"Weekly Winners" is the changeup to the Best Ball industry. Instead of season-long fantasy football, Weekly Winners has 17 weeks of cash prizes and each week starts completely fresh. The tournament is the 3rd-largest offered by Underdog Fantasy, and it's filling up fast. It's popularity will continue to grow as more content and research is dropped, hence this column. For my money, there is more strategy than any other fantasy football contests (aside from NFL Playoffs Best Ball of course) and a ton of sweat equity as we only have to draft once to have 17 weeks of DFS fun. It doesn't hurt that the prize pool is $170,000 every week either.

1. Play For The Early Season Schedule

The average draft position is similar to what it is in Best Ball Mania, where the prize pool is skewed towards late-season production. In Weekly Winners, every week is paid out equally. Our predictions are going to be far more accurate in the early part of the schedule than it is in Week 15 for example, so we should focus in on players who will do well early on.

In particular, I'm playing for Week 5 and Week 6. That's early enough in the year to feel good about our non-contingent based projections, but it's also the beginning of the bye weeks. These two weeks are heavy on early-round players, too. Week 5 has the Eagles, Lions, Titans, and Chargers on bye. Week 6 has the Dolphins, Rams, Chiefs, and Vikings on bye. If we avoid players on these 8 teams -- that's 17 of the top-38 players in ADP -- then we'll have noticeable +EV during these key weeks of the season. To play into it more, pull up the Week 5 and Week 6 schedules, and stack teams playing each other.

Remember to think through the archetypes of players who will do better early in the season, too. Those are the early-round RBs (before injuries begin effecting them), the veteran WRs (before the rookies steal target shares), and the starters ahead of players dealing with injuries or suspensions (like Chuba Hubbard and potentially Hollywood Brown).

All this said, you can choose to take the entire inverse of this strategy and build a team geared for late-season production only. Those would be loaded with rookies, currently injured players, and contingent-based upside players like backup RBs. They could spike together later on, but it's just not my go to strategy because it's a lower-confidence projection build and it's highly -EV early in the year, where the build in the previous paragraphs could last throughout the entire season if we're lucky.

2. Build Robust RB Teams

This plays off the first point, but if we're playing for early-season production, then we will want the highest-projected players to build into our flex. In half PPR best ball, those are RBs, especially early in the season and especially with the 2024 ADP landscape leaning so heavily away from the position. In each of the early and middle rounds, the RBs project for more half PPR points than the WRs based on my player projections. We can fill our flex spot with a highly-projected RB by let's say Round 7 (the Najee Harris range) and then stop drafting RBs altogether.

Roster construction shouldn't look the same in Weekly Winners, as it does in traditional best ball. The cost of diminishing returns are even greater, meaning we want to completely stop drafting the positions that we drafted in Rounds 1-7 where we're getting most of our starting lineup in these ceiling-outcome events. It's +EV to draft 3-RB teams if they all come early in drafts. That wouldn't be the case in traditional best ball where it's been best to have at least 4 (and often 5) RBs even when drafting them early.

3. Stick With Skinny Stacks (QB With 1 Pass-Catcher)

Team stacking is highly +EV in traditional best ball. We want to ride a good offensive season through multiple players, as a good QB typically brings along multiple of his teammates throughout the season. In Weekly Winners, we have to be super picky and focus in on a 1-week sample... and an elite one at that.

When I looked at ceiling correlations between teammates, I found this stat: "Only 1.1% of teams had a pair of WRs each score more than 20.0 half PPR points in a game and only 0.2% of teams had a pair of WRs each score more than 25.0 half PPR points." That means in most weeks, it was just one WR who went nuts in a game while the other WRs had bad or just solid games. It's possible that Tee Higgins goes for 5-100-1 when Ja'Marr Chase finishes as the WR1 overall that week, but they are drafted together far more often than the odds that occurs.

My research also shows that a true RB1 ceiling game isn't correlated to another ceiling game of his teammates. The narrative that an elite WR goes nuts early, setting up the RB closing the game is true in mid-to-high outcomes. It's just not true at the highest outcomes, which is the point of Weekly Winners. Once again, drafters are too often adding Joe Mixon to C.J. Stroud teams. We want Mixon to score 3 goal-line TDs when we draft him. We want Stroud to hit Nico Collins 3 times when we draft Stroud.

There are a few exceptions to this:

• It's fine to add a TE to your QB-WR stack. The amount of literal receptions, yards, and touchdowns to be a difference-making TE in a week is far less than what's needed at WR. There are only so many yards and touchdowns to go around in one game, so going QB-WR-TE is often better than QB-WR-WR for weekly winners. It's also helpful that the TEs are drafted way later than the WRs.

• It's okay to double stack WRs later in the draft because the opportunity cost is significantly decreased. For example, if we want to draft Courtland Sutton (Round 9) and Marvin Mims (Round 15) to set up a Bo Nix double stack, that's less concerning because we aren't relying on either to be a starter.

4. Scroll Down In Rounds 15-18

We want to build unique teams in Weekly Winners even more than we do in Best Ball Mania because the floor of the teams don't matter at all and there will be 15,570 teams that have the top-170 players in ADP. As a reminder, only 4,000 teams will cash, so even when you have the WR1 on the week, you'll need to find other ways to separate.

We can get unique by reaching at the Round 1/2 and Round 2/3 turns to find low-drafted combinations of players, but the other (fun) way to get unique is to scroll down late in drafts. The chart below shows how often players are drafted based on their ADP in Best Ball Mania. Players with a top-200 ADP are typically drafted between 60-100% of the time, but players with a 212+ ADP are rarely drafted.

I take the slightly lower projected points of the 200+ ADPs in Rounds 15-18 in exchange for less drafted rate. We don't have to scroll super far down, especially if we're building for early-season points, but it is a lever to pull. Here are some of my favorite lower-drafted players specifically for Weekly Winners:

• QBs: Drake Maye, Bo Nix, Sam Darnold (with Justin Jefferson), Aidan O'Connell (with Davante Adams)... In fact, I LOVE Sam Darnold in Weekly Winners.

• TEs: Colby Parkinson, Juwan Johnson, Greg Dulcich, Will Dissly.

• WRs: Darius Slayton, Odell Beckham, Andrei Iosvias, Josh Reynolds, Cedric Tillman, Jalen Nailor.

• RBs: Typically want to draft the early-round RBs with early-season projectable volume, so hard to find scroll down options.

5. Only Draft 1 QB If You Draft An Elite QB

Let's define this as a top-50 pick.

The elite QBs typically provide 2-5 spike weeks each year, but whenever they don't, we don't want to hedge with another QB because we need to think of it through the reverse lens. By that I mean: When our late-round QB hits his random spike week, we don't want to waste our 3rd- or 4th-round pick on an elite QB that isn't in our lineup. Michael Chiang's research showed that Josh Allen weekly winners teams last year were only +EV when they only were built with 1-QB.

The other thing to think through is "how are these elite QBs reaching their spike weeks?" Do they run a lot? Do they spread the ball around? If either are true, we don't want to overstack them. There are more weeks than you'd realize where an elite QB has a spike week but doesn't have a teammate that also had a spike week. Sometimes that's because Jalen Hurts scored two rushing TDs. Sometimes that's because Patrick Mahomes' four passing TDs went to four different players. Just because you have an elite QB doesn't mean you have to sell out for all of their teammates. This is one huge difference between traditional best ball and weekly winners. It's the difference between optimizing for at least a top 2% outcome (cashing in Weekly Winners) and a top 16% outcome (advancing in Best Ball Mania).

Lastly, we should be picky about our elite QB teams in Weekly Winners. Their ADPs are about a full round earlier than they are in Best Ball Mania and we really want to have their top pass-catcher stacked with them. If you don't have A.J. Brown, then it's going to be tougher to win with Round 3/4 turn Jalen Hurts. I'm more willing to take Hurts without AJB in Best Ball Mania knowing I can potentially stack Dallas Goedert with him later in the draft. I'm not as bullish on Goedert being the efficient way the Eagles move the ball in a ceiling outcome for Hurts. We'd rather have Brown's 50-yard TD ability instead.