Raw Best Ball Mania I Data

Cleaned pick-by-pick data for last year’s huge best ball tournament.

You’ve seen my film takes with The Tape Detective series, but today I’m here to bring the data. And I have a lot of it. Yes, we’ve talked to our developers and now you’ll have access to some data from last year’s Best Ball Mania I (and I’ve already cleaned it up a good bit).

I’ll be adding my takeaways from this data in future columns on Underblog and on our YouTube channel (stay tuned!), but here’s a link to download the raw data if you want to investigate things yourself.

Play on Underdog Fantasy

Here are some quirky things about the pick-by-pick best ball data…

• team is the team_id for Best Ball Mania I. There are 18 players on each team.
• round is the draft round for each player. Overall draft pick doesn’t exist in this data set, just the round.
• furthest_playoffs is how far each team advanced in Best Ball Mania I. “Lost” means they didn’t advance out of Round 1. “Round 2” means the team advanced out of Round 1 but was eliminated in Round 2 (top 7,200 teams). “Round 3” means the team advanced out of Round 1 and Round 2 but was eliminated in Round 3 (top 600 teams). “Round 4” means the team advanced to the finals (top 50 teams).
• made_playoffs is whether or not a team advanced beyond Round 1. This number is essentially “best ball win rate”, but it’s a little more generous than that. The “made playoffs rate” in this dataset is 18.7%. Typical best ball win rates are 8.3%.
• roster_points are how many points the team scored in the round they were eliminated in. The roster_points for teams eliminated in “Round 2”, “Round 3”, “Round 4” are just for the single week they were eliminated in, so the teams who missed the playoffs will have the most points in this column even though they were the worst teams in the tournament. I know, it’s confusing.
• pick_points are how many points that played scored in the round they were eliminated in. The weirdness of roster_points applies here, too. I know, it’s confusing.
• draft_time is when the draft took place, but like roster_points and pick_points, the time is dictated on which round the team was eliminated in. So the only draft times that are accurate in the data set are for the teams who didn’t advance out of Round 1.