It’s Best Ball Summer, ladies and gents! Underdog’s flagship contest, Best Ball Mania 6 (BBM6), has officially launched, with 2 million big ones available for first place, AND $1 million for second place for the first time ever. For the sickos out there drafting these teams for the 2025 season before training camps start (guilty as charged), I’ve got the worst picks you can currently make in every single round of BBM6 pre-training camp.
Round 18
Surprise! We’re counting down from 18 this time, and we’re kicking off the last round of BBM6 with a large swath of people that might make some of you angry. The worst players you can be drafting in May are rookies in ambiguous situations, period.
There is nothing, and I mean nothing, worse than drafting players who effectively score 0 points for you all season. Yes, rookies offer cheap upside that you can’t get any other way in this tournament. I completely agree with that. But we don’t know which rookies are even going to have roles this year. They’re barely in rookie mini-camp right now.
Now, please notice, I did not say all rookies. I said rookies in ambiguous situations. I’m talking Jarquez Hunter, Jalen Royals, Brashard Smith, Ollie Gordon, Tahj Brooks, etc. I like a lot of these guys as prospects, and I like a lot of their landing spots. But we don’t know how involved their teams want these players to be in their offense in Year 1. We may still not know in August before the season kicks off, but we will at least have a lot more info in that situation than we do now.
Round 17
Round 17 is pretty disgusting. The late rounds of BBM6 in general just feel so gross early in the summer. We just don’t know very much about depth charts, and we only have prospect profiles and draft capital for incoming rookies to make any decisions with.
This name is hard for me to write because I absolutely love him as a prospect, and I do think he has a pretty strong chance of mattering. But it’s May. We don’t know anything about projected touch distribution, especially in a 3 headed backfield with 2 incumbents. Jarquez Hunter has the potential to displace Blake Corum entirely, and gives the Rams some speed and explosiveness in the running game that they have lacked for several years now.
There’s even a possibility that Hunter can actually take some snaps from Kyren, and possibly earn some higher value touches like 3rd down passing downs and pass-catching opportunities. I acknowledge all of that info, and am pretty optimistic about it myself. But that doesn’t mean we should be drafting Hunter right now, because he could also easily be the RB3 behind a backfield where Kyren just plays 80+ percent of the snaps again. It’s not likely, but it’s also not impossible. Until we get more info on what the snap distribution might look like, I’m not risking the possible zero this early on in draft season.
Round 16
In the spirit of what I talked about in Round 18, the 3 rookie running backs in the 16th of BBM6 are the worst picks to make right now. I know I would love to believe that Sampson, Neal, and Giddens will all win the clear RB2 roles for their team. Logic would say they should. But we don’t know that yet, or even have an inkling of it yet.
Kendre Miller has far better draft capital than Devin Neal does, even if he is from a previous regime. He could easily be the clear-cut RB2 for the Saints, if that’s even a position that we want to draft for 2025. I like Neal a lot as a prospect, but I also loved Miller. And frankly, the Saints still love Alvin Kamara for their own good. Now with a rookie QB as the presumed starter, it’s unlikely that they take Kamara off the field very much, at least for the first portion of the year, if not all season.
DJ Giddens should have gone higher, but reportedly dropped in the draft due to pass-blocking concerns and poor interviews. He has Khalil Herbert to contend with behind Taylor in Indy, and Herbert is a perfectly fine, solid running back. Giddens might never see the field if he doesn’t shape up from an attitude standpoint (see Jermain Burton last year). It’s way too early to shoot your shot on Giddens.
Dylan Sampson should, should, beat out Jerome Ford for the RB2/3rd Down back next to far better rookie Quinshon Judkins. There’s no guarantee he will, though. And frankly, just like for the Saints, do we really want the RB2 for a team with as putrid of a projected offense as the Browns? I don’t particularly feel inclined to do so, regardless of how I feel about Sampson’s talent as a player.
Round 15
What are we doing here, guys? DeAndre Hopkins? Really? He’s coming off his worst season in his career by far, after his play has been on a downward trajectory ever since his last season with the Cardinals.
He’ll be 33 years old when the season starts. The Ravens are a good offense, yes, but they are a run-first, run-heavy offense. Even in the most optimistic scenario, Hopkins is, at best, the third target in this offense behind Zay Flowers and Mark Andrews. If DHop still magically has juice, despite not having it the past 2 seasons, he will still lose targets to Bateman and Likely. This is not a concentrated passing offense even without Hopkins added to the mix.
The only pro-argument is that Baltimore’s offense should be great and score a lot of points. Maybe Hopkins lucks into 8 TDs, but that is a thin, thin bet to make, especially for an aging separation route runner who can’t separate anymore, and isn’t big or good enough to displace the team’s incumbent red zone targets.
Round 14
I’m going to be honest, none of these guys are “terrible” picks at cost. They all have their uses and places as you build your BBM6 rosters. If I had to choose one, though, I’d pick Austin Ekeler.
Ekeler dealt with injury last season and is obviously only a shell of who he once was for the Chargers. He just turned 30 this month and is in the last year of his deal with the Commanders.
Kliff Kingsbury is not that good of a play caller, but what you can always count on for his offenses is running back production and lots of screen passes. However, the team added Deebo Samuel in the off-season to take a lot of the screen opportunities, which limits the fantasy upside of Ekeler.
They also drafted Jacory Croskey-Merritt late, who gives the team some much-needed juice in an otherwise lumbering backfield behind Jayden Daniels under center.
With the reduction in easy touch opportunity for Ekeler, combined with definitely reaching the running back age cliff, Ekeler could be a lot closer to a zero than most people may want to admit. And as I said at the top, drafting zeros is the single worst thing you can do in best ball, period.
Round 13
This is a pretty similar conversation to Hopkins to be honest. What exactly is the upside case for Joshua Palmer? We already played this game with Buffalo last year.
“There’s no definitive first target for the Bills, there are so many bodies, someone has to benefit from Josh Allen being good.” They really don’t, I promise you. Last year, the Bills had a whopping 2 fantasy-relevant players outside of Josh Allen. James Cook, who rushed for 16 touchdowns last season despite playing only half the snaps. And Khalil Shakir, who was the most mediocre, cookie-cutter WR3-4 you could possibly find. He had no target competition and had 76 receptions for 821 yards and 4 touchdowns. Yippee.
Josh Palmer is not a good wide receiver. Plain and simple. He’s never been good outside of a couple spot starts for Keenan Allen and Mike Williams. You can’t say that the situation is all that different to the Chargers last year. Palmer had a first-round rookie bust (and Ladd McConkey, but no one knew how good he would be when BBM5 was drafted last year) to compete with for targets from Justin Herbert, and that’s it.
Not only did McConkey son the rest of the team, Quentin Johnston turned things around after an enormous bust of a rookie season, and relegated Palmer to the sacrificial X position on a team that was starving for routes and targets. Joshua Palmer is just. not. good.
It doesn’t matter that he’s playing with Josh Allen. At all. This offense is not designed for individual receivers to get good passing volume, and Allen basically never throws the ball in the red zone, especially to JAGs like Palmer. You’re drafting 2024 Mack Hollins, and compared to the other guys in this round (and later rounds), no freaking thank you to that.
Round 12
Round 12 of BBM6 is where the picks finally stop being so gross as a whole, thankfully. Much like Round 14, there aren’t truly any “bad” picks in this round. However, there is a player whom I just don’t like from a player-take standpoint, so I’ll list Dalton Kincaid as the worst pick of the 12th round.
In a similar argument to Joshua Palmer, Kincaid is just not that good, folks, I’m sorry to say. He is the one and only sacrificial X-Tight End in football. He cannot block basically at all, meaning that he does not get utilized in the red zone. Pair that with playing with Josh Allen, who does not throw in the red zone, and you have very little touchdown upside, which is pretty crucial for tight end production in fantasy.
Despite having wide open target competition on the Bills and first-round draft capital, Dalton Kincaid has never even sniffed good fantasy production, and I frankly don’t have much faith he ever will. And sure, he’s the TE14, but honestly, he’s in the 20s for Tight Ends for me, and he should be a last couple of rounds pick if you just looked at his stats, and didn’t hold on to the Bills’ offensive potential that Kincaid never takes advantage of. Every other Tight End in this round and the 13th round are players I’d rather have than Kincaid in a vacuum.
Round 11
Hey, remember those rookies in ambiguous backfields I said you should avoid in Rounds 16-18 in BBM6? Guess what. You should DEFINITELY avoid the one going in the freaking 11th round.
Jaydon Blue is a scat back who wasn’t even utilized very much at the University of Texas. Yes, he’s fast, and he catches passes. Fantastic. He’s also a 5th-round pick in the NFL draft, taken ahead of his projected draft capital pre-draft.
I completely agree that he has a lot of opportunity to win the Cowboys’ backfield when competing against the corpses of Javonte Williams and Miles Sanders. But, we are drafting Blue like he’s guaranteed to win the job, when the reality of the NFL is that that’s just highly unlikely. And he’s so expensive already that even if he does win the job in camp, he’s not going to shoot up that much higher in ADP to let yourself wait to draft him until later in the summer.
Honorable mention, by the way, to Travis Etienne. He’s the Dalton Kincaid of running backs, although at least he’s produced once (2 seasons ago). That’s a murky backfield, and basically everyone else in the group is younger, better, and/or cheaper than Etienne. Unless he’s announced as the starter in camp, he’s not very likely to provide much value for fantasy with how inefficient Etienne’s been in recent years.
Round 10
In a tournament about scoring the most possible points, I try to avoid slow, plodding, bruiser running backs with bad efficiency in these drafts, regardless of the round. There are 2 in this round, Najee Harris and Javonte Williams.
Najee no longer has the workload or draft capital investment of the team to keep him in line for the amount of touches that kept him relevant for fantasy the past few years in Pittsburgh. He’s on a 1 year deal and will almost certainly be replaced by Omarion Hampton this season, possibly even before the season starts. He’s a solid backup if Hampton goes down, but he doesn’t have the explosiveness or, frankly, talent, to capitalize all that much if an injury did occur.
Javonte, on the other hand, is being drafted due to his opportunity in a confusing mess of a running back room in Dallas. Which sounds quite similar to the Denver Broncos running back room in 2024. And unfortunately, Javonte was obscenely bad and inefficient in that backfield, and basically held the entire offense back with how poorly he performed as the lead back.
I don’t care if he could win the job. I don’t think he cares if he could be the third-down back. It doesn’t matter. He’s not a good running back anymore, not since his knee injury. I would legitimately rather gamble on Miles Sanders than Javonte, at least Sanders lost his job because Chuba is good, not because Miles is bad. Javonte may be the starter all season, but he is incredibly unlikely to matter in BBM6.
Round 9
Jaylen Warren is so, so far off my list, and I know that’s a bit of a risky standpoint to have. The Steelers currently do not have a starting QB as of today, May 18th. Their best option is geriatric Aaron Rodgers, and their most likely option is Mason Rudolph.
Gross. No thank you for that offense. And now he has an upstart rookie in Kaleb Johnson to fight for touches and playing time? Double gross. Warren has talent, but I don’t think the Steelers will be in many positions to utilize that talent in 2025, and frankly, Warren isn’t good enough to overcome a bad offense, nor will he have the workload.
Not that there would be many red zone opportunities anyway, but Warren will get very few of the ones the Steelers do manage to have. If the QB is Rodgers, he doesn’t check down to his backs all that often, and audibles out of run plays constantly based on what he sees on the field. None of that spells well for Warren.
Plus, he’s not competing with Najee Harris anymore. He has Kaleb Johnson in the mix, and Kaleb has a much stronger, more diverse skill set and explosiveness level than Najee had. I prefer all the other backs in this round by a lot to Warren at this cost, regardless of how you’ve built your roster to this point.
