The first version of this series covered positional value in standard College Fantasy Football formats. This week, we’ll take a look at H2H Bestball formats.
Not all treasure is Silver and Gold, mate.
– Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
This article is the second part of a series I started last summer where I looked at positional value across different CFF formats. The first focused on standard re-draft leagues (i.e. choose starters). I am now providing a second article in the positional value CFF series.
Today, I will look at H2H’s best ball formats with waivers. I will eventually be doing another one for classic best ball formats with no waivers, as is used in Underdog Fantasy’s CFF leagues. A lot of the ideas in this one will apply to both.
First, for clarity, I will define what a Bestball format is. Bestball means that the highest-scoring performers in your lineup are automatically used as your starters rather than you choosing the starters. You can customize how many of these players you start each week (e.g., two QBs, five QBs, etc.). Below is an example of how this looks.
In the Golden Pig Invitational (my home league), you start 2QBs, 2RBs, 3WRs, 1TE, 2FLX, 1K, and 1DST. You have 22 roster spots, and you can configure this roster however you want (i.e., you can have 22 QBs if you want, or 10 DSTs, there are no restrictions). When the games are finished, your top performers are automatically pulled.
My opponent has eight WRs rostered compared to my six. Most likely, I make up the deficit at RB, or perhaps QB. His RBs must have performed better than his fourth-highest-scoring WR because only three scores were used, suggesting that the FLX positions automatically pulled from his RB or TE pool. For my squad, the fourth-highest-scoring WR must have outperformed my second-highest-scoring TE and either my third or fourth-highest-scoring RBs because one of the scores is being pulled in the FLX spot.
H2H Best Ball With Waivers
In this format, you get the benefit of not worrying about last-second injury scratches or an injury within the first few minutes for a player while retaining most (if not all) of the benefits of a standard league with H2H competition and waivers. Choosing starters can be a fun exercise in the standard format, but succeeding in this aspect of CFF is more influenced by luck than I would like. There is still skill involved, sure, but it’s one of the areas where the balance of skill vs. luck is muddied.
H2H best ball with waivers is how my home league is currently structured. The first lesson I learned last year when playing in this format was that upside is everything. Volatility is no longer a dirty word. It is in regular formats. Players who crack out a few times per month but also lay duds inexplicably are much more beneficial in this format. Players like Seth Henigan or App State’s Joey Aguilar, who could get you 24-26 PPG like clockwork, were no longer valued. Not highly, at least.
In that sense, it changed the calculus on how to value each of the major position groups, and I’m going to share with you today some of the things that I learned.
Stable QBs are out. Bi-weekly heroes are in
As alluded to in the above section, the stable, always dependable, white-collar QB doesn’t really play in this style of game. We’re looking for bi-polar commodities who can feasibly get 30+, 40+ point performances semi-regularly. If they lay duds every now and then, it’s not a big deal because their score won’t be used anyway. If they can give you a 40+ point performance four to six times the whole season (contributing in a major way to you winning those weeks), then their spot on your roster is justified.
A player like Henigan, for example, might get you a consistent 20-25 point performance every week, which is good, but when your opponents are achieving at least two out of their five QBs rostered scoring 35+ points, you’re going to end up in a point deficit for that position group every week. There’s some justification to hold one of these types of assets in the QB room if you have four other home-run hitters in the pen, but it is generally not beneficial to hold a set of QBs like this in this format.
As far as valuing this position group under this format compared to standard, I value QBs more here. This is a complete 180 from what I thought one year ago. I thought under this format, since the margin for error is higher, that I could value this position group even less than I usually do.
What turned me around was the start of the season in this league in 2023. I had a rough time with the QB group. I could find fairly solid guys, but I was constantly in a point deficit with others who had higher upside QBs that they acquired via drafting. I still finished with an 8-3 record in the regular season and advanced to the playoffs that year, so drafting elite QBs still isn’t necessarily a make-or-break factor for your season, but it does help a lot more in this format.
The reason QB is more important in this format is that you can now have as many QBs as you like on your roster that could all potentially contribute to your point total each week. When your opponent starts one QB or two QBs, the likelihood that you will face a situation where that player(s) scores 30+ each week is low. The chances are high when you have, say… five good QBs in this format. At least one of those five will clear 30, meaning that you need to put yourself in a position to get that, too, from your QB position.
On the other hand, if you have five good QBs in a standard format, it doesn’t make much difference because you’ll choose only one to represent your squad each week.
Overall, volatility is still bad for an entire position group. Still, as long as you have enough players performing at different times during the season, you end up smoothing the position group’s volatility in the aggregate.
Because upside is at a premium in this format, and the fact that every week is a goddamn scoring bonanza, you need QBs who can get to those ceilings of 40, 50, 60 points, etc. There aren’t as many of those around (as opposed to QBs that consistently get 25 ppg), so naturally the value of them increases here. Alabama’s Jalen Milroe is a good example to use here. His volatility makes him a nightmare to hold in a standard format. He’s a fucking rockstar in this format.
Wide Receivers
In my opinion, the dynamics of the best ball heavily affect this position. I don’t want to say that consistency is no longer valued at all, but it is certainly a devalued variable in this format.
In the words of my good friend Henri, who finished with an undefeated record in the 2023 Golden Pig regular season: the best-case scenario is to have players who crack out every game, but in the absence of that, the next best thing is a guy who cracks out twice out of every three games. So long as the team is balanced enough where different players are doing this at various times, you win.
You no longer need to fret about the players’ floor, and the emphasis of roster construction shifts to shooting for the upside. You might deploy a few stabilizers into the lineup with safe floors to help with your nerves each week, but by and large, you win by swinging as high as you can.
With that in mind, in the last version of this article, I specifically mentioned WRs who have safe floors as the type of players I like in standard leagues. In this format, that is not the case at all.
The boundary players, or at least the guys who score TDs, are very important. As mentioned in the QB section, you are now competing against your opponent’s absolute best shot every week. Their best performers automatically get used in their starting lineup, and in a format where you can feasibly hold eight or nine WRs, the scores required to win each week get quite high.
That’s not to say I am no longer interested in the high-target volume slot guys. You can see in Figure 1. that I still have quite a few of those guys rostered (Lincoln Victor, Terrell Vaughn, Sean Atkins), but there are also guys like Elic Ayomanour and Daniel Jackson for the long-TD upside. It didn’t pan out for either of those players that week, so it was nice to have the more stable commodities via the slot guys.
The matchup pictured in Figure 1. isn’t very high-scoring relative to the rest of the league. In other weeks, 30- and 40-point performances populate this league’s starting lineups. Slot guys can get to those totals, too, but it’s a lot easier when you score 70+ yard TDs to get there vs. 15 receptions of 20 yards or less each. The volatility of the boundary guys is greater. Still, as mentioned in the QB section, this is OK as long as you have enough players at this position group to smooth the overall volatility.
With all that in mind, I still believe that the WR room can be built entirely via waivers. It’s a position where there are just so many options that reveal themselves throughout the year.
Running Backs
This is the position where my view has shifted the most in this format. In general, I firmly believe in getting the #VolumePig RBs because those are the guys locked into so many carries each week that you’ll rarely get a dud. This matters quite a bit in a standard format where you choose your starters. It’s not as relevant in this format. It’s still valuable, don’t get me wrong, it’s always a good thing to have Tahj Brooks, who fetches you 20-25 points every week, but it isn’t at quite the premium it was before.
The guys who don’t get the consistent touch volume or whose role is not solidified as the designated workhorse each week can now be very valuable and, in some cases, even more valuable. Players that weren’t necessarily classic ‘VolumePigs’ like ND’s Jeremiyah Love, Baylor’s Bryson Washington, PSU’s Nick Singleton, and Rice’s Dean Connors in 2024, were very useful in this format because their down weeks wouldn’t count towards your score. Yet, you’d pocket their good weeks which happened frequently enough to help win you games.
An RB room filled with players netting around 15 points each week will have a hard time competing with another where one or multiple players hit 20-25+. You’re better off having a group of RBs where some score zero points, and the others put up monster scores versus a group of runners evenly dispersed around 10-15 points.
The ultimate goal is to have those consistent pigs who also have huge upsides, like Ashton Jeanty, Omarion Hampton, and RJ Harvey. Still, when looking for the next best option, more players can be valuable to you than before in an H2H best ball league.
