Walking Through Rounds 1-2 of a Playoff Best Ball Draft

You can't win a tournament in the first round.... but you can lose it

Last week I wrote up a team-by-team analysis of the AFC picture in playoff best ball. (below)

I was planning on doing the same today for the NFC, but due to the Lions-Vikings game leaving the bye at a relative 50-50, it’s hard to be as precise in what pairings are workable or unworkable as I could be with the AFC. I also talked plenty about the NFC teams in the context of my last piece. Instead, what I’ll write about for the bulk of this piece is what to do in the first two rounds of your draft — and what not to do.

Easily the biggest mistake I see in my lobbies are players not thinking proactively enough about what their team will look like based on their first few picks. Often you see teams taking two non-QBs from two possible super bowl opponents, each of whom have their QB come off the board to other teams. Or you’ll see teams build out two teams in the same conference. The result winds up being teams that cannot build a super bowl lineup featuring one of their first two picks, and often teams that rely on significant upsets to be live to win a contest. There’s nothing wrong with mixing in occasional bets on underdogs in a proactive fashion. But this piece will hopefully guide you away from finding yourself “stuck” after not properly thinking through the consequences of your early selections.

For folks who are just tuning into playoff best ball, first of all check back through my previous pieces for an explanation of the basic mechanisms of the format. But I think this will be a good start to help you feel less overwhelmed by all the levers at play with a zoomed-in focus on how to start building your super bowl game stacks.

Guide to the First Two Rounds

Here is every player with an ADP in the first 3 rounds that you might realistically consider with your first two picks.

As a general rule, you should be more willing to stray from ADP in playoff best ball contests than regular season tournaments. As we’ve hit on in each piece of playoff best ball content we’ve done, it is effectively a pre-requisite to win this tournament to have drafted at least five players from the two super bowl combatants. Because of that, the ADP at which you drafted your respective players only really matters with respect to those who are playing in the super bowl.

For instance, if you knew the Chiefs would play the Packers in the super bowl, you’re not gaining any edge from picking each Chief and Packer at ADP. In fact, the best possible team would start taking Chiefs and Packers from Round 1 all the way through Round 10, value be damned.

When you think about constructing your team, the most important consideration is how your best possible combination of players entering the super bowl stacks up against other possible combinations of those two teams.

Simply put, not all combinations are created equal.

There are only six teams represented in the first three rounds. For the purpose of this column, I will only focus on plausible super bowl combinations of those six teams. If you wish to play any of the other teams as a super bowl combatant you can likely play them as a secondary team from their conference with little opportunity cost.

I’m going to walk through each combination of early teams, and the best (and worst) ways to open your draft focusing on those teams.

KC-DET ; KC-MIN — Dealing with Bye Uncertainty

Stacking Kansas City with either Detroit or Minnesota requires a bit of guess work, given we won’t know until Sunday which of these NFC North foes gets the bye. For that reason, I’m mostly stacking Kansas City with the Eagles this week and pairing my Detroit and/or Minnesota teams with Baltimore and Buffalo. You can make teams that work in either event with those combinations and just add a 2nd QB if you play Goff or Darnold to be safe. Then I’ll just make it a point to go heavy on KC/MIN and KC/DET when I have more information.

However, there is nothing against the rules with stacking these teams heavily now, you just have to make a choice on who you are projecting to win Sunday’s game and what scenario you’re playing for.

I also think if you’re playing in any contest that’s been live for a while such as the Gauntlet that KC/DET is the better pairing (even if KC/MIN is the one I’ve played a lot more of prior to the Week 17 results, and prefer in a vacuum). The reason for that is that (sharp) drafters have largely been playing KC-DET as a two-bye build until recent weeks have flipped the NFC bye odds closer to 50-50. Detroit is also drafted so early that you can’t realistically add more than 2-3 Lions skill players anyhow. If you want to play KC-DET as a double-bye, you won’t be facing many teams with deeper KC-DET combinations come the Super Bowl in the event the Lions wind up without a bye, and those that do build 7-8+ player stacks of this matchup will need to do it primarily on the Chiefs side — which will get a bye anyhow.

KC-MIN is trickier. The Vikings have been (Way! Too!) cheap this whole time to the point you can draft every meaningful norseman if you want to on one team. You can build teams with Patrick Mahomes and 1-2 Chiefs skill players plus Justin Jefferson, Aaron Jones, Jordan Addison and T.J. Hockenson. This sets up a catch-22. Build KC-MIN under the assumption MIN gets the bye, and your team is going to be much worse than several of these mega stacks if these teams meet in the super bowl. Build KC-MIN under the assumption MIN does not get the bye, and you are likely dead to advance out of Round 1 if you have 6+ KC-MIN players.

For that reason, I’m just going to wait a few days and then go as hard as possible at KC-MIN once we know the situation on Sunday Night. However, if you are building either of these stacks here’s how to pay it round 1.

KC-DET

Jared Goff has begun sliding toward the 2-3 turn, which is resulting in far fewer rooms in which 5 QBs go in Round 1 than there were a week ago. Because of that, my favourite way to play it if you’re set on this stack is to take Jahmyr Gibbs Round 1 and then take either Jared Goff or Patrick Mahomes in Round 2 depending on who is available.

Amon-Ra St. Brown is a materially worse pick than Gibbs in my opinion, and a tough click for this format generally just due to the position he plays.

It’s difficult — though not impossible — to pair St. Brown with Gibbs AND one of Goff or Mahomes. The only way to do it is to save the QB for last, which works best if you are in the 4-spot and all three teams between your 2nd and 3rd pick have QBs. Sometimes teams will take Goff as a QB2 however and ruin your plans. This is lethal since you now have a Gibbs-St. Brown team with no Goff and no QB on any of the top-three AFC teams. Your path to a championship now relies on a string of massive upsets in the AFC.

If you take St. Brown with one of Goff or Mahomes in your first two picks, you now have to bet on St. Brown plus the injured David Montgomery or one of the Chiefs backs outscoring Gibbs plus that team’s surplus pass catcher in the super bowl, and perhaps more challengingly, you need to generate sufficient RB production from somewhere to get to the Super Bowl.

The most likely scenario for me is to just take Patrick Mahomes in Round 1 and then leave myself open to the board to gather more information before deciding which NFC team I pair him with. But if you’re set on the Lions, Gibbs is the way to go.

Best Combination: Gibbs, Mahomes

Viable Combinations: Gibbs, Goff ; St. Brown, Goff ; St. Brown, Mahomes

Non-Viable: Gibbs, St. Brown (unless you are confident in the room to give you a Round 3 Goff or Mahomes)