One of the newest waves to gain increased popularity in recent years in the fantasy football arena is the best ball/draft champions format (we will use interchangeably throughout).
Draft champions is an alternative to weekly lineup games where your lineup is optimized after all the games have been played and your highest scoring players are ‘started’ and count towards your total for the week.
This is a format I have been playing for years at NFFC and has recently hit the mainstream with impressive competitors popping up such as FanDuel’s Draft.com and Real Time Fantasy Sports.
We will go over our preferred best ball destinations at a later date but for now we stick to our rankings.
In best ball depending on your provider you select up to 35 players sometimes including defensive and special teams.
Strategy in these formats leans a little more to upside as opposed to high floors with lower upsides. For example we have TY Hilton as an WR1 in our best ball rankings because he is assured to have some moster weeks that rival any receiver in the NFL, however in our redraft standard and PPR his weekly boom or bust potential and floor factor into making him a high end WR2 instead of a WR1.
Draft champions, especially in the more fun 35 round format, make for very interesting and exciting drafts as you are now dealing with a pool of close to 400 players instead of the roughly 200 you see in shallow redraft yearlys. This means players that would be left on the wire in those leagues will now be rostered and their big weeks may help you win your league. All of a sudden you have to plan where you will draft Chris Warren or David Boone even though they are UDFA’s they have shown enough in preseason that if an injury were to strike their backfields they would be instantly fantasy relevant.
One thing new players would do well to remember however is that while there are no weekly lineups to set there is also no free agent pickups, which means who you draft is who you will roll with all season, so take that into consideration when drafting; especially when it comes to backups for your quarterback, tight end and even kickers and defense/special teams if applicable.
This is a format we suggest everyone try sometime in the future and with more and more owners seemingly complaining they cant set weekly lineups the draft champions formats is destined to soon be offered from traditional fantasy hosts such as Yahoo and ESPN as soon as 2019.
With that said, without further adieu we are excited to bring you our constantly updated 2018 fantasy football best ball rankings:
