Best Ball Draft Strategy. Why Tracking Your Exposure Matters.

Tomorrow, we have a VERY FUN best ball tool to announce, but today, Pete is here to explain why reviewing your exposures is key to becoming a successful best ball player… Read on for a lil tool preview (just between us though, ok?)

If you only draft one team each year, you’ll have 100% exposure to every player on that team. 

In some ways, that can be incredibly fun because you know exactly who and what you are rooting for all season long. But that also means you only get to do one draft, and I think we can all agree that drafting is the best part of fantasy football.

Thanks to the rise of best ball—a format that allows us to draft without having to worry about setting lineups, doing waivers, or making trades—we can literally draft hundreds of teams without any additional time needed on the back end. 

But with great power comes great responsibility.

If you are drafting more than a handful of teams, you are essentially building a fantasy portfolio. And in the same way you wouldn’t want an investment portfolio filled exclusively with aggressive growth stocks or conservative value stocks, you’ll want to be cognizant of how you are building out your fantasy portfolio.

Oct 30, 2022; Houston, Texas, USA; Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry (22) rushes for a touchdown during the third quarter against the Houston Texans at NRG Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports

That’s where Fantasy Life’s Best Ball Hub comes into play, an entirely free tool to help you review and manage your teams on the fly while drafting teams all summer long.

Here are four reasons why knowing what you are doing across a multitude of drafts is paramount to becoming a better fantasy player…

1. Learn from mistakes

In a macro sense, how can we expect to get better if we don’t critically review what we’ve done previously? 

In the same way a public speaker would watch back the tape from a presentation, or the way a team would review film from the previous game, it’s impossible for us to spot our mistakes and improve if we don’t apply a critical lens to what we’ve done in previous drafts.

In reviewing player exposures and overall team constructions—both things you can do easily with the Best Ball Hub—it’s easy to quickly review the decisions you are making in drafts. 

Example: I mix in a variety of TE strategies when I draft, but I am partial to Elite TE builds. Even if you miss out on Travis Kelce, I believe there are only a handful of TEs who can realistically pop off for 25+ points in a given week, something that is incredibly powerful in the playoffs when you are trying to separate from the field at an otherwise weak position.

While I have strong positions on Kyle Pitts (13%), Mark Andrews (13%), George Kittle (9%), and T.J. Hockenson (9%) in Best Ball Mania IV, I recently realized in the Hub that I have only 2% Darren Waller: 

As the cheapest of the aforementioned Elite TEs, this is a major blind spot in my portfolio and I plan to use this info to course-correct going forward.

2. Big exposure stands should be intentional

One of the big debates in the best ball space is whether you should take big stands on specific players. I’m personally more of a “Portfolio Bro” who tends to smooth out my exposures, because I try to let every draft come to me as opposed to forcing specific player selections, but there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” way to do this.

Going heavy on a single player—say, taking Derrick Henry in the third round of every draft because you are excited he plays the Texans twice in the fantasy playoffs—is simply a matter of risk tolerance.

If you think your edge in drafts is selecting a grossly mispriced player, it’s perfectly acceptable to hammer that edge.

What you want to avoid, however, is making big stands unintentionally.

Example: Marvin Mims is my most drafted player in Best Ball Mania IV:

This is an intentional stand I’m making. I think he’s way underpriced relative to the other rookie WRs with worse college production profiles like Jonathan Mingo and Rashee Rice.

On the flip side, I recently noticed I’m at 20% Khalil Herbert, 17% D’Onta Foreman, but only 9% Roschon Johnson. I like Herbert—and I really like the ambiguity of this Bears backfield with all three backs going after pick 120—but I’d prefer to flip my Herbert and Johnson exposures so I’m more overweight on the cheaper of the two backs. 

This is how I’m also playing the Dolphins backfield: 11% Devon Achane, 22% Raheem Mostert, and 16% Jeff Wilson. 

Reviewing these exposures revealed an inadvertent pattern in my drafting—lazily selecting Herbert in a flat ADP zone of the draft—and not being more intentional with how I’d ideally like to play the Bears' backfield. 

3. Remain price conscious

Getting ADP values in your draft is one of the most important things you can do to build a strong best ball portfolio. With the Best Ball Hub, you can easily see your ADP for that player (the average draft position in which you drafted that player across your drafts) and the current ADP (the Underdog ADP of the player as of that draft’s date).

Example: Jaylen Warren has been a priority target for me in drafts, but his ADP has moved up a ton since the start of the season. In some of my early drafts I was getting Warren after pick 160, which is why my ADP for him is 146.3 and his current ADP is 139.6. Any time your ADP is higher than the current, it means you’ve locked in “closing line value.”

4. Confirm you are correlating enough

The coolest feature in the Best Ball Hub is the ability to quickly see which correlations you have with a player in the fantasy playoffs.

We’ve explained in previous pieces why playoff correlation (specifically Week 17) is so important to winning these tournaments on Underdog, and the Best Ball Hub allows you to easily review how often you are correlating—both your team stacks and opposition stacks for Weeks 15-17.

Example: Geno Smith is one of my favorite QBs in drafts right now (I currently have 15%) and the Hub shows me which teammates I’ve been stacking with him:

As well as which Steelers I have as an opposition bring back in Week 17:

Looking at these images, I feel really good with how I’ve allocated my Geno stacks (heavy on the cheapest stacking partner in Noah Fant, as well as one of my favorite breakout rookies, WR Jaxon Smith-Njigba).

But seeing my Steelers exposure with Geno reveals that I don’t have any George Pickens or Diontae Johnson bring backs, which isn’t ideal considering one of those two guys would likely have a big game in the event of a Seahawks-Steelers shootout in Week 17. It’s something I’ll be looking to correct in future drafts.

You can start drafting to track your exposures on Underdog Fantasy, where you can get a 100% deposit match of up to $100 when you sign up below!

I’ve barely scratched the surface in the ways you can leverage the Best Ball Hub to become a better drafter, so be sure to poke around and play with it yourself. 

In future pieces we can discuss even more advanced ways to use the Hub—like drilling down into specific player combos and managing exposures across different contests. 

For now, be sure to check out our Best Ball Hub tutorial so you can learn about all of the bells and whistles available.