A weekly journal of too many best ball fantasy football entries, and how we’re progressing toward glory and treasure through the NFL season. You can read the week 1 report here.

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

As I mentioned last week, I’m tracking 136 entries (and $1,000+ in entry fees) into best ball contests on the Underdog platform. This is my weekly report to see how things are progressing and see if I’m on track to break even or maybe make some serious cash on the NFL season. Thanks for coming along on the journey. If you’re knew to Underdog, it’s a great platform for both daily fantasy, longer-term best ball contests as well as pick’em contests. The pick’em platform is why we have Underdog as one of our top apps like PrizePicks for football fans.

The Best Ball Contests Available

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’s how I’d describe these:

  • 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.

My Status Across 136 Best Ball Entries

Here’s how I spread my entries around these contests for the 2023 season:

  • Standard: 102 entries, including 10 entries into Best Ball Mania
  • Superflex: 9 entries
  • Weekly Winners: 18 entries
  • Eliminators: 7

Standard and Superflex Entries

Here is the data after week 2:

  • 111 entries
  • Average place out of 12 teams (each entry is competing in a 12-entry group for this round): 6.15 (slightly worse than week 1’s 5.89 number)
  • Just like last week, I still have 24 entries currently slated to advance. This means they are in either 1st or 2nd place after week 1. Not every team that was advancing last week is still slated to advance. Some dropped out of the 1-2 range, others went into it. The net-net is that we still have 24 entries slated to advance after 2 weeks of play.

Weekly Winners

Two weeks in a row of no success in Weekly Winners. I’m concerned!

  • 18 entries
  • Week 1 results: no entries finished in the money
  • Week 2 results: no entries finished in the money

Eliminator

I started with 7 entries and I’m down to 4 left after week 2. Not what I was hoping for.

  • 7 entries
  • Still alive after week 1: 6
  • Still alive after week 2: 4

Observations

The running backs are falling fast!

Other than Christian McCaffrey, fantasy players that expended early draft capital on running backs are taking on water right now. Of course, I did exactly this on plenty of my entries described above. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

By the way, one of the top WRs is Rams WR Puka Nacua. For some odd reason, your boy went pretty heavy on Nacua in late rounds. If I can get into the playoffs, having a severely underowned and highly productive player is how you can win big bucks (learn about the concept of leverage here). Let’s hope I can get into the playoff rounds with some of my rosters that have Nacua. I’ve got Nacua on 11-12% of my rosters.

This next week, I’m going to probably play some of the single weekend contests. I kind of like the contests involving players from only about 4 teams. There are some interesting strategies there. For example, this week, if you played the TNF-SNF contest, the winning rosters all had Vikings QB Kirk Cousins and Vikings TE T.J. Hockenson. I might try a similar approach and lean into the top tight end.

Thursday night is 49ers vs. Giants. Sunday night is Steelers-Raiders.

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.