With the release of the 2023 NFL schedule, tournament drafters are scrambling to take advantage of Week 17 matchups. The prevailing wisdom in fantasy circles over the past several years has been to build best ball tourney rosters like Week 17 DFS plays. It’s easy to see why. In Underdog’s Best Ball Mania III contest last year, winning your individual league in Weeks 1-14 secured you a $10 profit. Winning in Week 17 secured $2 million.

Stacking

Stacking players on the same NFL offense is a powerful strategy, and with 50% more teams in BBM4, a more essential strategy than ever this year. But not all position groups are created equal. Here are the five highest-scoring team stacks in Week 17 of last year:

Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Tom Brady (QB1) + Mike Evans (WR1) – 87 points

Las Vegas Raiders: Jarrett Stidham (QB2) + Davante Adams (WR1) – 61 points

San Francisco 49ers: Christian McCaffrey (RB1) + Brandon Aiyuk (WR2) – 58 points

New York Giants: Daniel Jones (QB1) + Richie James (WR9) – 57 points

Detroit Lions: D’Andre Swift (RB1) + Jamaal Williams (RB2) – 51 points

Positions from QB2 to WR9 by ADP found their way into the highest-scoring stacks. McCaffrey was traded in October, making pre-season stacking impossible. The most popular stack, QB1-WR1, is represented only once. With such a huge lead on the field, surely the winning team last year included a Brady-Evans stack? Here’s what the RotoViz Underdog Advance Rate tool’s Stack Analysis tab has to say:

It’s hard to win in Week 17 if you don’t make it past the quarterfinals, and not a single Brady-Evans stack got to Week 17. (Brady was on Pat Kerrane’s $2 million winning team, but he was stacked with Chris Godwin. The Advance Rate tool shows a 0.00% Finals advance rate for Brady only because it ran out of digits.) The takeaway from the above data isn’t that positional stacking is random, or that it’s bad for advance rate and therefore shouldn’t be used. (Indeed, the fact that so few Brady teams made it out of their individual leagues gave Pat’s team a ton of leverage in Week 17.) The takeaway is that predicting successful stacks several months in advance is extremely difficult, and a lot can go wrong in the interim. We should aim for stacks that give us access to huge scoring in Week 17, but we need to understand that a diversified approach that takes this uncertainty into account is the best way forward. The suite of RotoViz Underdog tools can give us a sizable advantage over the competition.

Advance Rate

Here are the most popular stacks over the past two years in Underdog tournaments: