Succeeding in best ball requires a different drafting strategy than traditional fantasy football.
The nature of best ball places a premium on player ceilings and spike weeks, making higher variance players more valuable than they are in your home leagues on Sleeper and ESPN.
Our priorities are different when drafting best ball teams, and so are fantasy football rankings.
But because best ball is a relatively new phenomenon, there has not yet been a metric that properly combines a player’s expected points with their expected variance to assess their value in best ball leagues.
You’ll find best ball analysts that manually adjust their rankings, using what they know and expect from players this upcoming season. This is imperfect and the subjectivity required is suboptimal.
That’s why Sean Koerner created BBPA (Best Ball Points Added), an innovative fantasy football metric that projects how many points in a given week are added and usable for best ball teams.
Best Ball Points Added, Explained
In traditional season-long formats, winning a matchup by one point or 50 points has the same value: a single win. However, in best ball, every additional point a player contributes over another player is invaluable.
For example, if a quarterback scores 12.7 fantasy points in a given week and ranks as QB20, that score is unlikely to be useful for most best ball teams. Conversely, a massive performance, such as Josh Allen’s 40.7-point explosion in Week 12 last season, significantly boosts a Best Ball team’s total points and potential success.
Or look at it this way: 0 points from Player A are no different than 7 points from Player B if the latter also goes unused. As such, there’s no reason for our rankings to subconsciously penalize the 0-point performance more than the unused 7-point performance.
Here’s a look at the top 10 quarterbacks in BBPA from 2023:
To see every quarterback’s BBPA from last season, make sure to check out Koerner’s Best Ball QB Tiers.
So the core idea behind BBPA is to quantify how many usable points a player is projected to add to a team, more effectively highlighting high-variance players who are specifically valuable on best ball sites.
It’s time to leverage BBPA to make more informed decisions and build stronger, more competitive best ball teams. Come back later this summer to get Koerner’s BBPA projections and season-long projections.
