk, not much competition on wide receiver, Jacobe Burssett and an unknown in Drake May right, Brian Thomas, you know some might be saying, well, what about Brian Thomas. Why were you on Brian Thomas because he was an elite prospect, like a really really really good prospect. He had a ninety five score in my prospect model, in the ZAP model, which told me, you know, guys in that range have hit very very well. And then Roma Dunze doesn't hit well. He has situationally, it's not there for him. It's really not there for him. So and I think that, you know, if injuries would have happened or you know, I think a lot of things just went south individually for the the Bears offense in general, for Rome not to hit. But I do think that like, you know, picking and choosing and being a little bit more aware and smart about out, you know, not just getting like Javon Baker because I'm going to get the next Pukainakua or something like that, I think is important, right And I think that you can also kind of make up for it in August when we get more information. If you're drafting in May and June, I don't think going heavily after those players is as necessary because the jump that we see in ADP, even if they are getting hyped, you know, is only going to be two or three rounds, it's and that's in the late rounds, right, that's it's just not significant enough for you to like want to invest that early on.

00:39:35
Speaker 1: So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some of the pros.

00:39:38
Speaker 2: Who end up listening to this will say, you know, I disagree, but I do think that we can kind of play the middle.

00:39:43
Speaker 1: A little bit better with the rookie wide receivers.

00:39:46
Speaker 3: That's a great point about August too, because that's a time where not only are we seeing preseason action, but we're also getting the intra squad reports as well. And if guys aren't getting burned then week one, they're probably not get burned at that point. And like you said, if we're cashing in on whatever two rounds of being ahead of market from twelve to ten, like that's not the type of EV that is going to be meaningful. Whereas like a running back injury, for example, that somebody that you were drafting in the middle rounds and then their counterpart gets hurt and all of a sudden they're going in the third, fourth round, Like that's real EV that you've pocketed. But yeah, some sort of like double digit round third string receiver.

00:40:30
Speaker 4: EV I don't think. I don't think that's very meaningful. It's over.

00:40:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, now that I experienced the whole summer of max entering and then going through all this too, I think that the one piece that I'll probably emphasize a lot next year is and this is this is anecdotal, right, so like someone's definitely done this analysis, but this is me spewing this. And again, this is why I love becoming a Best ball Berrow because I can just talk and say things and people aren't gonna sit there and wait for me to like have a strong take that's baked in analysis and stuff because I'm just learning this stuff as everyone else.

00:41:01
Speaker 3: Well people, Meanwhile, people are listening to you and winning six figures.

00:41:05
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah yeah.

00:41:06
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, meanwhile, Coop goes ound wins two hundred and forty k uh really cool, and I'm getting I'm getting two k in a in a big board contest. So so the one thing though that I that I want to say about like the games that you get in ADP, this is Best Balmania specific And again I did worse in Best Balmania than basically every other contest that I entered, aside from like I didn't do well in the marathon, but I didn't have many entries and stuff. In the sprint, I didn't do very well. But you know, it's a it's a it's a different kind of game. But with with BBM, you're drafting in May through August, right, and you have to you know, the benefit of drafting in May is that you get ADP discounts, right, And what I found, at least anecdotally, is I would imagine the ADP discounts that you get are going to be a lot more lucrative at the running back position than the wide receiver position, because we know that running backs can jump up if a guy gets hurt.

00:42:05
Speaker 1: If we just get some reports that you know.

00:42:07
Speaker 2: Look what happened to Chase Brown, right, Chase Brown rose like three rounds at one point because we got word that, you know, they really liked him and he was crushing camp and all this kind of stuff. And so I do think that we should probably have our stances early on running backs only and not really worry about what The only guy that had a crazy rise at wide receiver, I would imagine was Rashid Rice, and it was had nothing to do with anything football related, right, you know.

00:42:33
Speaker 1: Again this is this is more anecdotal.

00:42:35
Speaker 2: There's probably a wide receiver I'm not thinking of, but I would imagine that the running back position is the one that sees the biggest jump and gives you the biggest edge if you're able to sort of see things before they happen, you know, early on in the draft process versus like in August and stuff.

00:42:51
Speaker 4: Let's talk about some things that went right. We just went mad negative.

00:42:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know we did everything. I didn't. I didn't miss everything, thank god, thank god. It would have been would have been real bad.

00:43:00
Speaker 4: Like.

00:43:01
Speaker 1: Look, Brian Thomas is one of my favorite players in football right now.

00:43:04
Speaker 2: Because he was my MVP on the Fantasy Footballers Show this year. I went on, and you know, going on the biggest podcast in the fantasy football space and putting yourself out there and having arguably the best value in fantasy football being Brian Thomas.

00:43:21
Speaker 1: I'm very very happy about that, very very happy about Brian Thomas.

00:43:25
Speaker 2: And the reason for that is I do think there are you know, the stuff that I talked about a season long not converting to best ball.

00:43:32
Speaker 1: Some stuff still converts.

00:43:33
Speaker 2: Ambiguous backfields I think still generally convert you want to target running backs in backfields that are more ambiguous that we don't know who the starter is, but there's multiple running backs going in those like mid to late rounds who are on the same team together, which is what we saw with Cincinnati this year. We saw with Pittsburgh to a degree with Najie Harrison Jalen Warren. It's just that they you know, Jalen Warren was banged up for most of the season. I think he just had more ups as like a player than Naji Harris did, even though I had more Naji Harris than Warren. But then we saw it with Tennessee too, where an injury can happen and Tony Pollard ends up being, you know, a really good value from that perspective too. Whereas on the flip side, two of my biggest fades at running back this year were Zamir White, who, my god, the easiest fade in my opinion. I'm not trying to trash anyone who was on him, because I got stuff wrong too, but from my processes standpoint, that was one of the easiest fades in fantasy.

00:44:28
Speaker 1: Football history was was Zamir White? This year?

00:44:31
Speaker 2: It was like, you guys, you know, I get feedback all the time where people are like, you're not bold enough with your stances or whatever.

00:44:37
Speaker 1: You heard me be bold with Zamir.

00:44:38
Speaker 2: White, and you've heard me also be bold with Ramandre Stevenson, who had his moments, but overall a pretty down year for him versus where you were drafting Stevenson. So the ambiguous backfield thing and why they those kinds of archetypes are guys that you want to avoid is because they're projected to get all the work in their backfield. Yeah, Antonio Gibson was there. Yeah, Alexander Madison was there, but people thought saw them Zamir Whine and Ramandre Stevenson as Belle cow backs. Well, then you have to ask yourself why are they going in in the middle rounds? Why why aren't they draft Why aren't teams drafting them where Josh Jacobs is going, you know? And the answer to that is because they're not very good. They're not nearly as good as Josh Jacobs and some of the other guys who were going earlier, Right, And when you're not that good, there's an opportunity for other backs or the situations bad, but there's an opportunity for other backs to step in, which is what we saw in Vegas and even to some degree with Antonio Gibson getting run with Ramandre Stevenson in New England, so that was good. I talked about the elite rookie wide receivers. I think that we need to always focus on that. Even Xavier Worthy had you know, a decent like had some spike ceilings down the stretch. Xavier Worthy's rookie season kind of went the way that a lot of solid rookie wide receivers. It's kind of the way that those seasons go right. Starts out slow, a lot of boneheaded plays, a lot of questionable plays, but brought it together and was really productive.

00:46:05
Speaker 1: Down the stretch.

00:46:05
Speaker 2: So you know that, I think Worthy at the end of the day was not a bad process pick at all. And then the last thing is in these concepts translating from season long to best ball, the pocket passer trap right where we don't want to get early round pocket passers who don't have that much mobility to their profiles.

00:46:25
Speaker 1: We even saw it with Mahomes to a dude.

00:46:27
Speaker 2: I mean, like, I know that he gets a little bit more rushing juice than some of these guys, but Mahomes was one CJ.

00:46:32
Speaker 1: Stroud.

00:46:33
Speaker 2: You know, the only guy that you were not disappointed with that you drafted in the first in the single digit rounds who was not mobile was Joe Burrow, and that took an elitely bad defense right from from Cincinnati.

00:46:47
Speaker 1: And also Joe Burrow playing out of.

00:46:50
Speaker 2: His freaking mind all year long, or I guess after the first four games this season. Not to say that, I do think that that mobile quarterbacks and best ball are still a little bit overvalued, because when you look at the week to week fluctuations at quarterback, pocket passers are still giving you ceiling games. That's not the thing. It's more so that pocket passers are just generally more replaceable. You can get Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, those kinds of guys will step up. And we see this every year, even Jared Goff when he would fall in drafts. We see this every year with those pocket passers really can can match the production of some of the earlier round pocket passers.

00:47:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh, It's taken folks a while to get around to it. But running quarterbacks, the rushing is the floor. The passing will will always be the upside. But I mean, Jayden Daniels was that dude. This year of teams that finished the top ten in the finals, he was on six of the teams, including Team number two and Team number three. But that's because he was an incredible passer exactly on top of running the ball. I believe he finished fourth or fifth and epa per play. He was an absolute monster.

00:47:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Like we need that to happen. And same with like bo Nicks, Like bow Knicks had a good floor for rushing, but he ended up surprising everyone and he had a really really solid passing season and he's good, right, and so that's definitely you know, something to keep in mind is that, like the mobility is good, it can help ceiling too, because obviously you know you're getting more points for that, but you still need the passing numbers to be there for these guys to hit a true, true ceiling. Go look at like what Terrell Prior does, or look at what when Justin Fields has his spiked weeks. What's going on in those weeks. It's not that he's only running the football over and over again, It's that he ends up throwing, he ends up rushing for a touchdown and then throwing for two. You know, it's that he has the combination of scoring touchdowns. You just want touchdowns period at the quarterback position. Two more things I just want to I mean they're kind of or I guess three, but they're all like game theory driven in general. One thing that I think we did right, or at least I did, but I'm thinking that you probably did as well, because we were drafting pretty similarly.

00:48:51
Speaker 1: Is just general team balancing.

00:48:53
Speaker 2: You know, if you get a quarterback early, you don't need to get another quarterback early with them. I don't think that's a way that I'm going to differentiate per se. You know, when I talked about team structure, I do think that balancing is still really important where you you know, the amount of draft capital you spend at a position you know don't get you know, three elite tight ends.

00:49:13
Speaker 1: This doesn't make any sense. If you're gonna get three tight ends, get them late.

00:49:15
Speaker 2: I also think that, you know, this is something that Pete Overzet drives into people's heads a lot is focus. Yes, we focus on weeks one to fourteen, of course, but still only twenty five percent of the of the of the pie here right, Like perfect example is what happened with me and BBM my my. The number of semi final teams that I had was just as high as teams that had double the amount of playoff teams as I did in advanced teams. So, uh, just remember that, you know, twenty five percent of your season is weeks one to fourteen, despite that being such a large chunk in terms of time. And then the last point to make is that stacking is indeed important.

00:49:53
Speaker 3: It's almost like many moons ago, we knew that Lions liners and Packers likings are going to be the absolute fire orcs this thing.

00:50:01
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I mean, oh my gosh.

00:50:03
Speaker 2: The forty nine Ers Lions game that was like like it just felt like every time each team had the ball they were going to score a touchdown, Like it was unbelievable.

00:50:13
Speaker 1: Like if you have exposure to those games, it's it's important.

00:50:16
Speaker 2: So I don't think this year showed us that Week seventeen stacking is a bad idea. You know, obviously you got to kind of just get a little lucky and have the right combinations and stuff. But I think that we are still going to continue memorizing that week seventeen schedule every year.

00:50:34
Speaker 4: Got that right.

00:50:35
Speaker 3: I'm waiting for whatever the second Tuesday of March, whenever the NFL releases the schedule.

00:50:41
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, exactly, all right.

00:50:42
Speaker 2: Last thing I want to get to Rich, what are your thoughts as someone who comes from the poker space. You've been involved in different tournaments and stuff like that, and just knowing how.

00:50:54
Speaker 1: Some of that stuff is structured.

00:50:56
Speaker 2: What are your thoughts just some parting thoughts on what people have considered or what people have called pod luck. Right where you end up scoring, you know, in the semi finals one hundred and ninety points, but there just happens to be a team in your pod that scores two hundred and ten and they were impossible to beat, and now you're one hundred and ninety point team is out when another team scores one hundred and fifty and they do advance because their pod sucked. Like, what do you think that it's just a fun little characteristic of the game or do you think that people have the right to just be tilted over the whole experience?

00:51:33
Speaker 4: Oh, definitely both. I'm gonna steal a line from the wire.

00:51:35
Speaker 3: It's all on the game, baby, It's sometimes you're gonna get an easy table draw with a bunch of guys on vacation that are just there to have fun and play poker and splash around. And sometimes you're gonna be placed at a table with a bunch of people that are there to kill you and take every chip you have in front of you. And that's just part of the variants of this game. There's very few ways to jam hundreds of thousands of participants into a short playoff format that is going to be extremely well balanced. So I think that it's just variance. That's that's part of the game. You and we're going back and forth on some alternative ways that perhaps made the playoffs could be structured. But I think whichever path you take at some point to cram that many people through that narrow of a bottleneck is going to be some pain. And yeah, the twenty five percent of the first fourteen weeks only being twenty five percent, I don't think people realize because not everybody is able to experience the quarters, the semis and even the finals, like the amount of variance in a one game y one week sample and how painful that really is.

00:52:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's that's a great point.

00:52:46
Speaker 2: It's like, if your goal is to have the least amount of variance and to not have tilting things that you know don't go your way. It's the same thing in season long. We deal with in season long every single year. And look, I'm I'm guilty of it. I tilt like I get frustrated whenever. You know, I have a team that should have gotten a bye in a in a league that I'm in, right, and I I but the reason it didn't is because there's divisions and the other.

00:53:17
Speaker 4: Team not divisions, yeah, not divisions twenty four.

00:53:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's two divisions.

00:53:23
Speaker 2: My team gets third because the team I didn't win my division because the top team in the league just happened to be in my division. And then I lost the first round of the playoffs, right, and then my team goes absolutely nuclear in week sixteen and seventeen, Right, So I would.

00:53:38
Speaker 3: Have won the champions You can't you can't do the you can't do the accounting. Once I made this mistake in a league where I had a Jonathan Taylor team or Jonathan Taylor to drop the Ballah, yeah, I had to. I had to follow that team, and of course I would have won the championship. But that's why you can't follow it. He's got a.

00:53:54
Speaker 2: Close literally team one Forever literally scored the most points in the league in sixteen and seventeen, and then that terrible beat week fifteen. Regardless, regardless, I take that and I internalize it, and I get angry because I'm a human being, but also it's just part of the fun of the game. It's not like a super high stakes league. I'm not like that upset about it, but you know, I think that's one thing that like you have to just be cognizant and recognize entering a tournament is like, what are these rules?

00:54:23
Speaker 1: And that's why Underdog.

00:54:24
Speaker 2: I think did an even better job this year than they did the previous year, and they continue to improve giving alternatives to what this experience is. You could do the Marathon, where it is a full season thing. You could do the Sprint where it is a three week playoff. Like, there are other ways to play this game that still have really good payouts if like that's what your goal is as opposed to playing sort of like the flagship contest that they have.

00:54:48
Speaker 1: I enjoy BBM because there's and this is my.

00:54:52
Speaker 2: Overall kind of takeaway experience, you know, wrap this thing up kind of take I had a lot of fun doing this on a lot of different Like there was obviously doing this with you, Rich and you know, documenting all of this and like being able to chat with you every week, and you know, there was also the talking to different guests and all of that. But the Best Ball community is just like the people who are playing this and playing tens of thousands of dollars are incredibly inviting and they're incredibly open to this show and me going through this experience and you know, becoming a best Ball bro the way that I have. And also, just like Coop, right, just the average Joe who is playing Best Ball because they listen to a podcast that got them interested in doing it, and he's two hundred and forty thousand dollars richer because of it. Right. And I'm not sitting here saying to you guys, hey, if you play Bestball Mania, you too can win two hundred and forty thousand dollars. What I'm saying is this contest is built to have those really really big, big fun days, right, And that's what a lot of these contests are. Like, you're gonna more than likely. It's just like your fantasy league. It's just like the NFL. Only one out of thirty two teams is gonna be happy at the end of the year. Right. If that's not you, it's not gonna be you. It's not your year. That's fine. I think that you have to embrace the experience of this all. You don't have to do what I did in Max enter one hundred and fifty entries and a twenty five dollars tournament and then play other entries and do and spend tons and tons of money. You can literally enter dollar you know, dollar entry tournaments, spend one hundred bucks on during the summer and just experience this as well. And that, to me is what this has showed me the most, is that there is this giant, giant space out there of people who are nerdy and enjoy this stuff and are rooting for each other. And it's not just about like, you know, getting that dub. It's about rooting for friends who are about to get that dub. It's about like our discord the night that Coop was sweating the Jumior Gibb stuff was out of control and it was so much fun, right like this is one of the few games where we can really rally behind each other because we don't have this with our season long leagues generally. Right, season long leads, you're doing it in a silo a little bit, you know. I just I don't think the experience is out there outside of Best Ball the way that it is. I mean, DFS has has sweats and stuff, but it's just it's different because best Ball is like the four month wait of it all, not just that day.

00:57:21
Speaker 4: There's the anticipation and the building to it. Yeah.

00:57:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, it reminds me so much of where online poker was in like the mid two thousands. So they would have these tournaments the Atlantis. The Poker Stars Caribbean Adventure was one of the more famous ones in the Atlantis in the Bahamas, and on Sundays, which were the big online poker days, everyone would just be in the lobby of the hotel, like grinding online and one of the big tournaments, Like obviously people would bust and bust and then it would just be crowds that would get around like the few people that were still remaining, and they were just like people drinking and celebrating and like, yeah, it's that group sweat is just something that it's hard to replicate.

00:57:58
Speaker 4: And yeah, it's super fun.

00:58:00
Speaker 2: It's super fun, and it's really easy to be like, oh man, like I could have I could have been that person, but I had bad pod luck and I get it.

00:58:08
Speaker 1: I understand that.

00:58:09
Speaker 2: But like it's one of those things where you gotta understand what you're getting into and what you're doing. And this is a game that you could definitely have an edge. We have seen consistently people like Liam who was on the show earlier this summer, a Leoni. Right, these guys are consistently doing well in not just BBM, but just in Best Ball in general. Like, there are tons and tons of edges to be had, right to increase your probability, but at the end of the day, doesn't guarantee you anything, you know, Like I'm not trying to throw Leoni under the bus. He had an unbelievable advance rate, he got a little unlucky, he didn't have a finals team, you know, and like that sucks and he knows that it sucks. But at the same time, that's what this game is about. It's just there's going to be those times. There's also gonna be those times where it goes the opposite direction. So that's my general parting thoughts with all of this is that, you know, again, I would rate my season a four out of ten. It was not the result that I necessarily like wanted I got. I got a sweat, a cool sweat with the big board stuff.

00:59:12
Speaker 1: You know. That was fun.

00:59:13
Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, I think that this is like bigger than just that. It's about everyone having the opportunity to do this thing and to experience this thing. You know, me, people are like sending me screenshots and like sending me It's amazing.

00:59:26
Speaker 1: It's so much fun, right, And I think that at the end of the day is like what this is truly truly all about?

00:59:32
Speaker 4: Run it back?

00:59:34
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I guess so, I guess so. Yeah.

00:59:38
Speaker 2: That'll be the last becoming the Best ball bro episode of the twenty twenty four twenty twenty five season. But but maybe there will be something in the twenty twenty five twenty twenty six season.

00:59:52
Speaker 1: Rich. I appreciate your time as always.

00:59:54
Speaker 2: Let everyone know where they can find you if they want to yell at you and not just me about how their best ball season.

01:00:01
Speaker 3: Yeah at Richie Ryan. I'm in the discord as well as rich Toie Ryan, and we're over on at gridin gamble getting ready for the playoffs. I'm very happy the playoffs. If you had the last couple of weeks this season, we're an absolute slog but really excited for these games coming up now.

01:00:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too.

01:00:16
Speaker 2: And like I said, check out the underdog contests. I've been trying to throw some entries into the Mitten. It's five dollars entry, only ten rounds, six teams. It goes really fast. You can get a lot of lineups out there.

01:00:29
Speaker 1: Check that out. Promo code late round.

01:00:32
Speaker 2: Otherwise, everyone as usual, Thanks for tuning.