Super Teams Aren't Created Equally
In Best Ball, Play Chess When Everyone Else Plays Checkers.
Building Super Teams Through ‘Chalk’
The term ‘chalk pairing’ in the context of Best Ball refers to a combination of players that were drafted at a much higher frequency than any other two players in the player pool. In BBMIV, the week 17 chalk pairing was Amon-Ra St. Brown and CeeDee Lamb.
This pairing was common because they played each other in week 17 and are some of the best wide receivers in the NFL. Because they played each other in week 17, their ADPs were anchored to the 1/2 turn.
In the BBMV landscape, using BBMDB.com, I looked up a bunch of perceived ‘chalk pairings’ and the results absolutely shocked me.
This year’s version of Amon-Ra St. Brown and CeeDee Lamb at the 1/2 turn was Puka Nacua and Marvin Harrison Jr.
Puka Nacua’s injury will likely keep him sidelined until week 8; however, I’m still leaving the light on for this combo to pay huge dividends in week 17. Due to Puka’s injury, this combination will be less common in the BBMV playoffs compared to the CeeDee/Amon-Ra pairing in the BBMIV playoffs.
This is evident by looking at the health of these players last year - CeeDee Lamb and Amon-Ra St. Brown only missed a combined one game. Due to their health and dominance they were able to help thousands of fantasy teams dance into the Best Ball Mania playoffs. Puka has contributed zero points to fantasy drafters lineups for the last four weeks which is why his current advancement rate is 5.7%. Yet despite it being so low, if we zoom out and think about a scenario where Puka and Marvin Harrison Jr. are both fully healthy come week 17, we know that they could very easily be on tournament winning lineups.
BBMV winner, Farid Shaheed, had the Amon-Ra/CeeDee pairing on his roster — proving out the thesis that if you pair top tier players that play against each other in week 17 it could be one of the many things you need to go right to help you take down millions of dollars in Best Ball Mania.
Drafting with week 17 in mind used to be taboo, but Best Ball has evolved over the last five years and drafters now understand the power of week 17 correlation. This is obvious when you see that the Puka/MHJ pairing was done 12,628 times compared to the Puka/Drake London pairing which was done 7,989 times and the Puka/Deebo was done 2,936 times.
Marvin Harrison Jr., Drake London, and Deebo were going towards the beginning of the second round throughout drafting season. Yet drafters heavily prioritized starting their draft with week 17 correlation opposed to starts like Puka/London or Puka/Deebo that arguably have the same range of outcomes.
I don’t believe that we should de-prioritize game stacking for week 17; I will continue to hunt for the highest scoring games for that week and build my teams around it. However, I believe it’s equally as important if not more important to understand what the field is not doing. By taking notice of what the field isn’t prioritizing, you can take away a potential edge that can be applied in your own draft strategy.
Building Super Teams Through Unique Combinations
We know that drafters prioritize for week 17, but one thing they didn’t prioritize was drafting the two top wide receiver prospects together — two prospects that were regarded as top end talents that could be wide receiver ones immediately in this league.
I’m talking about Malik Nabers and Marvin Harrison Jr.
Malik Nabers and Marvin Harrison Jr. are on the same roster only 693 times.
For comparison, for every Nabers/MHJ pairing, there are eighteen teams with a Puka/MHJ combination.
Is the winner of BBMV eighteen times more likely to have MHJ and Puka compared to MHJ and Nabers? Definitely not, and this is why intentionally drafting unique combinations can lead to the construction of a super team.
Whether you max out Best Ball Mania or if you draft four teams, you need to think about how you’re going to get your team to not only advance out of it’s pod, but how it’s then going to be the highest scoring team out of thirteen in week 15, the highest scoring team out of sixteen in week 16, and how it could possibly be the highest scoring team out of 539 other teams in the week 17 finals.
There’s obviously a ton of factors that are completely out of your control when trying to execute this daunting task; which is why you can’t dwell too much on the lows and you can’t gloat too much on the highs throughout the fourteen week Best Ball regular season. Every day in our seemingly ordinary lives is full of unexpected events, so it's easy to imagine that there are countless of unforeseeable factors that will impact NFL games in December while we're drafting our Best Ball teams from April through August.
I’m happy to admit that I had no idea when I was drafting in May for BBMIV that Amari Cooper would have the best game of his career come week 16 — the semi-finals of the Best Ball playoffs.
However, there were factors that were in my control. I had an Amon-Ra/CeeDee Lamb team, which was intentional.
This year, I drafted ten teams with the Puka/MHJ pairing. If this pairing happens to be the nuts — this is traditionally a poker term that means the best hand, here it means the best possible pairing — then I’m giving myself ten chances to push a roster through with the best possible pairing. I didn’t want to look back on the season with regret for not prioritizing a week 17 correlation that could very feasibly be part of the construction that wins Best Ball Mania. For my own risk tolerance, it made sense to me to constantly seek out this start to a draft.
On August 28th, I had dozens of drafts to complete to max out Best Ball Mania. I was on vacation in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and as soon as I got back to my hotel room, I would get back into the zone and draft some more.
In one of my drafts, I got the twelfth pick and immediately thought that I needed to do something different. I hadn’t been very creative with my Best Ball Mania builds; I had experimented a bit in time box contests - contests that are only open for as little as a few hours and as long as a few weeks - bringing Puka, Bijan, MHJ, and A.J. Brown up to the 1 spot and taking a unique pairing in the 11 or 12 hole, but I hadn’t done that yet in Best Ball Mania.
In this particular draft, I decided to pair the top rookie wide receivers in Nabers and Marvin Harrison Jr.
As I stated before, this pairing was only done 693 times. There are many reasons that this pairing took place as infrequently as it did; for one thing, Nabers was typically going around the 2/3 turn while Marvin Harrison Jr. was going around the 1/2 turn throughout the summer. This means you would have to bring Nabers up to the 1/2 turn which was significantly before his ADP and which meant he would be selected before Drake London, Nico Collins, Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk, Jaylen Waddle, Chris Olave, Devonta Smith and Mike Evans.
Fantasy football drafters are comfortable betting on talent they have already seen perform at a high level. Drafters were uncomfortable taking Nabers ahead of all of these guys when he’s a rookie wide receiver who plays in an offense that the public doesn’t perceive to be very fantasy friendly. We’re only through five weeks and it seems clear as day that these were silly assumptions by the market; Nabers was clearly a phenomenal pick in the third round.
Before the season, RotoViz’s Shawn Siegele believed that Nabers was the better talent between him and Marvin Harrison Jr.; however, Shawn understood the ADP difference because it seemed like a much more favorable offensive situation for Marvin Harrison Jr. with an offense run through a healthy Kyler Murray compared to Daniel Jones.
I believed in Nabers because Shawn, Pat Kerrane and many others were raving about his prospect profile. Similarly to Bowers, who if you didn’t already see, I decided to build my portfolio around:
I decided that pairing Nabers with all of the top picks in rounds one and two would be beneficial to the overall success of my portfolio. I was overweight on the field by drafting 12% of Nabers in Best Ball Mania which also matches my 12% throughout all tournaments.
By starting a draft with Marvin Harrison Jr. and Malik Nabers I knew this would be a rare start to begin with, but there was no way for me to accurately predict that they would be drafted as infrequently together as they were.
I used this draft as an opportunity to make a super team — when you draft a little unconventionally at the top, I think it’s important that you develop a game plan quickly for how you will execute the subsequent rounds.
At the 3/4 turn of this draft I could have very easily started off with four straight wide receivers drafting Stefon Diggs with one of Rashee Rice, Tee Higgins, Amari Cooper or Zay Flowers but I used this as an opportunity to draft a unique piece among my popular plays.
I drafted Marvin Harrison Jr. on 14% of my Best Ball Mania teams, Nabers at 12% and Stefon Diggs at 14% - I didn’t see any convincing reason to not prioritize a target earner on a good Houston Texans offense in Stefon Diggs. I understood that he has target competition but this is still someone that gets open at a high enough clip with a hopefully sophomore year ascending QB in C.J. Stroud peppering him with targets.
I had obviously never drafted these three guys together since I had never paired Marvin Harrison Jr. and Nabers together, but I also decided to draft Derrick Henry over any of the wide receivers I previously mentioned as options in this spot.
The thesis was that Malik Nabers was a stud deserving of the twelfth pick of the draft — which meant I didn’t need to prioritize more early round wide receivers. I was drafting a unique team compared to what everyone in the tournament was doing and now I needed to also make it a team that would be unique to all of my own rosters.
Derrick Henry is someone that I didn’t prioritize in my drafts. He’s obviously had a very impressive career, but his age and his placement in drafts deterred me from drafting him often. He went in a pocket where I was almost always drafting a wide receiver because the opportunity cost of going away from wide receivers with 25+ point ceilings for another position seemed like a mistake. It was and is my belief that I could more easily find players of comparable ceilings in the later rounds of the draft at all the positions other than wide receiver.
I drafted 4% of Derrick Henry — it seemed obvious that it was still in Henry’s range of outcomes to score fifteen plus touchdowns in a highly efficient offense. Although I wasn’t consistently betting on this type of situation to play out, I knew it was a possibility and after drafting three wide receivers that I had high conviction in, it seemed like a great opportunity to take a running back I wasn’t sold on, but wouldn’t be completely surprised if he paid off his price tag.
In Best Ball Mania, there are 672,672 teams — 34 of them have Marvin Harrison Jr., Malik Nabers and Derrick Henry on it. For comparison, there are 1,021 teams with Marvin Harrison Jr., Puka Nacua and Derrick Henry on them. It’s clear that week 17 correlation is why there are significantly more of this three player combo than my three player combo with Nabers, but this team’s construction should be a reminder that creating your own path, but still playing by the ‘rules’ is a great way to make your own attempt at a super team. Let’s not forget that Derrick Henry and Stefon Diggs play one another in week 17.
The Marvin Harrison Jr., Malik Nabers, Stefon Diggs, Derrick Henry start is represented by one team — mine.
Being scared of duplicate lineups or having many similar players as another team in your playoff pod isn’t a necessary fear for a drafter to have. I recommend playing around with BBMDB.com so you can see for yourself how much ownership condenses when you try any type of four player combos. Even if the combinations seem like they would be common intuitively due to a team stack, a week 17 stack or ADPs lining up, it actually doesn’t end up being as common as you would expect.
Identifying when ADP is Merely a Construct
However, just because we don’t need to overly fear other rosters that are similar to ours doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to create a roster that is unique to our portfolio, to the field, that can make the playoffs and that can win in a three-week style DFS tournament.
In this lineup, I opted for some week 17 correlation by drafting Derrick Henry and Stefon Diggs. This was done 1,297 times. Does it really make sense that Puka Nacua and Marvin Harrison Jr. were paired together nearly ten times more often?
I don’t think so. I think this is habitual, I think this is laziness and I think this is Best Ball drafters just trying to pattern match their way to victory. CeeDee Lamb/Amon-Ra worked last year so that means Puka/MHJ will work this year.
I’ve made it abundantly clear in my drafting strategy that I thought this way, but it’s important to open up your third eye to other possibilities. It’s pivotal to allow some of your portfolio to represent ‘chalk’ and for other parts to look ‘too cute’. Ultimately, you need to draft logically and understand the risks you're taking. I'm not suggesting you draft a player with an ADP in the fifth round in round one. but grabbing one undervalued player at the 2/3 turn and bringing him up to the 1/2 turn can make all the difference.
It can't be stressed enough — you can’t just go on autopilot or get lazy with your roster construction. You need to keep thinking about how to get your team into the playoffs and how it’ll navigate those crucial playoff weeks.
On August 28th, ADP was merely a construct.
We had been drafting for months, soaking in every piece of news surrounding each team’s depth charts. Now was the time to draft based on your instincts, your player evaluations, and our information edge. There was no clearer moment than this one - the end of August - to decipher the truth behind each team’s depth charts.
That’s why I drafted Jordan Mason in the twelfth round on this team. I didn’t care that his ADP was a handful of rounds later; I wanted Christian McCaffrey’s backup on one of the best fantasy-producing teams in football.
Through five weeks, Jordan Mason has proven to be one of the biggest nominees as a ‘league winner’. We don’t know when CMC will return and if Mason will be irrelevant during the Best Ball playoffs, but through five weeks Mason is returning the value of a top five fantasy RB.
I hammered Mason throughout the last few weeks of August — I had a ton of Elijah Mitchell and once I heard about the season ending IR move I knew I needed to pivot to the new RB2 in this backfield.
I managed to get my Jordan Mason exposure up to 15% in Best Ball Mania, while bringing my Elijah Mitchell shares down to 10% — I was in the twenties at one point. It seemed clear as day that this was a role that was worth investing in.
Just like the MHJ, Nabers, Henry, Diggs combo, if we remove Diggs for Jordan Mason, I am the only drafter to have a team with this combination.
Does the uniqueness of this team guarantee a six or seven figure payout? As Jordan Belfort says in The Wolf of Wall Street:
This roster is simply one example of the infinite possibilities there are to construct a team with an easier path to victory. It’s an example of how you can tilt the odds in your favor by doubling down on your conviction while simultaneously leveraging depth chart information.
Here’s the roster below — this is a Sam Darnold team without Justin Jefferson. Is it possible that Jordan Addison has a big game with Darnold and that Nabers and/or MHJ outscore Jefferson in week 17? Of course it is. I’m never betting against Justin Jefferson, but when you get the twelfth pick in the draft, he’s already off the board and you should create rosters that can profit off of chaos. If Jefferson has a down game, if he’s injured, if it’s a Jordan Addison game, whatever it is, there are clearly a myriad of scenarios where this team’s roster construction makes sense.
When you take calculated risks while keeping draft capital and roster construction at the forefront of your mind you’re able to create your own opportunity to draft a super team.
Three Calculated Risks in This Draft:
Elite prospect, Malik Nabers, was drafted well before his ADP to pair with a player that’s drafted on the other side of the draft board (Marvin Harrison Jr.) for low combinatorial ownership.
Derrick Henry, a player I drafted infrequently, was selected to balance out my portfolio and to add onto my convictions with this unique start.
Jordan Mason, the clear backup running back of a top tier offense was selected well before his ADP because this role is invaluable and ADP can be thrown out the window when we are given new news right before the end of the drafting window.
Every time you draft a team, aim to create a super team. Sometimes this happens naturally by scooping ADP value or selecting a 'chalk' Week 17 matchup among elite wide receivers. Other times, you need to be more aggressive and build your own super team.
Hopefully this example of intentionally pairing less-drafted players to create a unique team demonstrates the countless ways you can attack this tournament.