With the explosion in interest in best ball fantasy sports over the past few years, there’ve been a handful of companies joining (and leaving) the space. One of the top best ball sites is Drafters. They specialize in offering best ball contests, with tournaments across the four major US pro sports leagues as well as the PGA.
Like many of their competitors, they also offer a “pick ‘em” or daily fantasy menu, along with season-long and daily/weekly contest types.
As expected, their flagship contest is their NFL Best Ball championship, which this year features $2.5 million in total prize money and $500k to first place.
On top of that, you can get started with the Drafters promo code LABS, which will earn you up to a $100 deposit match when you sign up.
In addition to deposit bonuses, Drafters also offers bonus entries to players after specified numbers of drafts in the NFL championship contest. These kick in at 10, 25, 50 (2 bonus entries) and 100 (3 bonus entries), and users who max enter 150 contests get a $100 bonus plus a free t-shirt.
Drafters Best Ball Details
Drafters uses a fairly standard, half-PPR fantasy football scoring system. At the end of each week, your top-scoring players by position are automatically entered into your lineup, with your final score for the week added to your total.
The unique thing about Drafters’ season-long best ball contests is the format. While most operators have adopted a week-by-week structure with playoff rounds, Drafters works differently.
Drafts are still conducted in groups of 12, with a snake-draft format. However, after the draft, your group of 12 no longer exists. Every entry into the tournament is combined into one giant league, with prizes paid based on total points scored throughout the season.
That obviously creates an interesting strategy dynamic. Since you aren’t just competing against the people you drafted against for the first 15 weeks, there’s a premium placed on finding contrarian players with upside.
Additionally, there’s no need to worry about Week 16 or 17 matchups, and stacking in general is less valuable. A point scored in Week 1 is just as important as in Week 17, and consistent scoring at the team level is equally as valuable as spiked weeks. We’ll dig into the implications of those in a later article, but they’re worth considering before jumping in.
Draft Options
Like other best ball fantasy football operators such as Underdog Fantasy, Drafters offers both slow and fast draft options. Each draft is 20 rounds, with a 30-second pick clock for fast drafts and an 8-hour clock for slow drafts (that gradually shortens as the start of the season approaches.)
The “starting” or official scoring lineup consists of 1 QB, 2 RBs, 3 WR, 1 TE and a Flex (RB/WR/TE) spot with no defense or kickers. Additionally, Drafters has imposed limits on the maximum number of players per position a team can draft, which are:
- 6 QBs
- 10 RBs
- 13 WRs
- 5 TEs
These limits are largely to prevent players from freezing their competition out of positions, by drafting most of the starting quarterbacks for example.
Best Ball Tournament Options
Drafters features a wide variety of tournaments, including small-field single week contests, “single league” contests that last the entire season, and of course massive GPP tournaments.
Their flagship tournament is the Drafters Million NFL championship, with a $15 buy-in and $500,000 top prize. This year they’ve also added a “Mini Championship” with a $2 buy-in and $20,000 to first place.
The $15 championship is capped at 186,672 entries in total, with individual users eligible for up to 150 drafts. They would likely add another smaller contest if this one fills, though last year there was some overlay despite an even smaller contest and $20 buy-in.
That makes it an attractive option for lower-dollar players – especially those looking to draft a large number of teams – since both of their big tournaments are fairly cheap. They currently don’t offer any higher-dollar GPPs, though they have six and twelve-person leagues up to $109 an entry.
UX
The user interface on Drafters is straightforward and easy to use on both desktop and mobile. They allow for custom rankings by either dragging and dropping players from the default ranks, or via .csv upload. This is an important feature, as being able to easily find players that you like more than ADP is crucial to the draft process.
Once contests start players can easily see their full team, as well as the overall standings within the larger league. Scoring updates are a bit slower than other DFS sites, but typically update within a few minutes of plays happening.
Deposits and withdrawals are also fairly straightforward, with PayPal and most major credit cards as options.
Conclusion
I’m focusing most of my best ball action on Drafters this season, for a couple of reasons. Crucially, they’re legal in my home state of Michigan, unlike Underdog Fantasy. Actually, Michigan regulator recently gave Underdog Fantasy’s best ball drafts the nod. If you’re in Michigan, check out our Underdog Fantasy promo code for a special sign-up offer available to new users.
More importantly, I love the full season structure of their best ball GPPs. The more popular format with playoff weeks relies heavily on getting lucky in the final week or two of the season, and doesn’t reward players for early season production.
Besides this being a more “fair” way to determine the best teams, it also is a big edge for those willing to work for it. Since most users are accustomed to the playoff format, they more often draft teams sub-optimally while playing on Drafters.
We’ll dive into way more Drafters best ball strategies throughout the summer, including types of players better suited for this format, overall roster construction concepts, and more.
