Best Ball Strategy
Some theoretical strategies and thought concepts that will help you draft strong best ball rosters.
As draft season heats up and best ball summer continues on, it felt like a great time to drop some strategy content for best ball drafting.
In the 2025 best ball streets on Twitter (X), you’ll see a lot of misguided roster constructions. After seeing my fair share of these, I was inspired to write up some basic-to-intermediate level thought processes and concepts that will hopefully help you guys consistently draft strong rosters.
So, I’m here today to give you guys a stronger understanding of how to optimally draft best ball teams in 2025 (and in future seasons). These concepts are mostly evergreen and can be applied year-over-year, obviously excluding Part IV below. These concepts should also be applicable for both newbies to the format as well as more experienced best ball drafters.
Table of Contents
Part I: Stacking and Correlation
Part II: Understanding Players’ Range of Outcomes
Part III: The Law of Diminishing Returns
Part IV: My Favorite Way To Draft in 2025
Stacking and Correlation
The concepts of stacking and correlation are a rather easy one to grasp, and good portion of you reading this will probably already have an understanding of this. However, it is a pretty important part of what we want to be doing when drafting best ball teams, so we will therefore discuss.
Both stacking and (less prominently) correlating our rosters are an important exercise in best ball drafts. For those who are foreign to the concept, “stacking” is the process of drafting players from the same team, most prominently a QB and his pass-catchers. “Correlation” is when you draft players from a team opposing your “stacked” players in a specific week, mainly week 17.
While you would theoretically advance a relatively similar number of your rosters with or without stacking, you would coincidingly be handicapping yourself in the playoff rounds if you do not stack (most importantly the championship round aka week 17). Stacking a QB with their WRs, TEs, or even RBs unlocks weekly upside that is crucial for your chances to put up a big score in the championship rounds of best ball tournaments. By stacking, you are making a bet on a couple of specific teams rather than countless different players from different games to have big performances. In essence, you are reducing the number of variables that you need to be correct on, or in other words “consolidating your bets”. If your QB throws for 350 yards and 4 TDs, the skill players surrounding him will reap the benefits and it’s more than likely that a couple of them had very big games of their own.
Same goes for correlation, as drafting players in the same game should theoretically allow you to benefit from a high-scoring game environment, another “consolidated bet”. For example, let’s say you stacked Baker Mayfield with two of his WRs, Mike Evans and Emeka Egbuka. You’re of course hoping for explosive weeks from these guys in the playoff weeks, specifically in week 17. If the Bucs have a huge offensive performance in week 17, the odds are pretty high that their opponents offense will provide some similarly high-scoring performances. With this thought process in minds, it is ideal to correlate your Bucs players with their week 17 opponent (the Dolphins) in order to capture the benefits of this potential shootout environment. Therefore, it makes sense to grab some Dolphins alongside your Bucs, say Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Wright. Now, you’re making a big bet on this week 17 game, and you will be the benefactor if it ends up as a high-scoring affair. On the same note, you are reducing the amount of things you need to get right, as this stack/correlation should theoretically provide you with multiple high-scoring outputs to contribute to your week 17 score.
Stacking is not solely beneficial for playoff round purposes either, as it can be somewhat helpful for the sake of advancing teams. See the 2024 Bengals as a case study: If you rosters made heavy investments in the Cincinnati Bengals, stacking Chase, Higgins, Burrow, and Chase Brown (something that was achievable on a regular basis), you would have made a concentrated team bet that likely paid off in a big way. Same goes here for making heavy bets on specific teams for your overall best ball portfolio, but that is a separate conversation.
Stacking a certain team (and correlating matchups) also allows you to get some exposure to players you may not be selecting often. For example, 2 seasons ago, when Puka Nacua burst onto the scene.. you probably wouldn’t have been drafting him often unless you had Matt Stafford at QB. Making a team bet on the Rams allowed you to gain exposure to a season-defining player that you more than likely would not have selected otherwise.
In summary, while stacking and correlating your rosters is primarily beneficial for unlocking weekly playoff upside, it also proves valuable for making team bets and diversifying your exposures.
Understanding Players’ Range of Outcomes
One of the worst things you’ll see on fantasy football twitter is comparing two players season-long prop lines that have notably different ADPs, indicating you should fade the more expensive player and draft said cheaper player because their projection is similar. While understanding how players project is obviously important, these projections do not come even close to telling the full story on a player.
For starters, these season-long prop lines are not efficient markets. They have low betting limits and liquidity, meaning there is no real sharp money shifting these lines in either direction.
Furthermore, props outcomes are binary, in that a player either does or does not outperform their line. You do not get paid extra for a player grossly outperforming (or underperforming) their prop total.
Let’s take an example I saw on X the other day, comping Keon Coleman and Travis Hunter’s props as they were nearly identical (~700 yards, 4.5 TDs), yet Hunter is a 5th round pick and Coleman is a 10th rounder.
At surface level, it’s easy to succumb to the idea that these two should be drafted closer together considering these lines. However, this feels like a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with using prop lines to determine ADP value. For starters, Keon Coleman had a pretty horrendous rookie year. Per Reception Perception, hw was completely inept against man coverage (3rd percentile success rate) and not much better vs. zone (23rd percentile). He earned just a __ route share. His prop totals seems quite high for someone who may not even be a top 3 target on his own team. While he’s certainly a front-runner for a full time role, it feels like there’s a very realistic world where he ends up behind Shakir and Palmer for 2WR sets, and even an outside chance that he’s behind a Curtis Samuel/Elijah Moore at some point this year. Coleman’s hefty yardage total (for a player of his lacking ability) is simply a case of “who else is there?”, rather than an ode to his ability and talent.
Conversely, Travis Hunter was just the 2nd overall pick in the draft and has virtually no chance of being anything worse than the 2nd best target on this team. Hunter’s line is of course being suppressed by the questions around his potentially lacking snap count at WR due to his CB duties, but a receiver of Hunter’s caliber/potential could quite easily cross 700 yards as a ~60% route share guy.
In laying out Coleman and Hunter’s profiles here, the first point I’m trying to demonstrate here is that these lines could be (and likely are) inefficient. Considering the (likely) talent gap, it’s also important to note that Hunter’s top-end outcomes are significantly more enticing than Coleman’s. Even if we want to adhere to the prop lines listed, it is undeniable that Hunter has much higher upside. The more important question, and frankly the lens we should be viewing all players through in large-field best ball tournaments, is what are the odds that these two provide us with league-winning upside? If the season was played out 100 times, at what rate would these two hit a top-tier outcome, say 1400+ yards and 10+ TDs? To assign arbitrary numbers to this scenario based on the profiles, let’s say Coleman hits the above outcome (1,200 yards, 8 TDs) in roughly 3-5% of seasons, and Hunter hits the same outcome 20-25% of the time. This is obviously not an exact science, but it’s important to view players in this light when drafting best ball rosters. And this is why there is a stark difference in price between these two players, a valid difference at that.
This leads me to final point (and essentially the whole point) of this section: Always draft for upside. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to mix in some floor picks. Quite frankly, “floor” in fantasy football is a myth. There are countless cases of guys with perceived floors (protectable volume, weak competition, etc.) that ended up completely bottoming out. Take 2024 Rachaad White or Zamir White, two guys that had perceived floor that ultimately got usurped and were clear backups and/or irrelevant by seasons end.
Drafting for upside, a la 2023 De’Von Achane, is how you win leagues. Players who may have lower perceived floors are often some of the best picks in the draft pool. Some guys who come to mind for 2025 are the aforementioned Travis Hunter, Rashee Rice, George Pickens, Bhayshul Tuten, and RJ Harvey.
Drafting to win is, simply enough, how you win.
The Law of Diminishing Returns
Thinking through this section/concept is what originally prompted me to write this article, as I have seen one too many poorly-constructed roster screenshots on X. You will constantly see drafters who are massively over-investing in specific positions, typically doing so at every position except the most important one… wide receiver. See the image below for an example of what I’m talking about…
The pictured is obviously a pretty extreme build, but this and builds like it show a fundamental misunderstanding of roster construction. For starters, only 2 RBs and a flex can hit your lineup each week, so a maximum of 3 total. The pictured roster has 5 of their first 8 picks at RB, so two of these RBs will be dead roster spots no matter what each week.
On that same note, this team is absolutely dead at WR outside of a miracle runout. You need 3 WRs to hit your lineup at minimum each week, and can have 4 total in your lineup each week including the flex spot. This makes WR inherently the most important position in best ball drafts, as your roster is required the most scores from them each week. The roster above is 8 picks in to their draft without a 3rd wide receiver, and they will need to hit the absolute nuts the rest of the draft to have a competent WR room.
That brings me to the title of this section, understanding the law of diminishing returns. This “law” can be defined as such: increasing one input while holding all other inputs constant will decrease total output. To put this in layman’s terms, focusing too much on one factor while ignoring other factors will ultimately be detrimental to the whole entity. In relation to fantasy football, this means that if you are allocating too much draft capital to the same position, you are inherently hurting your entire roster.
The best way to build a sound best ball roster is to allocate capital at a relatively fair rate to all four positions (QB, RB, WR, TE). Your WR group should receive the most capital, as it requires the most total weekly scores (3) from your roster as mentioned above. This would be followed by RB (2), and the lastly QB (1) and TE (1).
The chart below is a great way to keep yourself in check with draft capital. Each draft slot has roughly ~750-800 points of total draft capital. That would mean on a perfectly balanced roster, you’d be allocating roughly 330-350 worth of capital to WR, 230-250 to RB, and about 95-100 to both QB and TE. I want to make it clear that you should obviously not be following this too rigidly, nor do we even want to be drafting “perfectly balanced” rosters. More so, this chart and thought process can be used to keep you on track when drafting so you don’t get too wacky or unhinged with your roster construction.
Taking it back to the example above, it is a fine move to do a robust RB build (drafting multiple RBs early). Although not something I do too often, it is certainly a viable draft strategy that can work. However, the issue here is that this drafter needed to stop clicking after the 4th one (James Conner) was selected, and been completely done at RB for the remainder of the draft. Through his first 4 picks, he had allocated approximately 320 draft capital points towards RB. This is a lot of capital (over the 230-250 points we talked about above), and more than I like allocating to RB (especially through 6 selections of the draft), but it is still a manageable start to building a solidly-constructed roster. However, following the Conner selection, this drafter was in desperate need to start catching up at WR… especially since capital was also burnt on an elite QB. That’s where things really went south here.. adding another ~40 points of capital to Pacheco when this roster was already more than set at RB.
Again, this chart/draft capital guideline is not to be followed religiously or even too closely at all. However, having it in mind along with the “ideal” draft capital allocations by position is useful for drafting structurally sound teams.
My Favorite Way To Draft In 2025: Barrel WR Early
My last section here is a little glimpse into how I like to attack the majority of my best ball drafts in 2025. As you could probably deduce from this article and my general sentiment on best ball as a whole, I like to make sure I get my WRs early. I’m typically leaving a draft with no less than 3 WRs in the 1st 4 rounds. Some of my favorite clicks in these rounds are Ceedee, Puka, Ladd, Rashee, and Tet. Outside of WR, I’ll mix in the round 1 RBs some as well as Josh Jacobs, and some elite TE/QB.
The next 4 rounds I’m usually hammering a few RBs that project for strong roles and/or have clear top 12 upside. These include (but are not limited to) Ken Walker, James Conner, RJ Harvey, TreVeyon Henderson, and Tony Pollard.
Round 8-12 is where I like to mix in some high-upside rookie WRs such as Egbuka, Jayden Higgins, Tre Harris, Luther Burden, and Kyle Williams. I’m typically ALWAYS grabbing at least one QB and/or TE here as well. QB is largely team-dependent, but some of my favorite clicks are Drake Maye, Dak Prescott, and JJ McCarthy. Tight end options are also in abundance here, as there are high upside vets like Andrews and Kelce, as well as exciting younger players like Tucker Kraft, Tyler Warren, and Colston Loveland.
After round 12 or so, I’m mostly just filling in the remaining spots on my roster as needed. I typically always have at least two high-end RB handcuffs on my rosters, including guys like Tyler Allgeier, Isaac Guerendo, Will Shipley, and more. Cam Ward is an enticing late QB option as the 1st overall pick, and there are several viable late TE options including Hunter Henry, Brenton Strange, Chig Okonkwo, Mason Taylor, and Theo Johnson. WR is largely a crapshoot this late in drafts, but I typically grab rookies Jack Bech, Pat Bryant, and Jaylin Noel, or will mix in the occasional veteran in Dyami Brown or D-Hop.