Best ball is all the rage, and a great way to play fantasy football. It allows fantasy gamers to take part in what they love most -- drafting -- without the task of having to set a lineup each week. Not only is this format fun with no maintenance, but there are edges that present themselves as a result of playing in this style.
One of those edges is stacking. For those of you who don't already know, a stack is when we pair teammates together. There are different ways to do this -- especially if we expand our context to daily fantasy and other sports -- but for the purposes of this piece, stacks will refer specifically to pairing a quarterback with at least one pass-catcher.
Why You Should Stack
The reason stacking is paramount to best ball success has to do with understanding one basic principle of best ball: it is a weekly game played over the course of the season. This sets the stage for everything that we do in terms of team construction. Our objective isn't to score a set number of points, it is to outscore our opponents by as many points as possible each week. At the end of the year, our aggregated differential versus the field is what determines if we win or lose.
If we accept that our differential versus opponents is what matters most, then that means we want to accumulate as many big scores as we can that will be difficult for them to replicate. To simplify, think about this on the player level. Tyler Lockett is someone who season-long players had a lot of consternation over last season, because his results were so variant. But in best ball, he was a league-winner. He posted games of 45.5, 32.5, and 27 fantasy points (0.5 PPR). In context, he was one of only two WRs to post a game of at least 40 points, one of 13 with a game of at least 30, and one of 32 with a score of at least 25. The only player with more games of 25 points than Lockett was Davante Adams. Not only did these scores give fantasy gamers an advantage in the week they were obtained, they were also scores opponents were unlikely to make up in future weeks.
So what does that have to do with stacking? Individual player distributions are difficult to predict, but if we extrapolate this to the full roster level, we can try to maximize our big weeks through these teammate pairings. It should come as no surprise that quarterbacks are highly correlated to their teammates. Again, we can look to daily fantasy for some answers.
