Best Ball has fast become one of, if not the most, popular types of fantasy football. The ability to quickly draft a roster wherever you are, at whatever price range you desire, well, it’s easy to see why it appeals to so many people.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of people enter best ball contests for the chance to win millions of dollars in prize money. What is best ball, though, and what makes the difference between a good best ball team and a bad one? Let’s get into it.
- Best Ball Rankings
- Best Ball Consensus ADP
- 2025 Best Ball Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Free Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator
An Introduction to Best Ball (2025)
What is Best Ball?
Simply put, best ball is “draft-and-forget” fantasy football. No worrying about the waiver wire on a Tuesday night and then frantically clicking through 12 different leagues, scouring the wire for which flavor of the week is available. With best ball, the draft is the be-all and end-all. No waivers, no trades and, most importantly, no lineup decisions.
Each week, the platform will automatically set your starting lineup based on the highest possible score within the parameters of a correct lineup. Since we’re only focused on the draft, that gives us more time to enter more contests and focus on the best possible draft strategies that will help us win.
In redraft or dynasty, fantasy managers can repair a bad draft with roster maneuvers; in best ball, we want to crush every draft we join. Our mindset should be to capture value, build rosters that can overcome injuries, build a profitable portfolio and aim to hit on players we perceive as undervalued by average draft position (ADP).
Best Ball Formats & Platforms
With best ball exploding in popularity, more and more formats are available to users. Traditional season-long best ball involves competing against other users in your draft. Depending on the platform, you can choose to compete in three-, six- or 12-person drafts. Dynasty best ball is also popular, particularly for those who have reached the limit of leagues they can manage to set lineups for every week. Instead, dynasty best ball involves all the fun and strategy of trades and roster-building and relies on best ball scoring to save users from the weekly fantasy start sit headaches.
Tournament best ball is by far the most popular of the best ball sub-strands and is generally what most content is tailored towards. Typically, best ball tournaments involve a standard 12-person draft. Late in the season, the top one or two teams progress into the next stages of the tournament, where they compete against other teams that finished highly in their leagues.
Underdog’s “2024 Best Ball Mania IV” had 672,672 teams in total, with a max of 150 teams per person. The top two of each 12-team league after Weeks 1-14 advance to the next round. As you can imagine, the differences between this and a regular 12-team league are galactic, with only 0.8% of the total teams making it to the final. Even with a max 150 entries, costing you a cool $3,750, your chances of making the finals are the equivalent of once every eight years. As for DraftKings, their main tournament has had a maximum of over one million entries in each of the last two years, with similarly high prizes up top.
Knowing the above, you might feel defeated before even playing. How can we possibly feel confident we can win it all when faced with such long odds? First, this is supposed to be fun. If you don’t find drafting teams fun and you’re just here to make money, it might be time to stop reading. If, however, you want to have fun while also giving yourself the best opportunity to make some money, there are ways we can optimize for that.
It’s important to choose the contest you feel best suits your price range. DraftKings has offerings from $1, Drafters has a $2 contest, Underdog hosts contests from as little as $3, and FFPC drafts start at $5. After these budget options, the sky is the limit with entry fee options.
The largest prizes are typically found in Underdog’s Best Ball Mania contest, which comes with a $25 entry fee, and DraftKings’ Milly Maker, which costs $20 to enter. If you don’t have the bankroll or will to compete in these flagship contests, there are a lot of ways to approach things.
DraftKings regularly ran contests that were 3-5 max entries last year, priced between $8 to $100. These contests typically had smaller amounts of total entries and also had small finals, sometimes with as few as a handful of teams, unlike the Milly Maker, which had over 1,000 finalists. While you only have three attempts to draft the perfect roster, these contests can feel like an easier way to win, and the prizes are still in the five figures.
Fast Draft vs. Slow Draft
Once you have decided on the type of best ball contest you want to enter, your next choice comes down to the type of draft you’d like to play. Many users will be familiar with slow drafts from dynasty startup leagues or similar, but nothing quite prepares you for how slow a slow draft can move on a best-ball platform. You wait eagerly for the draft room to fill and all of a sudden, you’re assigned the 10th pick, and you might not make a pick until tomorrow. A 20-round best ball draft can take several weeks to complete, and many users opt to have several on the go at once.
On the other hand, fast drafts are a lot of fun and tend to involve slightly more mistakes. As such, sharper drafters prefer these. Typically, most platforms allocate 30 seconds per pick. An 18-20-round draft will take approximately 30-40 minutes to complete. Underdog has, however, started offering a 20-second clock this year for certain contests, which gets the juices flowing and lets you finish drafts even quicker.
As best ball season kicks into gear, I like to take a gentle swim in a few low-budget fast drafts before dipping my toes into higher-budget drafts. Much like a rookie quarterback, you’ll find the game slows down a lot after gaining some reps, and you can read the room much easier.
ADP vs. Rankings
Most best ball platforms allow users to create their own rankings or upload ones they trust to their site.
While drafting based on rankings is my preferred method, there’s an edge to be created by balancing rankings against ADP. Sometimes a site’s ADP can be slow to catch up to a player’s change of circumstances.
For instance, if a player is without a team, their ADP might drop near the undrafted range, depending on the caliber of the player. When that player signs with a new team, it can take some time for ADP to settle where the player is now being consistently drafted. In that period, if our rankings are up to date, we should always be presented with an opportunity to draft a player before we reach their ADP. Most platforms display both ADP and your ranking in draft rooms.
Using rankings combined with ADP can also allow us to draft players we’re not high on who fall to a perceived value pick. In 2024, I wasn’t high on Chuba Hubbard due to expecting Jonathon Brooks to take over before the end of the season, but when he fell past where I ranked him and his ADP, the choice to draft him became more tantalizing the further he fell. In hindsight, this was a great decision.
Taking players who fall below their ADP helps us build more unique rosters for tournament contests. If 80% of the people who drafted Hubbard took him in the 11th round and 20% took him in the 12th, those who drafted Hubbard later had the potential to have a very different team compared to the consensus, while pairing Hubbard with another 11th-round talent. Beyond all else, scooping up value has been a proven winner over the years.
Post-Draft Next Steps
Know that you need to tweet your draft board because if somebody does a best ball draft and doesn’t tweet the draft board, did it even happen? You can also jump into the FantasyPros Discord for feedback (feel free to tag me – ‘Tstrack’) or gentle flexing.
Next, you’ve probably already figured it out, but it’s time for another draft. Keep your budget in mind and consider how many drafts you’ll want to do between now and when the season starts. Some platforms offer tools for tracking player exposures, which can help build a player exposure portfolio.
Final Tips
Structural Drafting
Year after year, we see that adhering to micro-strategies like Hero RB or even Zero RB can help your rosters overcome injuries. These strategies have been proven to have higher advance rates than rosters where the drafter just took the best players. Understanding deeper strategies will help you become more successful across a portfolio of teams.
Best Ball Roster Construction
Remember bye weeks. Your team may look awesome on paper, but if all your running backs and quarterbacks have the same bye week, you’ll create a big hole to climb out of.
Stacking is beneficial but not always essential. Stacking helps us build correlated lineups where we need fewer things to go right. Still, it provides more of an edge in best ball tournaments than in a typical season-long best ball draft. If we reach heavily to complete a stack, we’re often better off not having the stack at all. Skinny stacks (small ones) don’t feel as high upside as massive stacks, but often pop up on winning rosters.
Select the right balance of players. There’s no sense in choosing seven running backs who all profile as third-down running backs who will have no chance to see an expanded workload. We need to balance clear workloads, upside and paths to big workloads.
Spread exposure to early and late-round targets. It can be tough to be highly exposed to players in the first round due to the randomness of our pick assignments, but in the late rounds, we should be mindful of not getting too attached to one player.
Even if you’re convinced Ja’Lynn Polk is going to have the greatest sophomore season of all time, if you draft him in 80% of your leagues and then he sustains a season-ending injury in training camp, you’re going to be spending a lot of time regretting wasting roster spots in your teams.
Players in this range are often dart-throw types, and it makes sense to want to take as many shots as possible. In 2024, players such as Jauan Jennings, Sean Tucker and Cedric Tillman went largely undrafted. Many drafters would have gladly traded their Polk shares for them instead.
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