Show Me The Best Ball Data - Friday 7/12
Defining the Best Ball landscape one week at a time
I think we can confidently say that Best Ball Summer is officially hot, hot, hot! Underdog Fantasy released The Hound Dog 2, The Pug 2, and The Golden 3 on Wednesday and they all snap filled within 12 hours because people are absolutely frothing at the mouth for new contests.
Rookies report to NFL training camps in less than one week. We know that news is going to hit fast and ADP is going to start moving, so I wanted to make sure that Show Me The Data is ready for all the action.
Moving forward, I’ll be sending out a newsletter every Friday helping to recap some of the different tools that I use to get a feel for how the Best Ball landscape is evolving. Ideally, as time permits (a 8 month old baby who is anti-sleep doesn’t help here) I’ll toss out a few longer form articles throughout the week as well.
Wen Puppy? Now Puppy
The Contest Comparison tool is probably the thing that I get asked the most about on Twitter. If you aren’t super familiar with the concept, I will be sending out an article later this summer trying to build what I think would be a perfect contest. In the interim, the quick explainer is that this is a tool that I use to try to determine how a contest ranks up against some of it’s peers. This can help for bankroll management throughout the summer.
Just this morning, Underdog released the Slow and Fast Puppy. For many different reasons, The Slow Puppy is one of my favorite contests that they have ever created. Ok, it’s actually mainly just one reason.
They took the top-heavy prize structure approach to both of these this season. While it’s hard to not love 6 figure prizes to first place, these contests are never going to grade out super well in my tool, since I weight “21st to 1st prize ratio” so highly.
These contests are very similar. Both follow the 2/12 → 1/10 → 1/10 advancement structure. The Fast Puppt (20 sec clock) is double the size and the ratio of the 5th and 21st place payouts relative to first place are both a little worse than the Slow Puppy. The big positive is that making the Finals in either of these guarantees that you make your money back, which is a fun addition UD has been adding this year.
“Scroll the Eff Down” Friday
I introduced this concept about a month ago, so if you missed that article please feel free to read it here. Generally speaking, what we are trying to identify is the low-owned players who will help provide us leverage on the field. We can combine Establish the Run’s BBM ownership projections with Hayden Winks Percent Drafted optimization curves to help us solve for this.
There’s been a lot of consistency with these charts over the past few weeks which is why I haven’t been tweeting them out a bunch, however with the upcoming ADP movement, this list should ebb and flow a lot too. For now, best to just familiarize yourself with the concept and try to target drafting a couple of the players in the Sweet Spot.
ADP Velocity - The Storms a Brewin’
Checking my ADP Velocity tool every day has been one of the most helpful things that I’ve added to my routine. As I introduced in mid-June, I think there’s a lot of nuance to be had in deciphering the ADP Risers and Fallers, and I think this tool does a really good job of providing context.
It’s honestly a pretty boring list right now, so I’m not going to spend too much time diving into it. Again, this is a good week to help get the fundamentals of the ADP Velocity report under your belt so when the big swings start happening, we know how best to assess them.
Diving into the Bookmark Bin
I am a big fan of the Jonathan Bales method (can’t find the actual quote/article) of trying to identify who the smartest/most reliable people are about certain topics and just following them blindly (almost). This allows you to spend more time on other things (like the above three tools). Of course with Fantasy Football, there’s pretty much no one that you can follow blindly, however here are some of the accounts that I have been getting the most value out of lately. Moving forward, I’ll try to include some data-driven tweets that I’ve bookmarked over the past week for any of my fellow SMTD who nerds want to dive in.
The Coachspeak Index - Incredible insight into whether we can take action based on what the coaches are saying, or whether we should proceed with caution.
32 Beat Writers - I subscribed to these guys a few weeks ago and have been absolutely loving the summary posts they put together outlining all of the actionable takeaways from beat writers for all 32 teams.
Majesstik1 - Jess is the creator of The Workbook over at One Week Season and he’s been dropping some really fun spreadsheets on Twitter looking at historical scoring data for all positions. Below is his WR tweet, but he’s got similar ones for all positions. I’m as big of a fan as anyone of spreadsheet screenshots posted to twitter that make you double tap, scroll around, and zoom in!
Happy Friday people. Enjoy the weekend, hopefully these Puppy contests don’t fill before Monday.
Peace, Love, and Best Ball!