Matthew Freedman used to write a column called The Dissenting Costanzan. He would peruse recent RotoViz articles for points of possible disagreement, and offer up an alternative take on the matter at hand, always with a sense of camaraderie and the goal of further discussion. While The Dissenting Costanzan is no longer a feature of RotoViz content, it would be a mistake to think that we don’t sometimes change our minds.
We were among the first to highlight the importance of playoff weeks in best ball tournaments, before Underdog was even a thing. Since then, it has become commonplace to prioritize Week 17 — the final week — to the point that many say, with some exaggeration, “Week 17 is all that matters.”
The idea of prioritizing Week 17 in Best Ball Mania 7 is to treat it as a one-week, 667-entry tournament. In such a tournament, you’d build a team with a lot of in-game correlation. Your quarterbacks would be stacked with (at least) one of their pass-catchers along with (at least) one of their Week 17 opponents. The hope is that the game you’ve decided to stack will shoot out, and you will be in a position to benefit from the enhanced scoring environment in the week where the prizes are biggest and correlation matters most.
This approach makes perfect sense for a one-week tournament. However, for a season-long tournament, it is suboptimal. It is a strategy designed to maximize your chances of winning the grand prize if your team makes it to Week 17. It is not a strategy designed to maximize your team’s expected value. I offer the following opinion in the same spirit as The Dissenting Costanzan: “here’s another possible way to look at things; let’s keep the conversation going.” Of course you may also choose to read my Costanzism in another way: “every instinct I have in every aspect of life . . . it’s all been wrong.”
