Best Ball Mania III is a 451,600-entry tournament with a 470-team Week 17 final. Because of this, finding ways to build high-upside teams that are meaningfully different from the field is of the utmost importance. Accounting for the fact that a large percentage of the prize pool is dedicated to the top few places (38% is for the top-five finishers) is a core facet of tournament play. As such, being profitable in the long run is extremely reliant on maximizing your chances of getting in the top few scores.
Arguably the most important skill in the tournament is building unique structures that also have strong upside. Having Ja’Marr Chase’s 50.1 half-ppr point performance helps you climb the leaderboard more if fewer teams also have those points.
Because of the importance of uniqueness, it is tempting to do things that are counterintuitive for the sake of uniqueness. Examples of this include drafting only one elite tight end, handcuffing your running back, and drafting four late tight ends. There is strong evidence, with data going back to 2015, that these strategies reduce the ability of your roster to compete. Luckily, it is entirely unnecessary to pursue losing strategies for the sake of unique builds. By combining strategies advocated in Michael Dubner’s excellent roster construction series, we can have our cake and eat it with high upside constructions which are considerably underutilized by the field.
In part one, I discussed how to build the ideal zero running back roster for tournament play. In part two, I explained how you can build an extremely unique version of the anchor running back build that has even more upside than the classic version. Last week, Madison Parker performed a similar exercise demonstrating the monster upside of Bully Tight End builds when executed correctly.
In this article I’ll be looking at the Hyperfragile strategy. There are serious flaws in how the strategy was utilized in BBM II. By examining these missteps in detail, we can both avoid them ourselves and create potential super teams the field simply isn’t building.
