Modified Best Ball 101
If you're looking to spice up your best ball leagues, try these variations.
Hey everyone, I’m Scott Soltis, a new contributor for The IDP Show. You might know me as ProfessorIDP, but you might not know that I’m a real-life professor of management. I teach and conduct research on HR topics such as performance management, talent evaluation, and people analytics with 24 publications (and counting). Fantasy football is where I blend my love for football with my love of creating and sharing knowledge. Thank you for letting me share this with you, starting with my debut article for The IDP Show on a topic I’m passionate about.
In today’s class, we will be exploring modified best ball fantasy football leagues. These formats are a great way to spice up your existing leagues, play IDP with less fear of player unpredictability, or keep the core concept of best ball without losing the sense of camaraderie found in traditional set-it-and-forget-it leagues.
What is a Modified Best Ball League?
Modified best ball takes the common setup of a best ball league (your starting lineup is set after the fact from the best of your available options) but adds week-to-week decision-making back into the mix. My two favorite variations on traditional best ball are what I am calling “Active Roster Best Ball” and “Transaction Best Ball.”
Active Roster Best Ball: Overview
Admittedly, there are very few league hosting sites as of this writing that support active roster best ball (ARBB), and even those that do can treat it as more of a bug than a feature. Despite the limited access to this format, it is my favorite way to play fantasy football, particularly IDP fantasy football. Here is how ARBB varies from traditional roster submission and best ball leagues.
Rather than setting a weekly lineup or having your starting lineup set from the entirety of your roster, you move players you want to be eligible for inclusion in your lineup to your active roster and store the rest somewhere else such as a taxi squad or injured reserve with no restrictions. In this way, it is similar to an NFL game where the active roster shrinks on gameday and those who are inactive are ineligible to play.
Active Roster Best Ball: Why I Love It
One of my favorite parts of ARBB is that it rewards roster construction and week-to-week decision-making while reducing some of the randomness/luck associated with fantasy football (particularly IDP). You could never eliminate these aspects of fantasy entirely (and I’m not sure I would want to) but reducing the number of losses due to in-game injuries or surprise overseas inactives seems like a step in the right direction to me.
Another is that it allows for more strategies than traditional leagues. I love starting Thursday Night Football players to know if I need to use roster slots for replacements. Another staple of my ARBB game is trying to have an offensive player (OP) and IDP playing in Monday Night Football with one active so that I can swap whichever has the most potential based on points already scored. I’ve even seen teams do very well by keeping more players in volatile positions active looking for those boom games that give competitive advantage.
Active Roster Best Ball: Drawbacks
The primary drawback is the limited availability of and support for ARBB formats. Of the two biggest IDP hosting sites (according to the most recent State of IDP Survey), MyFantasyLeague allows you to make your league ARBB. Sleeper has best ball and they have taxi squads/injured reserve but neither can be turned on in best ball leagues (and they don’t have an unrestricted IR option like MFL). MFL does not have locks for taxi squads so bad actors could swap in players who have already played. Full disclosure: this has only happened twice in my 5 years of serving as commissioner for leagues with this format.
A secondary drawback is the loss of traditional taxi squads or injured reserve if your league currently uses them. If you like to have taxi squads to keep a set number of young players on rosters for developmental purposes, you can always increase the size of your taxi squads so managers still have the option to store players.
Transaction Best Ball: Overview
Transaction Best Ball (TBB) is much less revolutionary, but no less fun. With TBB, you use all of your normal best ball league settings that you like, you just allow for adds and drops, waivers, and/or trades. That’s about it. And, as a bonus, it is fully functional on Sleeper, MFL, and likely elsewhere.
Transaction Best Ball: Why I Love It
You gain many of the same advantages I outlined above for ARBB… but with higher stakes. You can still strategize to have players that play early in the week’s slate and adjust accordingly but the “adjust accordingly” part will require you to drop a player on your roster to add a new one. You also get that manager engagement back that is sometimes lost in best ball leagues by having owners submit waivers, make trades, etc.
Transaction Best Ball: Drawbacks
The biggest drawback of TBB leagues is that it might not be for everyone. Some people play best ball to be able to be hands-off during the season. Others play in traditional lineup leagues because they enjoy that Sunday morning ritual. While TBB makes you more hands-on than standard best ball, it may not involve the same week-to-week decision-making that some love in either lineup leagues or ARBB leagues.
Why Try Modified Best Ball in IDP Leagues
As I’ve hinted a few times, while I love these modified best ball formats in general, they truly shine in IDP leagues. Whether you use three IDP positions or five, no position left behind, tackle heavy, big play, or a standardized scoring system (like Big 3 Scoring), or if you have few or many IDP starters, modified best ball leagues perform two distinct functions for IDP leagues of all shapes and sizes.
First, they make IDP more relevant in general. Based on data I have collected over the years, leagues that use IDP tend to have a balanced number of offensive and defensive starters or they have more OP than IDP. In leagues with balanced starters, IDP can become a neglected part of roster construction based on the relative scarcity of fantasy-relevant offensive players to defensive players (sorry offensive lineman). With a modified best ball format, there is a strong incentive to build a slightly more balanced roster so that you are not stuck with minimal output from IDP due to a lack of options. In leagues where IDP are plentiful due to fewer starting slots than offensive players (i.e. start 8 OP and 4 IDP), having good IDP options to raise your ceiling for those slots becomes a more viable strategy than simply streaming.
Second, they make neglected IDP positions more relevant. Using Big 3 Scoring last season, there was only one CB (Bland) and one DT (Buckner) who finished in the top 25 season-long and there were only six players across both positions in the top 50. These positions are much more well-represented on a week-to-week basis, with at least four CB+DT in the top 25 each week of the 2023 season, and with as many as nine in some weeks. Even if you are not in a league that breaks out CB from DB or DT from DL, switching to a modified best ball format makes more players in these positions viable as you look to exploit matchups or have more “boom” options in these positions than you would otherwise.
Lecture Summary
Modifications to traditional best ball leagues can add exciting new elements and strategies to your existing leagues and new ones as we enter start-up season. They are not without their shortcomings but they have many advantages (particularly for IDP leagues). Most drawbacks can be overcome with some clever thinking and/or help from your friendly professor whose office hours are always open to talk modified best ball and more at @ProfessorIDP on X.
Be sure to subscribe to The IDP Show on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
 | A guest post by
|