A brutal week of injuries has turned Week 12 into survival of the fittest, and I’m back once more to walk you through one of the biggest games you can play on Underdog Fantasy, the Battle Royale. The Battle Royale is a 6-person, 6-round fantasy draft. There are no bench spots, and you must start 1 QB, 1 RB, 2 WR, 1 TE, and 1 Flex spot.
Your goal is to pick the best combination of six high-scoring players, with the weekly grand prize available of $50,000 to the ultimate drafter. If you’ve never played on Underdog before, try it out! Click this link and sign up for Underdog Fantasy. Play $5, get $100 in bonus funds to use on other games and drafts. If you want to join in the fun, read on to see my favorite plays to target in Week 12.
Not Enough Studs to Go Around
Jonathan Taylor and Jahmyr Gibbs are clear standouts at the top of ADP, and after that… every single player is a somewhat shaky click for one reason or another. JSN and Amon-Ra are in games that could be over by halftime, capping their ceilings. Bijan had an abysmal game the last time Kirk Cousins was the starter, and the team is down Drake London as well.
Saquon and King Henry are in great matchups, but haven’t been very good this season. TreVeyon Henderson is going pick 7 and could be back to being the 2nd back in a committee behind Rhamondre. Lamb and Rice are in tough games against good defenses. Trey McBride is in line to succeed, but 6th overall is also a little spicy for a tight end. He basically has to be the TE1 to pay off his ADP, which is certainly likely, but not guaranteed.
Presumptuous Middle Rounds
In contrast to Rounds 1 and 2 on Underdog, Rounds 3-4 are doing a lot of heavy lifting based on assumptions on how certain games are going to play out. This makes these games quite exploitable to some extent, but also relegates some players to gross clicks that I personally don’t want to make.
The biggest example is the Eagles and Cowboys game, where Lamb, Pickens, and Dak are all lower down in ADP than their talent suggests, while all the Eagles are higher in ADP than their play really merits on offense. You can exploit that pretty easily by either assuming the Eagles pass to score instead of run through Saquon, or by playing out the scenario that the Cowboys are leading/win the game and get their weapons a ton of touches.
I love Brock Bowers in this range as well, seeing as he has just as much upside as McBride any given week. Chris Olave provides a nice target floor and ceiling combo, and Jameson Williams seems to be Dan Campbell’s favorite player since he’s taken over the play-calling duties. All of the QBs are defensible in this range as well, though there are several later shots that I also like taking this week on Underdog.
Depth is Gone
With all of the injuries and bye weeks for a few good teams, the depth of the RB and WR positions is definitely lacking this week in the Battle Royale on Underdog. There are a lot of question marks early in the week about these injury situations and how much work some of these backups will get, and it is difficult to parse through which players even have enough upside to help you even if they do get the majority of the work.
The QB and TE positions are actually very deep for once, and at TE especially, I actually think there could be scenarios where you draft 2 TEs to have one play as your Flex, considering how thin some of these paths to success are for a lot of the skill position players in the late rounds. I wouldn’t do it a lot, but I think 10-15 double TE teams are perfectly viable if you plan on drafting all 150 this week.
Who to Target
So who should you take? I’ll tell you who my targets are at each position, keeping in mind the idea of balancing good projectable volume with understanding how the field may build their Underdog lineups.
Quarterbacks – Expensive | Mid-Range | Free
Jalen Hurts | Jared Goff | Caleb Williams
Running Backs – Expensive | Mid-Range | Free
Jahmyr Gibbs | Javonte Williams | Alvin Kamara
Wide Receivers – Expensive | Mid-Range | Free
CeeDee Lamb | Jameson Williams | Rome Odunze
Tight Ends – Expensive | Mid-Range | Free
Trey McBride | Brock Bowers | Hunter Henry
Flex – Expensive | Mid-Range | Free
George Pickens | Michael Pittman Jr | Jakobi Meyers
