What is Best Ball Fantasy Football?

Best ball is a fantasy football format where you draft a team and never touch it again. No setting lineups. No waiver wire. No trade offers at 2 AM. Each week, the platform automatically selects your highest-scoring players and slots them into your starting lineup. Your job begins and ends on draft day.

That's it. You draft, and then you watch it play out over 17 weeks. It's the purest test of drafting skill in fantasy football, and it's why millions of players have made it their preferred format.

In traditional fantasy, you want consistent players who give you a safe floor every week. A receiver who puts up 12 points every Sunday is gold because you know what you're getting when you slot him into your lineup.

Best ball flips that on its head. Since the platform picks your best scorers automatically, a boom-or-bust player who scores 3 points one week and 30 the next is more valuable than the steady 12-point guy. Those 30-point explosion weeks get captured. The 3-point duds just get ignored because someone else on your bench outscored them.

This changes everything about how you draft. Players with big-play ability, volatile target shares, and touchdown upside become assets instead of liabilities. Backup running backs who would sit on your bench all year in redraft become valuable depth pieces who might inherit a workload due to injury and deliver a league-winning stretch.

Best ball scoring follows standard fantasy football rules, with most platforms using half-PPR (0.5 points per reception) or full PPR (1 point per reception). The key difference isn't the scoring itself; it's that the platform automatically applies those scores using your best possible lineup each week.

For example, if you drafted three quarterbacks and one of them puts up 35 points while the other two score 12 and 8, only the 35-point performance counts for your starting QB slot. Your lineup is always optimized after the fact, so you never leave points on the table.

Most platforms don't use kickers or team defenses in best ball. The focus is entirely on skill position players: quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends.