Week 14 of the 2023 NFL season is in the books and that means most best ball tournaments, including Underdog’s Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4), are heading into the playoff rounds. It also means that many analysts and fantasy football personalities are sharing their BBM4 advance rates and favorite advancing teams on social media. I’ve written about advance rates in various contexts throughout this season,…...

As the 2023 Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4) regular season winds down I’m beginning to think about the lessons that we’ll learn from this season. It’s easy enough to look at the performance of various roster constructions and assume that 2024’s average draft position (ADP) will be influenced by those. We’ll likely see even more emphasis on “zero RB” and “hero RB” structures. Elite quarterbacks…...

In the Week 7 edition of my Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4) Advance Rate Review we pushed the NFL veterans aside to focus exclusively on the 2023 rookie class. This week we will do the same.  I wrote in Week 7 about how many rookies see their usage change at some point during the season. This year we’ve seen Dalton Kincaid, Demario Douglas, and Jahmyr…...

This week in my Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4) advance rate review we’ll be revisiting our format from Week 6, looking at advance rates by roster construction. Back in Week 6, the story centered on the dominance of the zero running back construction. Raheem Mostert, De’Von Achane, Zach Moss, and Kyren Williams had defined the season to that point. Each of these players were producing…...

One of the broadcasts this past Sunday mentioned that we are halfway through the NFL season. While that isn’t technically true (the end of Week 9 will mark the halfway point of the NFL regular season), it’s quite close. It struck me that we’ve been analyzing the season up to this point almost exclusively through the lens of preseason expectations. Preseason expectations inform the cost…...

One of the most popular talking points each NFL offseason is the disproportionate production of rookies. Many rookies start the season slow and finish strong as they get acclimated to the NFL game. The disproportionate production is easy to show in terms of raw points per game scored, but it’s more difficult to quantify their true value to a team. When you include price and…...

This week in my Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4) advance rate review we’ll be veering off the path we’ve carved thus far to take a look at roster constructions. Underdog released the entire field of teams in their flagship contest two weeks ago and it’s time to put that data to work. We’ll be looking at roster construction by position. Sorting by position helps us…...

One of my econometrics professors in university used to repeat the same phrase in nearly every lecture: “All models are wrong but some are useful.” It’s a popular aphorism for a reason. I’ve published my Best Ball Mania IV (BBM4) advance rate model each week this season, but as of recently that model has reached the end of its usefulness. Last week Underdog released the…...

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…....

One of the more underappreciated ways that Underdog best ball is different from a normal redraft league is the “points chase” scoring. There are no weekly matchups and no W/L records, only points. Total points scored matters to an extent in redraft, but it’s typically relevant on the margins as a tie breaker or similar. This makes spike weeks less impactful in redraft. All of…...

Two weeks into the 2023 NFL season and we already have a few clear candidates for the best ball MVP. They show up in redraft leagues as waiver wire headliners and late-round dart throws, but how do these studs leave their mark in Underdog’s Best Ball Mania IV? (BBM4) In this week’s BBM4 advance rate model review, we’ll identify a few late round stars and…...

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…....