Weekly Winners on Underdog Fantasy is a unique Best Ball tournament format where participants compete to have the highest weekly score throughout the NFL season. Instead of focusing on cumulative season-long points, the emphasis is on winning each individual week. Here’s a detailed breakdown on Underdog Weekly Winners strategy and the Best Ball tips for winning!
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Underdog Weekly Winners: What It Is and How to Win
- Weekly Payouts: Each week, the team with the highest score wins a prize. This structure ensures continuous engagement and excitement throughout the season, as every week is a fresh opportunity to win.
- Drafting: Similar to traditional Best Ball, participants draft a team of players, but the goal is to draft players who can maximize their performance in specific weeks rather than over the entire season.
- No Lineup Management: Once the draft is complete, there are no trades, waivers or setting lineups. The best-performing players are automatically selected each week.
- Flexibility and Engagement: Since each week is a new chance to win, participants remain engaged even if their team underperforms in earlier weeks.
- Increased Chances to Win: With payouts every week, there are more opportunities to earn winnings compared to traditional season-long formats.
Tips for Becoming a Weekly Winner
1. Target High-Variance Players
You’re better off with players boom/bust players than you are consistent performers. Remember, you’re trying to win, or at least top-5 a contest with 186,000 entries. Spike weeks matter.
For wide receivers, deep threats or consistent multi-touchdown performers like Tyreek Hill, Mike Evans, Gabe Davis, Darius Slayton and Marquise Brown tend more towards a boom/bust output than consistently good. Evans has had SIX top-5 weeks in the last two years. Chris Godwin has ONE inside the top 10.
For running backs, adding goal line backs is a great get spike weeks outside of bell cows –for example, David Montgomery or Jamaal Williams later in the draft. Gus Edwards led the NFL in carries inside the 5-yard line last year and may have a few multi-touchdown games in him with the Chargers.
These backs won’t pay off most weeks, but when they do, you’re going to get a big boost in your odds of finishing near the top.
If you can’t get goal line backs, the same principle applies as Best Ball: Draft backup running backs who may take on a bell cow role if the starter gets injured ahead of timeshare running backs that will likely remain in a timeshare in the result of an injury.
2. Division Stacking
The goal here is to get more game stacks so your players are playing each other more times than not and that some of those games may go off. If you can hit the right game in a given week that has a high score, you’re increasing your odds of having a lineup spike week.
3. Stack, but Maybe Not Too Much?
These are essentially large-field GPPs in daily fantasy, so you want to make sure you’re correlating your quarterbacks with wide receivers, tight ends and pass-catching backs. If you have Hill and Jaylen Waddle and they go off one week while you don’t have Tua Tagovailoa, you’re probably dead in the water.
A lot of the data from the highest-performing lineups last season had lightly correlated quarterback and receiver stacks. So hypothetically the recent data suggests you’d be better off with Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase OR Tee Higgins — not both wide receivers. Similarly, you want Deebo Samuel or Brandon Aiyuk, not both.
There are a lot of ways to win, but you’re going to at least have one stack with your quarterback. Targeting larger stacks allows you to capitalize on outlier events.
4. Stack Your Bye Weeks
If you can get all your players resting in a week or two, you can punt those weeks but give yourself a higher chance of winning other weeks.
5. Draft Elite Quarterbacks & Tight Ends
This gives you more chances for spike weeks, more access to better offenses. The top 10 quarterbacks in Underdog ADP last year accounted for 77% of the 30-fantasy point games last season. Similarly, the top 10 tight ends accounted for 60% of the 20-point fantasy games last year. Those numbers are drastically higher than wide receiver and running back.
6. Try to Get as Unique as Possible, Moving Around the Early Rounds
You’re not really trying to have the best team; you’re only trying to have the best team for one week. So drafting by ADP is not the best strategy because what’s going to happen is that the same player combos are going to be owned over and over again:
- Christian McCaffrey + Brandon Aiyuk
- Jaylen Waddle + Tyreek Hill
- Bijan Robinson + Drake London
All of these combos are going to be owned a LOT in Weekly Winners. Don’t be afraid to move around the draft, even in the early rounds.
Example: Got Christian McCaffrey? Reach two rounds and get Lamar Jackson and Mark Andrews — no one is going to have that combination of players.
7. Draft Unowned Players at the End of Drafts
Instead of taking Darius Slayton in Round 18, who’s going to be owned in roughly 5,000 lineups, go deeper. Jalin Hyatt might have a third of that ownership with similar big-game upside. Going down a round or two to, say, Josh Reynolds, now you’re talking about players who are owned in the hundreds. Pay attention to news as we get closer — there will be some currently undrafted players poised to carve out roles.
