Playoff Best Ball First Impressions

Five Rules for Sharp Drafting + Under and Over-Valued Teams

Welcome in to the beginning of Thinking About Thinking’s playoff best ball coverage.

This is one of my favourite game formats every year because it merges player selection, roster construction, and team-focused analysis.

It’s also one of the most exploitable formats for sharp drafters to create a sizeable edge vs. the field.

Last year I did an FAQ post on some of the basic strategic levers at play in these contests. I won’t go into a lot of detail on the basics of the format but you can check that out here. As a refresher / introduction here are 5 basic rules to follow for making +EV playoff best ball rosters.

Lastly, this will be focusing only on Underdog’s contests. I will cover the FFPC playoff challenge here too once the field is set.

1. Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Similar to regular season best ball, the success or failure of your season will come down to the performance of your best team in the final week — should you be fortunate enough to advance one there.

Unlike regular season best ball, very few of the players we’re drafting will be playing in that final week.

To have any chance to win an Underdog playoff best ball tournament you need five player ‘live’ in the super bowl. Specifically you need to be able to field 1 QB, 1 RB, 2 WR/TEs and 1 FLEX. Any other consideration is secondary.

Therefore, every pick should be made with an eye toward either increasing the total number of combinations of five players you can make in a given super bowl matchup, or increasing the total number of team matchups you can field a live five between.

For example, a lineup with 5 Bills and 5 Packers maximizes the number of potential combinations you can create in a Bills-Packers Super Bowl, while a lineup with 3 Bills, 3 Chargers, 2 Packers and 2 Vikings maximizes the total combinations of teams you can field a plausible 5 player lineup in.

There is no hard and fast rule for what is the best number of players on a given team to take, but every player you pick should be in service of giving you additional team combinations or additional player combinations to get you to five in the super bowl.

On a similar note, you should not be overly worried about your advance rate from Round 1. High-projecting players from teams with low super-bowl odds are typically over-drafted. Those players have use cases on specific teams, and the managers which draft them most heavily will advance more teams early on, but nothing else matters if you can’t field a live five in the Super Bowl. You just have to live with the fact that most of your teams are going to be wiped out early, and need to just give yourself as many shots as possible with well-constructed teams for one to reach the super bowl with a live combination. Once you’re there, all those teams which were optimizing to advance rather than win will be the reason you’re at such a big advantage when the big money is on the line.

2. Mind the Bye Weeks

Navigating the bye weeks is the most interesting wrinkle in the strategy for these tournaments.

To state the obvious, teams with byes are typically the most likely to make the super bowl, but spending your early picks on players who won’t play Round 1 will make it difficult to advance teams through the first round.

Of course, whether you choose to be over or under-exposed to bye week teams doesn’t make them any more or less likely to be in the super bowl.

In just the last three seasons we’ve now seen a double-bye week super bow, a no-bye week super bowl, and a one bye-week super bowl.

Naturally the treshold for the type of score you need in a super-bowl comprised of one — or especially both — bye week team(s) will be lower than if two non-bye week teams make it.

For that reason, the more interesting decision-point is how to build bye-week and non-bye week teams than whether to focus on the bye-week or non-bye-week teams.

You can make a +EV pick with any first round pick. You just need to build a team around each pick that makes sense in the context of the assumptions that pick relies on in order to pay off.

If you’re building with two non-bye week teams as your primary stacks, I would be inclined to build out an entire lineup with just those two teams or close to it. For instance, let’s say my first pick is Derrick Henry and I’m able to add both Lamar Jackson and Zay Flowers. I decide to make my second team stack the Packers — which works nicely because I can draft any Pakcer I like in most rooms all after the first three rounds.

If you’re building under the assumption of a Packers-Ravens Super Bowl, it’s quite likely there will be teams featuring 7, 8, 9 or even 10 Ravens and Packers making the Super Bowl week since it’s quite easy to draft the best players of both these offenses, and Packers-Ravens teams are likely to be at an advancement advantage over bye-week teams in Round 1.

If I were building Packers-Ravens teams I would invest very few if any picks in other teams and instead play all in for this combination.

If my first pick is Jahmyr Gibbs however, I’m now assuming the Lions make the super bowl — which means there will be a lower threshold to hit in the finals, and the more pressing concern is finding ways to advance my team through Round 1. On a team like this, players such as Bijan Robinson or Nico Collins — who will project as elite plays in Round 1 but have very low odds relative to their ADP of making the Super Bowl — are far better suited choices for my team. If the Texans or Falcons can win one game, and I get two elite performances from a Collins or Robinson before bowing out, that might be worth it if they can carry a team with three Lions on it to the finals.

The other interesting wrinkle at this time of year is we don’t even know for certain which teams will have the bye.

The Lions are 70% likely in the NFC according to ESPN’s FPI, but the Chiefs are given a 52% shot, compared to 34% for the Bills and a small chance for the Steelers and other teams.

At the current odds, I’m mostly drafting the Lions under the assumption they will get the bye (and the Eagles under the assumption they will not). In the AFC however I’m mixing my bets, including a few Bills and Chiefs teams assuming they do get the bye and others that assume they do not.

3. Mind the Positional Combinations

It’s important to keep track of the positional limitations on your combinations.

The easiest way around this issue is to ensure you draft a RB from the same team as your QB (or QBs). If you do that, any combination of five players between two plausible super bowl opponents should be a plausible five person lineup.

For example, let’s say you have the following team:

QB — Lions, Falcons

RB — Lions, Falcons, Bills

WR/TE — Lions, Falcons, Bills, Chargers, Chargers

Any combination of either NFC team with either AFC team in the example above will field a plausible full lineup. However, consider a slightly different version of that team:

QB — Lions, Chargers

RB — Lions, Bills, Bills

WR/TE — Lions, Falcons, Falcons, Chargers, Chargers

In this example, despite having plausible combinations of five live players from four plausible super bowl matchups, the only combination you can actually field a lineup of 1 QB, 1 RB, 2 WR/TE, 1 FLEX is Lions-Chargers.

If it’s Lions-Bills, you can’t field 2 WR/TE, if it’s Chargers-Falcons you can’t field a RB, and if it’s Falcons-Bills you can’t field a QB.

Any time you start adding multiple players from 3rd and 4th teams you’re adding more combinations of teams at the expense of more combinations of players. So make sure if you’re doing so that you are actually adding plausible combinations of teams to make a valid super bowl lineup.

4. Mind Your Opponents

In playoff best ball, team-level pricing is extremely volatile. It’s quite likely we will see major shifts to team-level ADP on a weekly basis based on injuries, performance, and playoff and/or odds to obtain a bye week. And this makes a massive difference in which teams you should be targetting in which contest.

The nature of these tournaments is that specific combinations matter very much since there are far fewer plausible winning lineups than in regular season best ball. For that reason, closing-line value is hardly an abstract concept. When a player moves up a full round in ADP this changes the type of combinations of players you can put around them, and it makes them a meaningfully different pick on your roster than someone else’s who drafted them at a different price.

If you are fortunate to have five live players for the Super Bowl, you will doubtlessly overlap with every other team that does. If you draft a team after their prices rise, other drafters will have built far better versisons of the same team you’re building.

For now, underdog is only offering the “way too early” contests. When they start launching The Gauntlet, we won’t have to worry about competing with today’s prices, but we will keep a close eye on how much pricing shifts over the life of that contest.

An example last year was the Bills — who (similar to this year’s 49ers) were 5-5 at this time last year but the market believed in as a plausible contender if they were to make playoffs. They opened as a team you could take every meaningful player from in the mid rounds. However, that quickly changed as they began to stack wins and improve their playoff security. By the end of drafts it was difficult to stack the entire offense, and if you did, you had to start from Round 1 rather than Round 3.

Had the 2024 Super Bowl been 49ers-Bills, it would have been functionally impossible to create the best version of 49ers-Bills teams in The Gauntlet drafting late in the process. You either had to ignore the Bills entirely, or pair them with a later-drafted NFC team who wasn’t being combined with the Bills earlier in the process.

However, as Underdog continues to release smaller, time-boxed contests, you don’t have to worry about clposi

5. Don’t Fight The Room

Not every drafter in your lobbies will be sharp. But several will be, and you should be able to predict the picks of those drafters. If you’re planning to draft a lot of entires into these tournaments you should be open to several different combinations of players and teams — even if you have strong preferences for a couple teams to be over and under-weight on.

Because there are a finite number of meaningful players on each team, the combination of players you draft really matters.

The nature of these drafts is that in sharp rooms, each manager is only considering players from 2-4 teams, which means ADP is not particularly reliable in a single room. If you happen to be the only player interested in a given team, you might be able to draft almost every player on that team well behind ADP. However, occasionally you’ll find yourself competing with another drafter for a given team and it’ll press the cost of each player on that team upwards.

To the extent you can avoid confrontation with your fellow drafters it’s best to do so. Sometimes you’re committed to a given team and there’s nothing you can do about it. But especially for teams that aren’t targeted until the mid-late rounds, if you were hoping to add a Green Bay stack for instance and someone else snipes you on Jayden Reed, I’d just let that dream die and stack up a different team. If Green Bay goes on a big run there will be teams in current contests who grab Reed, Jacobs and two more Packers with their final 4 picks. If you take Jacobs after someone takes Reed, there’s a good chance that other manager is also going to add Watson or Doubs and both of you are left with a far diminished version of the Packers onslaught compared to other teams you’ll see in the final rounds.

I want to be over-weight Packers (spoiler alert) but I only want to be over-weight with the best version of Packers teams, not any Packers team at any cost.

Team-By-Team Breakdowns

Now let’s get into a first look at the current market and what teams present the best opportunity at this moment. The full ADP can be viewed here, but I’ve included a screenshot of each team’s ADPs below.

For each team I’ve set out the following, based on ESPN’s Football Power Index:

Team: (% to make Super Bowl) / (% to make playoffs) / (% to earn bye)

AFC

Buffalo Bills: 27% / >99% / 34%

Kansas City Chefs: 26% / >99% / 52%

Baltimore Ravens: 18% / 97% / 1%

Pittsburgh Steelers: 10% / 97% / 9%

Houston Texans: 9% / 97% / 2%

Los Angeles Chargers: 6% / 95% / 2%

Other Potential Playoff Teams: Denver Broncos, Indianapolis Colts, Miami Dolphins, Cincinnati Bengals

NFC

Detroit Lions: 39% / >99% / 70%

Philadelphia Eagles: 17% / >99% / 19%

Minnesota Vikings: 11% / 95% / 7%

Green Bay Packers: 11% / 88% / 2%

Washington Commanders: 6% / 88% / 2%

Arizona Cardinals: 5% / 65% / <1%

Atlanta Falcons: 3% / 72% / <1%

San Francisco 49ers: 3% / 27% / <1%

Other Potential Playoff Teams: Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Los Angeles Rams, Seattle Seahawks

First Impressions

I will dive far deeper into the team-by-team strategy in coming weeks but I wanted to register my first impressions.

Going solely by the ‘objective’ odds, the tiers in terms of likelihood to make the super bowl appear to be as follows:

1. DET

2. KC / BUF

3. PHI / BAL

4. PIT / HOU / MIN / GB

5. LAC / WSH / AZ

6. SF / ATL

7. Everyone Else

Meanwhile, the best ball market has tiered the teams more like this in terms of ADP

1. PHI / DET / BAL

2. KC / BUF

3. HOU / MIN / SF

4. ATL / GB / PIT

5. LAC / AZ / WSH

6. Everyone Else

Based solely on ADP v. Super Bowl odds, the Eagles, Ravens, 49ers, Texans and Falcons stand out as over-priced, while the Chiefs, Bills, Packers and Steelers stand out as under-priced.

In terms of teams who are near-locks to make the playoffs and under-priced relative to that, the Chargers and Commanders stand out, while the 49ers are the major outlier for being priced up despite only a 27% chance to make playoffs.

A lot of this is explainable by the relative attractiveness of each team’s fantasy assets. Drafters want to click Henry, Barkley, Jefferson, Collins, Mixon etc. and they’re much less excited about the top producers on the under-priced teams. However, Derrick Henry will be scoring 0 points in any game the Ravens don’t play — so I would argue this is more a description of an inefficiency than a fair explanation of the cost.

If the Ravens and Eagles miss the Super Bowl, the Henry and Barkley teams will be drawing nearly dead, even if they post huge advance rates for as long as the Eagles and Ravens are alive.

Speaking subjectively, I simply believe in the Packers much more than I do the Vikings (and perhaps even more than the Eagles). I’m fairly confident Jordan Love will be the best QB on the field in every conference playoff game he appears in, and Matt Lafleur can hold his own as a play-caller. I don’t love their defense, and I understand that their offensive EPA on the year lags behind the Eagles and Commanders.

I just trust that with the depth of play-makers and quality of QB they have more ways to beat a team in a playoff environment where each team is hyper-specifically game planning for one another than any NFC-contender not named Detroit or San Francisco.

I fully buy the Lions of course and I think Amon-Ra St. Brown and Jahmyr Gibbs should probably be the first two picks off the board. We saw last year that the 49ers got increasingly more expensive down the stretch as drafters focused more on playoff odds and less on the weekly fantasy value of the players in front of them. I would take advantage of the current prices on the Eagles and Ravens guys and stack up the Lions now while you can still get multiple of their top options on the same team. The timing is also beneficial to add players from teams like the Packers, Steelers and Chargers who are nearly certain to make the playoffs at a very palatable cost to help sustain your advance equity on Lions builds.

The 49ers are the most high-variance team on the board. If they make the playoffs they might be favoured in every game save for @ Detroit on their path to a Super Bowl, and they boast several elite fantasy options while having zero chance at a bye. If you think they can win their next two games vs. the Packers and Bills, their playoff odds will massively shift upward and their costs will skyrocket. Even though they are “over-priced” I am more intrigued by them than the Eagles or Ravens since I see a far higher ceiling on their cost than their current ADP. If they lost the next two games they’re dead, so it’s not likely you’re going to have deal with even cheaper 49ers teams in your pods. You can either full fade them and hope they miss the playoffs, or you can take them now and take the chance of getting the cheapest 49ers teams in the pool. I think it’s worth at least mixing in and may even wind up overweight based on my total disinterest in the Ravens and Eagles.

On the AFC side, my first impression is that both the Bills and Chiefs are too cheap for their super bowl odds and we should be making them our major focus in the early rounds.

Going deeper, the Chargers are my Packers of the AFC in terms of a team I feel is underrated. I like them a lot better than their full-season metrics profile which still weights their first 4 weeks when Justin Herbert was battling multiple injuries and they were running the ball at league-high rates. Since opening up the offense post-bye week the team is 5-1, and they are the only team outside the Chiefs and Bills in the AFC that can credibly offer a top-end defense combined with elite QB play. They’re probably a WR-short this year and will need to play on the road every game, but I would absolutely back this team in a road game vs. Pittsburgh or Houston and I give them far better odds of knocking off one of the true elites than either of those squads.

For this week at least, my two favourite builds are:

1. Lions early w/ one of Chiefs or Bills in the middle + Chargers late

2. Chiefs or Bills early + Packers late

Depending on whether you wish to play the Chiefs or Bills as a bye-week team or not, you may wish to add in a 3rd/4th team with strong Week 1 equity. I’m playing each team both ways for now.

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