Best Ball

Best Ball: What is it?

Best ball is a draft-only fantasy league. No waiver moves. No trades. No setting a lineup. You draft a team of usually 20 roster spots (most best ball leagues are 14-16 teams), and that is your team for the entire season. The scoring format is typically the same as any other fantasy league, and your “lineup” will consists of the same roster construction. For example, 1QB, 2RB, 3WR, 1TE, 1FLEX-RB/WR/TE, and a defense..NO KICKER!! The way that best ball works, is that each week, your best scoring lineup is automatically selected after the games have been played. In other words, your highest scoring quarterback, your two highest scoring running backs…and so on.

What about drafting?

Since there is NOTHING for you to do after the draft, it goes without saying that drafting is the most important (only) aspect of a best ball league. You will draft your team the same way as any other snake draft, except how you draft is a bit different. While you most likely hear us say that you should wait on quarterbacks in redraft leagues, that part doesn’t change. What does change, is the number of quarterbacks you draft. In redraft leagues I don’t usually like drafting more than one quarterback unless I’m using the Quarterback By Committee approach  or my starter has a very early bye week. If you select Josh Allen and his bye week is week 7, I don’t need to use a roster spot on someone that won’t see my lineup until that week. In the best ball format you do want to draft a second quarterback…and maybe even a third. Remember, you can not make any moves, so you need someone right away to cover that bye week, and who knows, maybe your 3rd QB (Joe Flacco? ) has a monster game one week and outscores the other two quarterbacks on your roster. In that case, it would be that QB’s score that would count for your QB points. The same can be said about tight ends and team defenses. You actually want to draft more than one. However, don’t confuse what I’m saying here. Just because you need to draft multiple QB’s TE’s and DEF, doesn’t mean to reach for the top ones when you’re drafting. The fact that you should wait on those positions (except for Andrews and Kelce) doesn’t change. It is just the number of players at those positions drafted does. Remember Duke Johnson in week 15 of last season? Even if you rostered him, you didn’t have him in your lineup. Those 25 or so fantasy points that he scored would be wasted, but not in a best ball league.