The Ultimate Underdog Best Ball Mania VII Guide

Jun 12, 2026

IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

This is always (one of) my longest articles of the year. It’s everything I could think to research once Underdog released their full data from last year’s Best Ball Mania (BBM) contest. And so, it’s everything I think about when I’m on the clock. The article is organized in five sections: Roster Construction, Stacking, ADP Value, Player Takes, and Diversification/Uniqueness. And it’s all backed up by 24 graphs/tables from BBMVI. Feel free to skip around using the hyperlinks above or read straight through if you’ve somehow hung onto an attention span in the year 2026.

Roster Construction

By roster construction, I mean how many players and how much draft capital you should spend at each position. The table below shows the most popular positional allocations used by drafters last season and how often those teams advanced to the playoffs.

Quarterback

Deciding between two or three QBs is the biggest choice from a roster-construction perspective. Data from recent years continues to guide us toward three-QB builds. Four of the five best-performing options last year had three QBs. And three-QB builds have now outperformed two-QB builds in four of the six years of BBM. That’s definitely the way I’m leaning in early drafts.

Alright, so we want three QBs in most cases. Perhaps the more interesting question is when should we target these QBs? The answer last year was as late as possible. And that’s because the top-end of the position didn’t separate. The 24.9 fantasy points per game scored by the QB1 in 2025 was the lowest a QB1 scored over the last five seasons (minimum of eight games played). And that’s true for QB2, QB3, and QB4. At the same time, QB7 through QB12 has been stable over the last four seasons.