Optimal First-Round Strategy for NFFC Playoff Contests

The NFFC Playoff Hold 'Em is a different kind of fantasy contest. It's not just about who scores the most points this week. It's about committing to the right players early and letting the scoring multiplier do the work as the playoffs unfold.

To help cut through the noise, I ran thousands of playoff simulations and asked a very specific question:
Which players most often turn out to be optimal Week 1 roster choices once the entire postseason plays out?

Below are the results of those optimization runs. I'll start by looking at the players who most often showed up in optimal Week 1 rosters, grouped by position. After that, I'll walk through each playoff team and highlight the best Round 1 options on a team-by-team basis.

Teams are ordered by power rating (based on PowerRankings.com), since advancing deeper into the playoffs is the single biggest driver of value in this format.

If you're mostly here for actionable takeaways, the position and team sections will get you what you need. If you want to dig into how the simulation works and what went into it, I've included a full explanation at the end.

Positional Breakdown

Quarterback

The first big takeaway for me was a bit surprising: the quarterbacks on some of the teams with the best odds of making a deep run did not sim out as well as I expected. In particular, Matthew Stafford, Sam Darnold, and Jalen Hurts graded out as worse bets to be strong Week 1 plays than I would have anticipated. On the other hand, it does make sense that quarterbacks who really spread the ball around to a number of different receivers (the top four in the optimals) might be better plays than the quarterbacks with narrow target trees and elite WR1s, given that the gap between quarterback and wide receiver fantasy points is larger.

Running Back

Unsurprisingly, true workhorse RB1s sim out much better than backs stuck in committees. I also suspect that the lack of concentrated targets in the passing game plays a role here. For example, Buffalo doesn't have a pass catcher who is likely to string together multiple big games in a row, which only adds to the appeal of James Cook.

Wide Receiver

The top wide receiver plays are largely what you would expect. What stood out was the size of the gap in optimal percentage between some WR1s and other wide receivers on the same teams, particularly how much more often Puka Nacua simmed out as the top Rams option compared to Davante Adams. That gap reflects both the compounding difficulty of Adams outproducing Nacua across multiple games and the small amount of health-related risk baked into Adams' projection.

Tight End

With wide receiver and tight end combined into a single position, you do not need to roster any tight ends. In fact, a tight end appeared in our optimal sim for Week 1 just 27% of the time.

Kicker

Defense

Team-By-Team Breakdown