The Best Ball fantasy football format continues to rise in popularity each year with a simpler way to manage a fantasy football team.
For those wondering what Best Ball Fantasy Football is all about, it’s not hard to get started. The most important aspect of Best Ball is the draft because after that there isn’t much for you to do. The Best Ball format takes your team and automatically sets your lineup based on whoever on the roster posted the best numbers.
The great thing about Best Ball is that the draft means everything! Once you draft a team, you’re just a fan like everyone else. If your team turns out to be a dud, it’s a long season because you won’t have the luxury of trades and roster moves to salvage things.
2023 NFL Best Ball: 10-team strategy
The preferred strategy in Best Ball is to stack your roster with teammates. If you’re going to draft Aaron Rodgers, you want to be in a position to grab Garrett Wilson and maybe Mecole Hardman as well. If Rodgers tosses for 400 yards and three touchdowns, there’s a very good chance that Wilson and Hardman are going to get in on some of that action.
Some basic notes everyone should know:
— Pay attention to the bye weeks.
— With no trades or wire pickups, you need depth and balance.
— Save the risky picks for later in the draft.
In DraftKings leagues, the roster size is 20 with a PPR scoring format. That means that top running backs that are also part of a passing game will be at a premium. Expect guys like Christian McCaffrey and Austin Ekeler to go early in the draft. If you aren’t in a position to get a clear RB1, take a look at RB2 which gets a good timeshare of carries and is often used in the passing game. In a 10-team league, it should be easier to get one of the top backs, but they will go quickly.
Because you’re only using one quarterback each week and there are no trades, there’s no reason to stack your roster with multiple elite quarterbacks. You can draft Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow if you want, but you’re only going to get one QB performance each week and will have wasted a high draft pick on a player that isn’t going to be among your top guys every week. Look at QB drafting on a sliding scale of 1 to 20. If Mahomes is the No. 1 guy, your second quarterback should be closer to the 15-20 range because you can pick up a guy like Daniel Jones much later in the draft. But if your QB1 is a guy on the back end of the top 10 or an injury concern (see Garoppolo, Jimmy), then you might want to have a more proven QB2. In a 10-team league, everyone should be able to grab two quarterbacks they feel good about.
The pool of wide receivers is deep and gets deeper every year. Tight ends are not so deep. Using the Mahomes example, the team that has Mahomes should go out of their way to get Travis Kelce because he’s likely going to be the number one target in the passing game again. There are so wide receivers like Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase and Stefon Diggs that will be top-point producers each week, but in a 10-team league, you can afford to focus on other positions early in the draft and still come away with two or three WRs in the top 50. As for tight ends, after Kelce, George Kittle and Mark Andrews it’s an unproven group and you might be better off waiting and taking a young guy with high upside or finding guys that produce in the red zone. Most tight ends are less about volume and more about touchdowns.