Best ball

What best ball is

Best ball is a fantasy format where you draft a roster once and never manage it again. There are no weekly lineup decisions, no waiver claims and no trades. Each week the scoring looks at every player on your roster and counts the highest scorers at each position automatically, as if you had set the perfect lineup in hindsight. Your season total is the sum of those weeks. Underdog is one of the operators that runs best ball drafts for the NFL.

The skill is all in the draft. Because the best scores count on their own, best ball rewards depth and upside: a receiver who scores nothing for three weeks and then catches two touchdowns is worth more than one who is steady and unremarkable, because the quiet weeks never make your lineup anyway. Many best ball contests run as tournaments with playoff rounds late in the season.

An example

In a hypothetical best ball league you draft eighteen players in August. In week four your top receiver has a quiet game, but your fifth receiver catches two long touchdowns, and the scoring counts him in the starter's place without you touching anything. In week nine two of your running backs are on bye, and your depth fills the gap. By December your total is the sum of every week's best lineup, and the draft you made months earlier has decided almost all of it.

How Speed Survivor is different

Best ball is a season-long pool of decisions made once. Speed Survivor sits at the opposite end of the calendar: every decision is made live, inside a single game, and the contest settles the same night. You answer twelve yes-or-no questions as the game unfolds, earn speed points for being right and fast, survive cuts at set points, and the entrants left standing split a prize pool funded by the entries.

There is no draft and no roster to carry through the season; if tonight goes badly, the next game is a fresh start. How it works has the full game, and the compare pages set it beside the fantasy apps.