With the 2022 season officially over, 2023 best ball season is now back in full force. The FFPC is running two “Never-Too-Early” Best Ball Tournaments. Shawn Siegele and I are currently taking part in a draft for the Superflex version.

Superflex drafts add several strategic wrinkles. While standard 1-quarterback best ball is far from solved, there are a few dominant strategies that most players are aware of and utilize regularly. There are still contrarian approaches that return positive win rates, but in non-Superflex best ball, it’s getting harder to find a way to differentiate your strategy without sacrificing some expected value. This is not the case in the more neoteric Superflex leagues. There’s no consensus dominant strategy, meaning there is significant opportunity for a contrarian tack to find success.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that you need to get your QBs early in Superflex leagues. I’ve written in the past about the “QB window” in Superflex leagues, which, prior to the last two seasons, fell between Rounds 3 and 5. The ascendance of a number of elite QBs has moved the window up in both 1-QB and Superflex leagues. But what if you ignore the QB windows? What if you take, say, zero QBs in the high-leverage round? Can a Zero-QB team win in a Superflex best ball tournament? Shawn and I attempt to find out.

We drew the seventh pick. This is too late to grab the truly elite QB options, which opens up your strategy playbook quite a bit. Check out my earlier article to see how we handled the first four rounds. This time we’ll walk through Rounds 5-12 and talk a bit about team construction strategies.

The Middle Rounds of a Superflex Draft

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Zero running back is a strategy that works well in full PPR leagues with either three wide receiver slots and one flex slot or two WR slots and two Flex slots. Most FFPC leagues are the latter. But FFPC Superflex leagues replace one of those Flex slots with a Superflex slot, effectively replacing a WR in the starting lineup with a QB. Note how much the relative value of RBs and WRs change just by making this minor shift in the starting lineup assumptions.

Start Four Wide Receivers

Start Three Wide Receivers

Obviously not every team in the league is going to play a WR in every available Flex spot every single week, but because WRs still outscore RBs at a similar ADP, most teams will fill their flexes with WRs most weeks. Removing a flex position thus has a dramatic effect on the relative value of WRs compared to RBs. Whereas Zero-RB is still a winning strategy in regular two-flex FFPC leagues, it becomes a lot less attractive in Superflex leagues, in which you can realistically start at most three WRs. (The fact that TEs are sometimes flex-worthy in FFPC leagues also has the effect of diminishing the value of WRs when compared to standard PPR leagues.)

What Do You Do When You Can’t Draft WRs?

For these reasons, over the next three rounds, Shawn and I took some uncharacteristic detours.