Let’s start with a thought experiment: 

You go back in time and draft a Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4) team with all the knowledge you have now. Who do you select in each round?

As someone who has been keeping up with my expected advance rate model, you may be tempted to simply select the player with the highest expected advance rate in each round. While this certainly would be a good strategy, I’m not sure it would be the best strategy.

In the later rounds I think expected advance rate is a strong indicator of forward looking performance. When thinking about players like Puka Nacua, De’Von Achane, Kyren Williams, and C.J. Stroud it’s easy to see how they continue to crush their cost-adjusted expectations. However, I think the strategy is different in the early rounds. Christian McCaffrey has the highest expected advance rate of all first-round selections, but I don’t think he’s the optimal 1.01. 

My model doesn’t consider structural relationships between the positions, it only considers each position in isolation. Due to this, I think Travis Kelce is the obvious 1.01 if you were able to go back in time and draft with current knowledge. He’s the only player that you can’t confidently replace the production of by nailing every single pick after the first round. This will be something to think about next offseason, specifically when aiming for regular season prizes.

THE ADVANCE RATE MODEL

If you haven’t caught my advance rate article yet this year, here’s a quick rundown:

My goal this season is to help my fellow best ballplayers track the performance of their portfolio more closely. 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 BBM4. The model uses a handful of variables including the players final average draft position (ADP), points scored, position, and more to estimate a player’s advance rate if the season were to end today. 

We’ll look at the model position by position each week. Each visualization shows all players at a given position by their final Underdog ADP and expected advance rate. The red dashed line denotes an average advance rate of 16.67%. Players with expected advance rates above that line are colored in green, players below the line in red. Let’s dive in!