This One's for the Bye Week Bros

Author: Billy Jones

Introduction

In the world of best ball fantasy football, where trades and roster management are off the table, every decision made during the draft becomes crucial. As I mentioned in my last post, I recently finished my 100th draft of the summer and I now feel like I have a good sense for the pockets of the draft and some common nuisances that one can run into when trying to build the optimal roster. Today I am going to put on my "Bye Week Bros" hat and address a particularly annoying week that has been plaguing me during my best ball drafts. This particular week keeps resurfacing, causing headaches and frustration as I strive to assemble the million-dollar roster. While some within the best ball community may dismiss the impact of bye weeks on player selection, let's explore the bye week situation that I keep running into issues with.

BBM Basics

For those who may be less familiar with Best Ball Mania (BBM) by Underdog, it’s a unique and immensely popular fantasy football tournament. Best ball is a fantasy football format where participants draft a team and then have no in-season management requirements like waiver wire additions or setting lineups. Instead, the highest-scoring players are automatically placed in the starting lineup, and leagues are decided based on cumulative season points rather than head-to-head matchups.

BBM takes best ball to another level with its distinct two-stage structure: the regular season and playoffs. During the 14-week regular season, teams compete against others in their draft, with the top two teams advancing to the playoffs. The playoffs then consist of a series of single-week DFS-style competitions, where teams from different drafts, potentially with overlapping players to your roster, vie for advancement to the next round.

Data Source

Before I jump back into analytics, I would like to acknowledge the data source. The data used for this analysis was obtained from Underdog Fantasy for the ADP data (as of 06/23/2023) and ESPN for the NFL schedule.

Bye Weeks

Analysis

One particular challenge that fantasy football enthusiasts face is the concentration of bye weeks for tight ends. Within the top 210 ADP, players frequently drafted in BBM rosters, there are 30 tight ends. Interestingly, 6 of these tight ends have a bye in week 7, and an additional 8 have a bye in week 13. This is almost half of the tight end pool with 2 bye weeks.

Week 7’s bye poses less of a problem due to the tight ends ADPs being relatively close and therefore overlapping is less of an issue. But Week 13 bye, I can’t say the same. Within the Week 13 bye week tight end pool, there are early-round tight ends that are highly touted that I find myself drafting a lot of, as well as some late tight ends that I love too. 

As Pat Kerrane's highlighted in his post, elite tight ends are a necessary evil as part of best ball, while they may reduce a team’s advance rate they can provide elite spike week upside which can win one a championship (2021 – Mark Andrews, 2022 – George Kittle). Mark Andrews, TJ Hockenson, and Darren Waller are three of the top tight ends with proven league winning potential, and all have the week 13 bye.

Additionally, outside of Travis Kelce, tight end production is incredibly inconsistent and adding depth is a great way to increase your chances of hitting on a meaningful score to your lineup when it matters most. For this reason drafters will often look to add one or two more tight ends in the later rounds of the draft. When looking for a tight end later in the draft I look to fill out my bye week while taking advantage of team and matchup correlations that I already have in play from my earlier picks. The bye week play is straightforward as I am looking to maximize my score by having a player each week. The team and matchup correlation plays are again straightforward as I am looking to ride my earlier player bets that certain offenses will be explosive across a season and/or certain matchups will be high scoring in the playoff weeks. Of these late tight ends that I am keen on, a good chunk of them also fall on the week 13 bye; Kincaid (NE bringback – 1st round tight end on explosive offense profiled as big slot), Cole Kmet (ATL bringback – improved offense and quarterback with expected increase in team passing volume, still weak receiving target competition after Moore), Dawson Knox (NE bringback – same logic as Kincaid but not the shiny new toy), Michael Mayer (IND bringback – pre-draft #1 tight end on a team that he should dominate snap share from day 1), or Isaiah Likely (MIA bringback – 2nd year tight end with a quarterback proven to feed his tight end and massive contingent upside, incredibly popular week 17 game to stack up, especially if can’t land Mark Andrews with Lamar Jackson). 

Solving the Puzzle

Understand Those Affected

The first step to solving a problem is admitting its existence and based upon the above, navigating the Week 13 tight end puzzle can be a problem. By recognizing which teams have their bye week during Week 13 and the correlated Week 17 “bring back” games, one can begin to solve the Week 13 tight end puzzle. Here are the teams and tight ends affected by the Week 13 bye:

Week 13 TEs

- Baltimore Ravens – Mark Andrews & Isaiah Likely

- Minnesota Vikings – TJ Hockenson

- NY Giants – Darren Waller

- Buffalo Bills – Dalton Kincaid & Dawson Knox

- Chicago Bears – Cole Kmet

- Las Vegas Raiders – Michael Mayer

Week 17 Bringback Games

- Baltimore Ravens –> Miami Dolphins – N/A

- Minnesota Vikings –> Green Bay Packers – Luke Musgrave

- NY Giants –> Los Angeles Rams – Tyler Higbee

- Buffalo Bills –> New England Patriots – Mike Gesicki*

- Chicago Bears –> Atlanta Falcons – Kyle Pitts

- Las Vegas Raiders –> Indianapolis Colts – N/A*

* Hunter Henry and Jelani Woods not included due to ADP but I have drafted and am fond of both *

Proactively Know Your Outs

If you have drafted one of the early tight ends (Andrews, Hockenson, and Waller) with a Week 13 byes, one should take mental note of this at the time and consider if there are moments in the draft where building alternative stack and correlation options that are not affected by the Week 13 bye are beneficial to your team structure in making a decision between two players. If you're focusing on volume when assembling your tight end group, it's sharp to not walk yourself into a situation where stacking and correlation would push you into a non-optimal week at the tight end slot. I am a big proponent of tier-based drafting and I have found that there are often large WR or RB tiers later in drafts which I have multiple options I can stack with someone currently on my roster but there is only 1 TE that fits the roster and bye week needs. In these situations, especially when in a vacuum I prefer the WR or RB, I will pick the TE in the preceding round as this order of operation gives me more options to fit my construction across both picks and not that single pick. 

Knowing it is OK to Accept the Bye Week Loss

In some cases, it might be a sharp play to accept a bye week loss at the tight end position. During drafts, certain players can unexpectedly fall due to various reasons. It could be a result of highly knowledgeable drafters trying to manipulate the board based on correlation and stacking strategies, or it could simply be random luck in the draft room. In either scenario, there will be opportunities to acquire tremendous value with your picks, and capitalizing on this opportunity is a positive move for your team. Additionally, this approach provides the added advantage of creating a unique lineup during the playoff rounds, as other drafters are likely to avoid having multiple players on the same bye. It is important, however, not to overemphasize the uniqueness angle by loading up on players with the same bye week. Striking a balance is key, and there is certainly merit in not actively avoiding bye week overlap.

Conclusion

In the world of best ball, where we must balance the various different levers and micro edges used while drafting, considering bye weeks while drafting is something to not be entirely forgotten. Drafting around bye weeks can be tricky and there are many options on how one can play these situations. I hope you found the presentation of the situation and my thoughts around attacking it useful and thank you for joining me for another best ball summer post. Stay tuned for more fantasy football analysis but until then, may your fantasy teams thrive, and your player takes never be wrong!

*This blog post was enabled by ChatGPT. The text was generated by me, and the content is my own, but some sentences and wording were provided by the model. I take full responsibility for all information produced in this blog. More information about OpenAI and their technology can be found at https://openai.com.*