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Best Ball Season Review: How to Analyze Your Teams and Improve Next Year

Most managers look at their final standing, feel a combination of luck and regret, and start fresh next August. That’s a missed opportunity. The managers who compound their improvement year over year run a structured postmortem: a systematic review of what decisions were right, what decisions were wrong, and what to carry forward.

Postmortem Review Table

What to review The right question How to use it
ADP deviations and draft board Were my decisions good based on information available at draft time — not based on what happened? Reinforce correct processes; identify evaluation errors
Team performance attribution Was this outcome driven by decision quality or by luck (injury, stack timing)? Separate controllable decisions from uncontrollable variance
Pre-season player evaluations Which players did I correctly identify? Which did I miss, and why? Build a mental model of what signals you’re reading right vs. missing

The core principle: A good decision that leads to a bad outcome is still a good decision. A bad decision that leads to a good outcome is still a bad decision. Review process, not results.

Part 1: Process Review

Go back to your draft boards and review the pre-draft decisions you made:

ADP deviations: Where did you take players significantly earlier or later than consensus? Were those deviations correct based on the information available at the time?

Stack selection: Did you build the stacks you intended? Were they built around QBs with upside in high-pass-volume offenses?

Position balance: Did you follow your stated positional strategy, or did you get pulled off plan by late-round decisions?

Part 2: Decision Attribution

For your best-performing teams:

  • Was performance driven by correct stack decisions, or by a single player’s breakout that wasn’t predictable?

For your worst-performing teams:

  • Was underperformance from injury (uncontrollable), or from a stack that never fired because of team-level production problems (partially controllable)?

Separate what you couldn’t control from what you could. Injury to your RB1 in Week 1 isn’t a process failure. Having no secondary option behind him is.

Part 3: Draft Board Analysis

False positives (high on them, underperformed):

  • Why were you high on them? Was the information at draft time wrong, or did you misinterpret it?
  • Was this uncontrollable (injury, scheme change) or an evaluation error?

False negatives (low on them, overperformed):

  • Was the signal available before the season that their situation was better than you priced?
  • Is this something you can build into your process for next year?

Six Questions to Answer After the Season

  1. What was my biggest correct decision and why was it right?
  2. What was my biggest incorrect decision and what was my mistake?
  3. Which player situation did I correctly identify before the market?
  4. Which player situation did I fail to identify?
  5. What information source or research habit would have helped me most?
  6. What should I do differently in the draft next year?

You don’t need elaborate documentation. A few honest paragraphs answering these is more valuable than a spreadsheet you’ll never revisit.

Adjustments to Carry Forward

Based on your postmortem, identify 2–3 specific process adjustments:

  • “I consistently overdrafted RBs in mid-rounds when WR value was available. Next year, I’m tilting WR from Rounds 7–12.”
  • “My stack targets were right but my secondary stack was too correlated with my primary. I’ll use a different offensive group.”
  • “I waited too long on QB. I lost my top 3 targets before I drafted one. Next year I’m taking one in Round 7 or sooner.”

These specific adjustments are the compounding asset of doing best ball seriously year over year.

What Not to Do in a Season Review

Don’t chase results. If your player had an injury and missed the season, don’t conclude the analysis was wrong — check whether pre-injury production was tracking expectations.

Don’t attribute one-game outliers. Your stack fired in Week 14 and carried you to the money. That’s not evidence your stack strategy was brilliant — it’s evidence that high-ceiling stacks can hit at any time.

Don’t over-adjust to small samples. One bad year in a high-variance game doesn’t mean your process is wrong. Look for patterns across multiple years and multiple teams.

For how to incorporate these improvements into next year’s draft, see: How to Prepare for Your Best Ball Draft: A Pre-Draft Checklist. For how variance affects your year-to-year results, see: Best Ball Variance Strategy: Why You Should Draft for Upside, Not Floor.