The NFL schedule is a valuable piece of the puzzle for best ball drafters who want to take down tournaments..

There are two main reasons why the schedule release is so important:

1. We now know who is playing against each other in the most important weeks of the season (Weeks 16 and 17), which allows us to set up game stacks on our rosters
2. We also now know the bye weeks for each and can avoid taking a zero at the QB or TE position in a given week

In last week's Best Ball Mania V guide, we explained the importance of the playoff weeks. 

And today, we are going to dive deeper into best ball strategy and share how to correctly leverage the NFL schedule to build teams that are live to take down the $1.5 million top prize in BBMV.

If you need a refresher on why correlation (stacks and game stacks) is important in these tournaments, check out this piece before reading the rest of this article.

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Week 16 is now very important

For the first time in its history, Best Ball Mania features an extremely smooth payout structure, which we explained in detail last week. 

And because more finalists will win life-changing money this year (the top 20 teams in the 539-person final will all take home six-figure prizes), it makes getting to the finals even more important than in previous years. 

I am not going to go deep into the weeds on the math in this piece, but if you do want to explore the concept of "EV" and "win rates" then I highly recommend this piece by Rotoviz's Michael Dubner where he crunched the numbers and watching this video I put together on the subject.

In the best ball nerd streets, there are lots of debates right now on which week is technically more important, but I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive. 

The main takeaway is that we want to consider stacking up games in both Week 16 (so we can finish first out of 16 in the Week 16 pod) and Week 17 (so we can finish in the top 20 for those big prizes).

I recommend keeping the playoff schedule pulled up as you draft and looking at the Week 16 and 17 opponents for your main team-level bets you've made (i.e. if you have a Ravens stack, consider adding a Steelers piece for Week 16 and a Texans piece for Week 17.

We can't predict the future

The biggest mistake drafters make once they understand the importance of correlating their teams in the playoffs is thinking they can predict which games are going to pop off and which games are going to flop. 

The temptation is to say, "I want to load up exclusively on Texans and Ravens because that game is definitely going to shoot out in Week 17," and, “I refuse to touch any Dolphins or Browns because Tua is going to freeze in Cleveland.”

But playing this guessing game and eliminating teams from your player pool is a surefire way to draft a suboptimal portfolio of teams.

As our resident weather expert Chris Allen will attest, we can't even predict the weather hours before the game starts, much less months before.

Last year, many drafters avoided the Browns/Jets game in Week 17 because of outdoor weather concerns in New York. And you know what happened? The game was a fantasy bonanza. Breece Hall, Jerome Ford and David Njoku all delivered week-winning performances.

We also can't predict injuries or how a game script is going to unfold. 

Remember when everyone wanted to draft Derrick Henry last year because he played the Texans' paper-thin rushing defense in Week 17? And you know what happened? Henry rushed only 12 times for 42 yards because the dominance of the Texans passing offense shocked the world and forced the Titans away from the ground in a 26-3 route. 

The point is: We don't have to try to correctly predict how these games are going to go. Correlating our teams is actually an act of humility. We can't predict the future, but we can predict that when a given game does shoot out, there will be multiple fantasy winners from the game.

And because of that, we want to correlate indiscriminately across all of the Week 17 matchups. If you draft Tyreek Hill in Round 1, you now exist in a reality where Hill and the Dolphins passing attack is going off in Week 17 and you need to build the rest of your team accordingly around that thesis. 

The Best Playoff Schedules

Even though we can't predict what is going to happen in a single game, we do know that games in domes feature more scoring than outdoor games:

In a study done by Pinnacle.com on scoring in the NFL from 2003 to 2015, they found that total points per game scored in outdoor venues was almost 4 full points less (42.4). than games played in a dome stadium (46.2 ppg).

But if I'm going to put a priority on dome games (and warm weather games), I want to do it across a larger sample than just a single game. In focusing on teams who have playoff schedules with zero weather concerns, we can give ourselves multiple chances at reaping the benefits of an improved game environment.

There's only one team that plays all three of its playoff games — Weeks 15, 16 and 17 — in a dome: the Las Vegas Raiders. 

There are two other teams that play all three of their playoff games either in domes or in the sunny confines of Florida: the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Considering none of those teams are particularly sexy or involved in premiere Week 17 matchups that are at risk of getting unreasonably expensive, I do like the idea of tilting some overall exposure tiebreakers to these teams knowing that you can capture the benefits across the three most important weeks. 

The Galaxy Brain Stacks

Ok, let's wrap up with a little fun. In dissecting the playoff schedules, there are a few fun oddities that we can exploit in our drafts.

There are two "quartets" of teams who play each other in the fantasy playoffs, and by drafting players from each team you can essentially “buy two game stacks and get one free.”

The Week 16/17 Quad:

• Week 16: Texans @ Chiefs, Steleers @ Ravens
• Week 17: Chiefs @ Steelers, Ravens @ Texans

The Playoff Quad:

• Week 15: Bears @ Vikings, Packers @ Seahawks
• Week 16: Vikings @ Seahawks 
• Week 17: Bears @ Seahawks, Packers @ Vikings

I would not force any of these in a draft, but it is a fun wrinkle to consider if you want to get the max amount of stacks available across your lineup.

For a more in-depth strategy on how to correlate in a draft, including knowing how much to reach ahead of ADP to secure a stack, check out my full NFL schedule/correlation video on the Deposit Kingdom Youtube channel.