If you’re anything like me, you opened up the Underdog app to check out your best ball portfolio less than a quarter into the early window of Week 1. I’ll admit it’s premature; the Underdog app often hasn’t even updated the scores, but I just have to know. We spend all summer drafting best ball teams and when the season arrives it can feel anticlimactic. There’s nothing to sweat. It’s hard to know if you’re doing well or not.
THE ADVANCE RATE MODEL
My goal this season is to help my fellow best ball players track the performance of their portfolio more effectively. To do that, I’ve created a model that I will update each week to predict the advance rate of each and every player drafted in Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4). The model uses a handful of variables including the player’s final average draft position (ADP), points scored, position, and more to estimate a player’s advance rate if the season were to end today. The model will be highly reactionary in the first few weeks of the season (wait until you see Tyreek Hill) but will settle down as the season wears on.
Tracking player advance rates helps us sweat our best ball portfolio in two ways:
- Tracking the success of individual players
- Tracking the success of macro strategies (Zero RB, Hero RB, etc.)
These are the two lenses through which we’ll perform analysis. Early in the season we’ll lean on the individual player lens before shifting towards the macro lens. We should feel confident about what strategies were most effective in BBM4 before the playoffs arrive.
