Underdog Drafts

Preparing for Chaos

Imma Gonna Win!

It’s after midnight on a warm August night when you put on your sleep cap and you’re ready to start counting sheep. But before it fades to black your peace is spoiled by a rude messenger. It’s an urgent push notification from Underdog saying “You’re on the clock!.” You have 10 hours to make your selection, but since you want to sleep-in until noon it’s now or never. Justin Fields has fallen five spots past his ADP and you already have DJ Moore rostered at WR. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy. You click the paper-airplane icon “Draft” with a grin thinking about what you want to buy first with the $3 million prize. It isn’t long until that same messenger returns, but this time it’s AJ Dillon who now needs to be saved. Without hesitation you smash the green icon and you close your eyes wondering how you could be so lucky. It’s not until the next morning upon opening your Underdog app and wanting to relive the previous evening’s triumphs that you realize something is off. The squad you drafted Justin Fields with already had Lamar Jackson, which wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t have the same late bye week. Damn. You quickly click through every active draft searching for your AJ Dillon team. Your worst fears are realized when you come to find Aaron Jones on your roster smiling down at his teammate a few spots below. Double Damn. It helps to be organized when competing in a tournament with 677,376 entries for $15 million in prize money. This two-part series of articles is dedicated to the groundwork and strategy behind Underdog drafts. Much of the process covered in this series can be directly applied to redraft leagues as well.

Spread Them Sheets

Like everything else in fantasy, there is an excess of factors to be cognizant of when attacking your Underdog drafts. In order to orchestrate all of these data points into a harmonious symphony, I find spreadsheets to being the most effective method of organization. Here’s how to begin building out your spreadsheet.  

Sheet 1 - The Cornerstone: Sheet 1 is the basis for all of the other sheets in your document. It is comprised of both a ‘Rankings’ section and a ‘Notes’ section. I divide the Rankings section with Overall, Round, Player, Position, Bye, and Personal Rank (optional) columns as pictured below.

The Rankings: The basis for all my rankings (dynasty, redraft, Underdog) is rooted in ADP. Managers that operate too far ahead or behind ADP take on far too much risk in outsmarting others. With millions of dollars on the line and thousands of contestants, it’s not a stretch to say that Underdog has the sharpest season-long ADP in the entire fantasy space. Overspending and negating any possible ADP edges that are pivotal in such a small-margin contest is folly. So with that said, visit https://underdogfantasy.com/lobby , go to the ‘Rankings’ tab, and press the ‘CSV download/upload’ button to receive the latest Underdog ADP. Once you have the ADP copied over to your spreadsheet, the real fun can begin!

Color Coding: In an 18 round draft that has over 200 players its pivotal to find what you need as easily as possible. At minimum I recommend color coding the Position column (I use the same color-scheme Underdog uses) and highlighting in red any player on a week 13/14 bye. Having too many players on a bye right before the playoffs can absolutely crush you, especially if you lose any players to injury throughout the course of the season that you banked on performing during these byes.

Notes Section: If you were speculating what all the different numbers and colors represented in the Rankings section, wonder no further. My Notes section comprises four different categories. Is any of this necessary? No, but I hate sleep and love needlessly grinding any possible edge I have in winning, so all of this is purely optional. 

WoRP Performance - One of the main things I look at when organzing my rankings is how well a player performed in terms of WoRP (Wins Above Replacement Player). We will dive deeper into exactly what WoRP is, but in general WoRP shows us how many more wins a player earned you in comparison to any other player. I assign a score and color to each player depending upon their previous year’s WoRP. 

Playoff Projection - Having players with the projected best matchups during the most critical stage of the tournament is a massive advantage. There isn’t much of a science to how I assign these scores to players - I simply assign a low, middle, or high score to that player’s week depending upon if the pass/rush defense they are playing was ranked in the bottom, middle, or top third of the league. Since there can be fluctuation in how defenses perform year to year, I only use this as a tiebreaker when I am on the clock and having a hard time deciding what player to draft.

Spike and Above Average Weeks - The beauty of playing in a BestBall format is capturing the peak performances players are capable of. One of my favorite ways to gauge how dominant a player was in a best ball format is to look at the number of Spike weeks (player was top 5 in points scored at their position for that week) and Above Average weeks (top 16 QB/RB, top 24 WR, top 8 TE) a player had last year. Be judicious when it comes to your player selection - draft a healthy mixture of players that can offer peak performance and/or consistency. You can easily find this data by joining South Harmon “S.H.I.T. Show” on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/SouthHarmon.

Roster Construction - We have three years worth of data from the Best Ball Mania Tournament in which we can glean some very interesting notes on the best and worst ways to compete on Underdog. When pouring through the data it becomes apparent that there are not only certain Roster Constructions (the number of players to draft at each position) that perform better but also the ideal ranges to target different positions throughout the draft. This Roster Construction section is a snapshot of the most ideal roster, based upon both WoRP data and the amazing analysis that Hayden Winks (@HaydenWinks) does over at the Underdog Network. We will be taking a deeper dive into the analysis behind Roster Construction in part two of this Underdog series, which focuses on strategy. 

Sheets 2-13 - 1.01-1.12: An eternity later after you have finished scoring and color-coding each player (if you so choose), it’s now time to replicate this Cornerstone sheet into 12 more sheets. Drafting from the 1.01 position is massively different from the 1.12 slot, especially when observing ADP. If most users are drafting in respect of ADP, then it’s not too difficult to map out the players that will likely be available at each of your selections. Having each of these dedicated draft position sheets can make all the difference, especially when the draft position is an unknown until after you join the lobby.

An additional advantage to having dedicated sheets for each draft slot is potential stacking! Stacking is a strategy in which managers draft pairs of teammates - typically consisting of QB’s & their top receiving option(s). Stacking is a major emphasis in my Underdog drafts and is often in the same breath as prime playoff matchups as the greatest edge in best ball. 

I begin this process first considering which teams I would be willing to draft their respective QB (27 QB’s for me in 2023). The next step is arranging in order of ADP the QB’s fellow teammates. I then rank each stack based upon the combined scores of the QB with their top stack option; with special emphasis on the QB and the offense they operate in. This transitions into identifying which stacks are the most attainable given the first player you have to draft at ADP. There are certain stacks that are pretty much impossible to achieve without seriously reaching ahead (such as Diggs & Allen) or getting extremely lucky with a top player falling to you past ADP. However, there are plenty of stacks (such as the Kelce & Mahomes) that are definitely achievable within a certain range of draft slots.

Sheet 14 - Exposure: The following two sheets on Exposure & Active Drafts are optional given that the information can be found through the Underdog platform, but if you live on the sheet streets like I do then perhaps you’ll find this arrangement preferable as well.

First looking at Exposure, this tells you the percentage of shares you have drafted of a particular player across all of your drafts. Your exposure is strategic for the simple reason you don’t want most of your tournament hopes sinking because you couldn’t stop drafting a player and they suffer a season-ending injury. I personally don’t recommend any exposure on a player exceeding 30-35%.

Sheet 15 - Active Drafts: The final sheet displays all the rosters I am in the middle of drafting. This sheet is only worthwhile if you participate in the Slow-Draft (8 hr timer) lobbies, which is exclusively what I participate in. With the extended selection time, one can methodically map out their strategy by thinking several moves ahead and focus on a portfolio approach across all of their active drafts. If you wait till the end of the off-season, very often you can take advantage of any big news that affects ADP live during your slow-draft as an additional perk as well.

In my Active Drafts section, I track the number of Spike/Above Avg players I’ve drafted, the picks themselves, and I make heavy use of my notes section with players I want to draft with upcoming selections. The final element I focus on is my draft strategy, but we’ll save that for next time!