Underdog Best Ball Mania IV Strategy: Positional Draft Strategies

May 28, 2023

The foundation for being a winning best ball player is understanding positional allocation and roster construction, topics we have already mastered for Underdog Best Ball Mania tournaments with the help of 4for4’s Roster Construction Tool. Taking these concepts a step further, data from top Best Ball Mania lineups over the last two seasons can help inform fantasy managers when they should be drafting each position, in addition to how many players at each position to draft.

In this Best Ball Mania review, you will learn about some of the most common positional draft strategies including which ones work the best depending on how your draft plays out.

For the purposes of this research, the primary metric used to measure success will be playoff advance rate over expectation. Best Ball Mania 1 had different playoff advance rates than BBM2 and BBM3 and this metric normalizes for those changes. (See full explanation here)

More Best Ball Mania IV Strategy: Positional Allocation | How BBMIV Prizes Impact Draft Strategy | Week 17 Games to Target | Best Ball Draft Curve

Best Ball Resources: BBMIV Rankings | Underdog ADP | Roster Construction Tool | Advance Rate Explorer | 2023 Schedule Grid

Quarterback Draft Strategy

Early-Round Strategies

^{Roster Construction Tool Settings: *QB1 selected before Round 6 **QB1 selected before Round 6, QB2 selected after Round 5, QB2 selected before Round 12 ***QB1 selected before Round 6, QB2 selected after Round 12}

In the positional allocation study, I alluded to the change at the quarterback position in recent years, and how the dominance and predictability of top-12 fantasy quarterbacks was likely driving the gap between 2-QB and 3-QB builds. The data supports the idea that when teams spend early on a quarterback they should typically stop at two—advance rates and average points have been higher at virtually every stage of the tournament when teams stick to a 2-QB build after investing heavily in their QB1.