Best Ball Strategy: Herzig’s Approach to QBs

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Drafting QBs is one of the most important parts of a Best Ball draft because it often dictates your stacks and overall roster composition. In this article, I look to share my approach for how I’m attacking the position in Best Ball tournament drafts. This analysis will primarily focus on the Underdog rules and roster sizes.

If you’ve been reading my articles or listening to my takes on podcasts, you’ll know that I am heavily favoring the Hyper Fragile builds and ideally aiming for a roster construction of 2-4-9-2 with the final slot going to where I’m weakest. Looking through my early drafts, I’m only 10 in but zero of my roster constructions have three QBs. This is because I 1) believe in the importance of saving that additional roster spot for a more volatile position and 2) identified guys in the 8th–10th rounds that I feel provide substantially more upside than I’m able to get if waiting on guys outside the 12th round.

Now, once we establish I am likely only drafting two QBs, it is important to ensure I have two guys that provide substantial upside. The No. 1 thing regarding QBs that I learned last year is the importance of having a QB that has rushing TD upside. Yes, across the season it’s great to have QBs that rush for 40 yards a game because they provide a solid floor. But more importantly, in the Best Ball playoffs and especially only 0.5 PPR scoring, having the rushing QB that can get one or two rushing TDs is a fantastic way to gain an edge on the field. This year, I am doing what I can to leave every Best Ball draft with two QBs inside the Ryan Tannehill and better tiers.

While my personal rankings don’t perfectly line up with Evan Silva’s Tiers, I am going to use his recent QB tiers to talk through my strategy in each grouping.

Tier One: Lamar Jackson (QB1) > Patrick Mahomes (QB2) > Kyler Murray (QB3) > Josh Allen (QB4)

In this tier, I have found myself often grabbing Lamar because with an ADP of 55.1, he allows me to already have my two or three solid RBs and I’m only giving up a Tier Three TE or solid WR to grab him. I also love that with Lamar, I don’t have to worry about a stack and can let the draft come to me for QB2. For the other QBs, I have found that I’m only grabbing one if I also have one of their stud receiving options. I was looking at a draft recently where someone grabbed Josh Allen, stacked him with Emmanuel Sanders and Cole Beasley, but not Stefon Diggs. With any team I draft, I like it to tell a story of how it could win the championship. If Josh Allen has a great year, it’s likely to also include Stefon Diggs – and in the playoffs, there would be a substantial number of teams that have that stack. I would then need to advance multiple rounds of the playoffs with Allen crushing, but hope that either Diggs goes very quiet for a four-game stretch or gets hurt, but Allen still thrives. I think that outcome is just too unlikely to excite me to build that roster and thus I’m out on Mahomes and Allen without Tyreek or Kelce or Diggs. Kyler I’d be more willing with his significant rushing upside, but I just haven’t been ending up with him often due to his ADP.

And when I end up with one of these four, I am likely trying to pair him with a high weekly upside but mid-round guy in Justin Fields, Trey Lance, Trevor Lawrence, or Ryan Tannehill.