Did the Shark Eat Us? (The 2025 Best Ball Economy: Part I)

Revisiting the Wide Receiver v. Running Back Economy after Backs emerged victorious in 2024 and considering how strongly to react in 2025

Alright folks I’ve been working on this one for a while, and looking forward to laying it out for you. It’s time to have our annual conversation on the seasonal draft economy — in particular with respect to running backs vs. wide receivers. Here is Part I today, and I will circle back with Part II shortly.

In this column we are looking at the macro factors influencing ADP and scoring output to determine how best to navigate this economy. In Part II we will narrow in on the micro considerations (i.e. player takes) which determine how our teams get built within this draft environment.

Note: While designed around Underdog’s Best Ball Mania, this is broadly applicable to any tournament format such as Draftkings Best Ball or even the FFPC or NFFC Redraft Tournaments

Let’s dive into this.

We Jumped the Shark in 2024

Last off-season I wrote about the possibility we had gotten out over our skis with WR-Flation in the piece linked below:

That article turned out rather prophetic 2024 was the best season for RB-heavy drafted in the Best Ball Mania era.

However, I don’t intend this call back as a victory lap. First off, that piece was explicitly not a prediction that we had definitively over-priced the wide receiver position. Rather, it was largely an exercise in how best to take advantage of the RB prices available to us in the event that we had. While I made a case for James Cook who wound up as a great hit, I also recommended Travis Etienne who had an awful season. Both in the article and in my own drafts, I largely failed to shift to the running back position early enough to fill up on Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry — two essential pieces for a successful 2024.

But that piece did diagnose some inefficiencies in our wide receiver infatuated market correctly, such as the following:

For the majority of 2024 draft picks, you are choosing between a higher scoring RB and a lower scoring WR. Based on that, shouldn’t we be building under the assumption that RB will be the optimal flex position more often than not?

Historically, RB and WR have been equally likely to hit the flex in half-PPR best ball. But in this economy, it’s hard to believe that will continue. I’ve heard arguments made that we should leverage the current Best Ball economy to draft fewer RBs than previous years relative to cost because better profiles are available later. For instance, a team with David Montgomery - D’Andre Swift - Tony Pollard - Brian Robinson Jr. may be viable with just 4 RBs or possibly with a last-round 5th, despite no RBs being taken in the first six rounds. I agree that it could be viable, but I don’t really understand what the purpose of such a team is.

In support of that passage, I made some charts:

As you can see above, running backs and wide receivers had scored quite similarly on a positional finish basis in 2023 (the season previous to last). When scoring is arranged like this, if we simply alternated between the two positions in our ADP, and if we were able to forecast the year-end finishes of each position with similar accuracy, each running back would be roughly a coin toss to outscore the adjacent wide receiver.

But as you can see in the chart below, that is not how we drafted running backs and wide receivers in 2024. We drafted the WR36 nearly two rounds before the RB24.

Because you start 2 backs and 3 receivers each week, that means you could draft the first ‘flex’ running back nearly two rounds later than the first ‘flex’ wide receiver and that back was likely to score more points per game. In that environment, it was unlikely that optimal teams would flex a wide receiver.

What may be surprising given how last year played out is that wide receivers and running backs continued to score at a similar rate from a positional finish perspective.

Yes, this chart tilts more toward early-RBs than its 2023 counterpart, but only by a hair. There were a couple more backs at the top-end that produced above 15 PPG. As well, the RB30+ range tailed off more steeply than in 2023. In my opinion this is due to atypical running back health in 2024. Backs outside the top-30 scorers at the position were not able to access contingent upside as often as they might in a year with more common injury distribution.

However, given how similar the scoring distribution was as a whole, one could argue that the biggest reason RB-heavy teams were so much more successful than WR-heavy teams last year compared to previous iterations of Best Ball Mania was not about the backs or the receivers. It was about us.