A weekly journal of too many best ball fantasy football entries, and how we’re progressing toward glory and treasure through the NFL season.

Hey there, I’m Kevin, and I play Best Ball on Underdog Fantasy.

This is a support group, right?

I got into Best Ball contests this year (in part because I legally bet on sports in the state of Florida), and quickly racked up 136 entries over the course of a number of contest formats on the Underdog platform ahead of the NFL season.

Like many of you, I’ve played fantasy football with friends in the past, so this was an easy thing to pick up. In fact, my view is that the best ball format on Underdog is really the most superior form of fantasy football. It’s quick, easy, no maintenance throughout the season, gives you some extra fun during NFL weekends, and of course, gives you the shot to win some big bucks!

I have no idea if my entry fees (totaled over $1,000) will be a huge loss, break even or be an investment into millions of prize dollars (not likely). Either way, wow, is it fun. I’m a huge fan of the format.

Each week, I’m going to chronicle how I’m progressing. Am I pacing well toward winning some of these contests? Do I even know if I’m pacing well? Remember I’m new this year. Either way, I’ll share all the lowlights and highlights.

Before I jump into my week 1 status, a quick note of introduction. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’d recommend you check out our best ball fantasy football guide as well as the Underdog best ball guide we have written. They’ll give you a good overview. Or, you can just keep reading, and you’ll likely pick it up along the way.

Best Ball Variety

Within the NFL best ball ecosystem on Underdog, there are multiple formats. Underdog rolled out some new ones this year, and really gave its users some fun variety. Here they are:

  • Standard Season Long Best Ball: Headlined by the huge Best Ball Mania contest with $15M in prizes, this also includes smaller contests like Puppy, chihuahua, etc. (lots of dog-related branding at Underdog. These contests have varying entry fees. You draft your team, score points in the standard QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, WR, TE, FLEX lineup format. The first 14 weeks of the NFL season are the first round of elimination, then week 15, week 16 and championship round week 17. This is your standard format.
  • Superflex: Similar to standard, except instead of three WR slots, you have two WR slots and a SFLEX position. SFLEX can include QB (standard FLEX can only include RB, WR or TE). This leads to changes in draft flow because most lineups are going to have 2 QBs contributing on a week-to-week basis, therefore QBs go much earlier. Just a fun variety on the normal best ball contests, while still feeling pretty close to the usual.
  • Weekly Winners: Now let’s get into some very different formats. Weekly winners is our first one. This goes against the entire idea of a season-long contest. Every single week is its own contest. Some call this a blending of best ball with daily fantasy.
  • Eliminators: Again, a different format. Instead of round one of elimination/advancement being weeks 1-14 of the NFL season, every single week is an elimination round. Similar to survivor type games.

The Status

Now that you know the contest types, let’s look at my participation across each of these and where I sit after a week of action.

  • Standard: 102 entries, including 10 entries into Best Ball Mania (the big boy!)
  • Superflex: 9 entries
  • Weekly Winners: 18 entries
  • Eliminators: 7

Standard and Superflex Entries

I’m going to group together standard and superflex since they have the same advancing structure. Here is the data after week 1:

  • 111 entries
  • Average place out of 12 teams (each entry is competing in a 12-entry group for this round): 5.89
  • 24 entries currently slated to advance. This means they are in either 1st or 2nd place after week 1. The advancing round is the entire time frame between weeks 1-14 in the NFL, so advancing status right now is basically meaningless, but we’ll track this week to week.

Is this good? I have no idea. This is where I am currently. We’ll see how it moves week to week.

Weekly Winners

The nature of how Weekly Winners is structured, you’re going to basically strike out the vast majority of the time, and hopefully I finish in the money a handful of teams across my entries.

  • 18 entries
  • Week 1 results: no entries finished in the money

By the way, the interface is super cool for tracking your performance.

As you can see in the above screenshot, I had 4 of my 18 entries finish right outside the money, so I guess that’s encouraging? Will be interesting to see if one of these entries hit in the money in the forthcoming weeks.

Eliminator

I’ve got 7 entries in elimninator contests. These are unique because each week is a individual contest, and you just need to survive and advance. You advance by not being in the bottom two spots of the 12-person groups. One of my lineups finished in 12th place and is gone. The other 6 advanced.

  • 7 entries
  • Still alive after week 1: 6

Observations

Overall, the first week of NFL was super fun having all of this best ball action going on.

Having gone all in on this world over the last few months, it’s very funny to see some of the narratives of “best ball season” get completely destroyed and become irrelevant, while others were pretty accurate.

A few storylines that the fantasy world was a buzz about during week 1:

  • Chiefs receivers were horrible.
  • Lions RB Jamhyr Gibbs didn’t get much action, but boring David Montgomery did.
  • Atlanta RB Tyler Allgeier put up huge numbers even with newcomer Bijan Robinson
  • Tua to Tyreek is nasty.
  • Tight ends were a bust.

Here’s my best lineup for this week out of all the 100+ entries.

Yes, I’m in first place with that lineup after week 1.

Other Fun

Underdog was running a special for Saquon Barkley where he only had to gain a single yard on a pick’em contest. I try to play all the specials, and I decided to go big here. Why not? Let’s take a swing with a 5-leg pick’em that pays out 2o to 1. One of the legs is essentially already cashed (assuming Saquon just plays), so let’s go for it. Welp, I went 5 for 5, and turned $5 entry into $200. Boom.

Want to join in the fun? Be sure to use promo code SOUTH, and you’ll get up to $100 on a deposit match. Join, deposit $100, you’ll have a $200 bankroll to play daily fantasy contests and pick’em contests.

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See you next week.