What Is the Best Draft Slot in the FBG Online Championship?

We have partnered with the National Fantasy Football Championships (NFFC) to create the Footballguys Online Championship (FBG OC), where, for $350 (or $250 for brand-new players), you can compete for over $1 million in total prizes, with $300,000 going to the overall champ.

Draft Position

Today, we're going to dig into draft position. There are a couple of wrinkles from the NFFC that make your draft slot interesting and fun.

3rd Round Reversal (3RR)

Instead of a regular snake draft, the third round is the same as Round 2. The draft then snakes after Round 3.

This is how the draft order goes:

• Round 1: Team 1 through Team 12
• Round 2: Team 12 through Team 1
• Round 3: Team 12 through Team 1
• Round 4: Team 1 through Team 12
• Round 5: Team 12 through Team 1
• Round 6: Team 1 through Team 12
• Etc.

Kentucky Derby Selection (KDS)

The KDS process allows owners to rank their preferences for Draft Day, from most desired to least desired, BEFORE the leagues are randomly selected. Some owners would rather draft at the top if they are selected early in their league; others prefer to go to the middle, and others move down to the lower end. KDS allows that if you're fortunate enough. A sample KDS from an owner could look like this: 1, 2, 3, 8, 6, 7, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Then, the NFFC randomly orders the 12 owners in your league. That order decides who picks their slot first, second, third, and so on.

1. The owner first in the random order gets their #1 preferred slot.
2. The owner second gets their top-ranked slot of the 11 still available.
3. The third owner gets their top-ranked slot of the 10 still available.

This keeps going until the 12th owner takes whatever slot is left.

What Is the Best Draft Slot in the FBG OC?

Since you have some control over where you pick, let's find out the best draft slot to pick from. There are lots of theories, but instead of theories, we are going to look at data.

And by "we", I mean Footballguys' own Dan Hindery.

Dan has created a must-have set of tools for the FBG OC:
https://www.footballguys.com/nffc-tool/

If you are a serious FBG OC player, you must give them a look.

The tool we will use here is the Draft Slot Explorer.

Draft Slot Explorer

The FBG OC pays the top 2 of 12 teams in each league, so any random team has a 16.67% baseline advance rate.

The chart below shows how much each slot beat or missed the baseline. A slot at +20% advanced 20% more often than expected; -20% means 20% less often.

FBG OC Advance Rates

Yes, over the last four years, if you pick at the 1.01, you advance 41% less often. Brutal!

Here's how the slots stack up, from most to least desirable:

The Draft Slot Explorer page has more info about draft slots. Check it out now.

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