Trimming the Fat - FFPC Best Ball Slim Draft Strategy (WR/TE)

I mentioned the below in part one of this series, but in case this is your first time seeing an article on this, I thought I'd keep the intro the same. If this feels repetitive, feel free to skip down to the wide receiver portion of the article.

Perhaps the most popular format in FFPC Best Ball leagues is their 28-round, 12-team team formats. These leagues follow a relatively standard roster format, requiring you to start the following on a weekly basis:

• 1 Quarterback
• 2 Running Backs
• 2 Wide Receivers
• 1 Tight End
• 2 Flex
• 1 Kicker
• 1 Defense

They are a lot of fun to tackle and start at $35/league. However, if you're looking for a cheaper option to get your FFPC fix in or just something a little less tedious, the growing FFPC Best Ball Slims just might be a good place to start.

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(Recapping) The Skinny on Slims

These starting rosters shape up as follows:

• 1 Quarterback
• 2 Running Backs
• 2 Wide Receivers
• 1 Tight End
• 2 Flex

The key omissions in this format are kickers and defenses, which have become less sought after positions over the years despite traditionalists claiming there is only one way to play. There's not and FFPC slims are here to prove it!

Consider this your introduction to the format, as we lay out some basic strategies for tackling your first best ball slim.

In part two of this article, we'll take a look at how to approach the wide receiver and tight end positions. If you've yet to do so, be sure to circle back to part one of this series, where we cover draft strategies for quarterbacks and running backs.

 

Wide Receivers

As was the case with the first article, I will be once again soliciting the aid of the RotoViz FFPC Roster Construction Explorer to help cover roster build theory for both wide receivers and tight end.

When it comes to the receiver position, we see the following win rates from the receiver position.

Of the different builds we see here, we notice that the two with the highest win rates are 7WR builds (8.6%) and 8WR builds (10.1%). However, 6WR builds, when executed correctly, can still be a winning strategy. These numbers directly coincide with what we know about running back builds, which is that builds between four to six running backs have the higher win rates.

(NOTE: In PPR or .5 PPR scoring, it's often discouraged to have more running backs than receivers. At the least, keep this number even. However, having more WRs than RBs will likely offer you more upside.)

Keeping in mind that we are only working with data from 2020 (when FFPC first deployed the best ball slim format), we can plug in a variety of filters that show several occurrences in which 5WR and even 6WR builds cashed at an above-average rate. If you recall from the first article, I went over some historical win rates for RB builds, where we saw that a running back heavy approach early has yielded suboptimal win rates.

One quick way to boost your win rates at the start of a draft is to secure your WR3 before the fifth round, which propels overall win rates to 9.1%, with a 6WR build providing you an 8.9% win rate. Even 5WR builds, while below-average, aren't as bad as you'd expect compared to their 7.0% shown above.

This allows you to secure three elite WRs early while avoiding the famous running back dead zone, and also implies that you are drafting an elite TE or RB with one of your first four picks.

For those curious about starting with a more robust RB draft, here is how win rates look when you select your RB3 before round five.

You'll notice that 4RB builds are the only ones with an above-average win rate, while the overall win rate is 1.6% lower than teams who draft their WR3 before round five. For another look at how win rates can be affected when drafting WR-heavy early, here are FFPC slim win rates when your WR4 is drafted before the seventh round.

Drafting WR early and often can boost your team's win rates in a number of ways. Whether you are building them around a single elite RB strategy, an elite TE strategy, or even going Zero RB, WRs can create safe floors and pad ceilings. This is especially the case in scoring systems that reward receptions since not every running back you draft high will have the benefit of adding points through the air - a la Derrick Henry and Nick Chubb.

If you are deploying other draft tactics correctly, it is harder to blow a WR-heavy approach than it is an RB-heavy one.

 

Tight Ends

If you don't think that tight end is one of the most painfully useless positions in all of fantasy football, then you either haven't been playing long enough or you live in denial.

Regardless of which one it is, most would prefer the TE position be done away with in fantasy or rolled into some kind of WR/TE flex where we aren't forced to roll out the likes of Drew Sample due to an injury or bye week.

But the reality is, we do have to draft and start at least one TE every week, so it's best we know how to do that.

When it comes to drafting TEs in FFPC slims, go into the draft with the assumption that you'll never be drafting more than three. If you are taking more than three, it's likely because you've faded the position so hard that four of your final five picks are invested into the position.

One strategy that I covered for drafting TEs in the 28-round FFPC best ball drafts is beginning your draft with a TE-TE start. This has yielded historically high win rates (10.1%). But, would the same start hold up under the 18-round best ball slim format? I plugged it into the RotoViz RCE and these were the results.

On one hand, we are staring down the barrel of another limited sample size. However, we've still got a decent number of teams that have done that, and we can see that the average score for these teams is 55 points higher than the unfiltered win rates.

This isn't all that surprising because the FFPC features TE premium scoring (1.5 PPR) and allows us one TE spot plus two flex spots - meaning we aren't as likely to burn our second-round pick as we would be in other leagues that feature only one TE and one FLEX spot.

If you want to see some insanely high win rates stretched over a larger sample, here are win rates for teams that took a TE1 in Round 1.

Now, there's a lot to get excited about here, but let's not get too crazy. Last season, only one tight end carried a first-round ADP in best ball slims (Travis Kelce, 9.2 ADP). So these win rates could be highly reflective of the 18.6% win rate he gave to his drafters. But, it's also good to know that drafting elite TEs in Round 1 can boost your win rates in these formats - especially when you consider that Darren Waller (10.9 ADP, TE2) and George Kittle (13.7 ADP, TE3) could both draw first-round selections in your drafts.

It's hard to say exactly when you should go with a 2TE build as opposed to a 3TE build with only one season to review. But, teams that drafted their TE1 after Round 3 but before Round 10 all drew an above-average win rate, with that win rate only climbing the closer you get to Round 3.

You can probably win plenty of leagues with a 2TE build provided that both of your TEs are drafted within the first 10 rounds. But with such a volatile position, who's to say you can't find this year's Logan Thomas (271.4 ADP in 2020) or 2019's Darren Waller (177.9 ADP)?

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