PREMIUM

Best Ball Strategy: How to Approach the Early Rounds (2023 Fantasy Football)

In the early rounds of best-ball drafts, it’s critical that you come prepared with an optimal and flexible approach. It’s less about deciding which players are good/bad (they are being drafted at the top of the board for a reason, after all) and more about building a strong foundation for success that sets the standard for your roster throughout the draft. Thinking about your player targets in Round 2 should already be on your mind before you make your selection in Round 1.

The biggest question entering the 2023 best-ball season will undoubtedly be a debate between going RB, WR, QB(!?), or Travis Kelce in Round 1 and how that impacts your drafts in the remaining early rounds. Obviously, your randomized draft slot will make the decision easier for some that are rewarded the 1.01 or 1.02 – as this may be your only opportunity to gain exposure to players with the highest ADPs – but after that, I expect plenty of variance throughout the first round.

Early Round Best Ball Strategies

Let the Draft Begin.

Looking back at the results of 2021 best ball drafts per Tom Strachan – data regarding all 2022 drafts has yet to be released at this time – the optimal start was starting with a hero-RB approach in some capacity. The full results can be found here. But in quick summary, drafting a running back in at least one of the first two rounds was the best approach specifically in Underdog’s half-point scoring format. In both Underdog and FFPC (Full PPR), WR-RB was the best start.

And although we don’t have the full results from last season regarding all positional starts from 2022, we can use player and positional advance rate/alive rate data with ADP to deduce some strategies that did work the best this past season.

The Round 1 RBs averaged a 7% alive rate which was inferior to the Round 1 WRs (11%). And the results were the same in Round 2, with RB alive rates at 7% and WRs at 11%. This would suggest that going WR-WR was the best way to start drafts for the highest alive rates. But it should be mentioned that the WR alive rates continued to be stellar (12%) entering Round 3. And that’s coming with a large sample of WRs from that round. On average, there were eight WRs being drafted in Round 3 versus just two running backs.

The RB/WR results were strikingly similar when looking at Underdog advance rates from Round 1 (Weeks 1-14). RBs in Rounds 1 & 2 averaged 13.5% advance rates versus WRs at 19.5%. The only major difference being there was a smaller dip in WR advance rate in Round 3 (17%) compared to the alive rate.

So what’s that all mean? Wide receivers stay kings in best ball, but there are a lot of them you can draft at value. Whereas at running back, the position is more scarce, and you “should” draft a top-end running back within the first three rounds as your cleverly coined “hero-RB.” Usually, I’d say you are playing with fire drafting running backs starting in Round 3 (the most common start of the RB Dead Zone). But with WRs all the rage in best ball, I figure some RBs that would be locked in as Round 1 or 2 picks in years past will fall in ADP.

But if you find yourself in a draft room where the top-end RBs are flying off the board, don’t feel scared to go WR-WR-WR. Rather do the “WR Turkey” than overdraft a sub-optimal running back. The high WR advance rates from last year suggest this will lead to a high advance rate as you push off the running back position till later in the draft.

Simply put, I’d recommend blindly following a hero-RB or zero-RB approach than a zero-WR or robust RB one. Obviously, every draft is different, so you should always remain fluid in your approach. But based on the data at hand, following the former should set your roster up for success in the early rounds.

And this is concise with my takeaways from my other best ball articles from the FantasyPros Best Ball Draft Kit: RB Primer, WR Primer, and Best Ball Roster Construction.

All in all, if you focus on drafting the three best overall players inside the top-36 (which will be WRs more often than not), you are setting a strong foundation.

As for drafting a tight end in the first two rounds, it’s a slippery slope to manage. In tight end premium formats, it’s definitely in play, but I am much less bullish on it in traditional formats. As I wrote in the tight end best ball primer, Travis Kelce is in a tier by himself as a first-round pick. And having him this past year as a backend first-rounder was awesome with his 30% advance rate from Round 1 and 8% alive rate on Underdog.

However, the fact that he is entering his age 34-season coming off a year where he distanced himself from the rest of the tight ends by a massive outlier amount has me slightly concerned he might be overdrafted in 2023.

Should we expect him to perform as well or better in 2023? And expect the rest of the tight end field to perform as badly as they did in 2022? Especially when we have data from 2021 in a more “normal/flatter” tight end scoring year where going tight end in Round 1 did not yield the most optimal results. Hence, my hesitation. Not to say he can’t run it back as TE1 (again). Antonio Gates finished as their TE2 at 34 with 12 receiving touchdowns. But he also wasn’t a first-round pick in fantasy.

Meanwhile, Mark Andrews was nearly matching Kelce’s expected fantasy point output (14.7 versus 13.0) before Lamar Jackson‘s injury in 2022. His season-long 29% target share led all tight ends in 2022.

TE Fantasy points per game 2018-2021 (PPR)

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022
Travis Kelce	18.1	16.9	22.1	16.6	18.6
Fantasy TE2	16.7	14.6	17.5	16.6	13.5
Differential	+1.4	+2.3	+4.6	0	+5.1

All in all, I want to select an early-round tight end. Because five of the top-ten scorers in points per game finished with top-ten alive rates. Six of the ten finished inside the top 10 in total points scored. The top-six scorers in tight end points per game returned an 83% top-6 alive rate.

Ergo, if you draft a tight end that finishes inside the top six in total points scored, it’s an advantage in the best-ball format. And for the most part, these tight ends come as no surprise at the top of the tight end landscape. The top six tight ends in points per game were all selected within the top ten based on ADP.

So there are legs backing targeting a tight end early. However, if you swing and miss for one early, it’s an easy way to nuke your team entirely. The first tight ends drafted after Kelce last season averaged just a 13% advance rate and a 2% alive rate from Rounds 2-4. Outside the top 50 is when the tight end alive rate spiked the most. In terms of advance rate, it spiked outside the top 90 overall picks.

These metrics compound the idea of avoiding the middle tier at tight end while also supporting the idea of going quantity over quality in the later rounds. But the backend of the “elite” tight end tier can still be exposed for massive edge and value.

Quarterbacks

Round 3 is where we have typically seen the elite quarterbacks come off the board. Still, it would not surprise me to see them rise into Round 2 based on the edge elite fantasy quarterbacks presented to drafters last season. However, as I laid out in my QB Best Ball Primer – as did Tom in his early approach to best-ball drafts last season – being the first to draft a quarterback doesn’t always grant you the best advance rate.

Tom said it best by defining the elite QBs’ win rate as “disappointing, to say the least,” entering 2022.

And he would be proven right. Only two of the QBs drafted inside the top-4 rounds finished with top-4 advance rates. Essentially a coinflip.

Meanwhile, Joe Burrow and Jalen Hurts were being drafted outside the top 60 overall picks. And the other five quarterbacks with the highest advance rates from Round 1 were drafted outside the top 100 overall picks.

Value is still the name of QB, which is why I stress a pseudo-late-round “elite” quarterback strategy. Essentially getting the last or second-to-last quarterback with top-tier upside to capitalize on value. This will change based on where QBs fall in ADP, but I’d say Rounds 4-6 is the appropriate range.