Win Total Points Best Ball

How to Win Total Points Best Ball Tournaments: The Framework

Total points best ball tournaments are a different beast. There are no head-to-head matchups, no playoffs, and no late-season heroics that erase a slow start. Your only goal? Score the most total points from Week 1 to Week 17. And I’ve built a strategy framework that helps you do just that.
This guide will explain the framework, how to apply it position vs. position, and how to use GATs (Games Above Threshold) to value players among those positions.

For brevity, this article will focus on the PPR version of this tournament (starting 1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, and 1 FLEX) so you can understand the concept. Think you’re ready to win a total points best ball tournament? Join me on Drafters (u/GOYAADi) and put the strategy to work.

What Is “The Framework”?

Technically, it is a macro strategy. A macro strategy is your flight plan—it determines your altitude, direction, and destination before you take off. Micro strategies are what you do when there’s turbulence (WR Avalanche) or changing conditions (ADP Fallers). Small course corrections that keep you on track. You might adjust slightly, but the route stays the same.

Our macro strategy is for our roster to score at least 2,800 total points during the season.

This has been the winning score for the last several years, including every large-field event on Drafters in 2024, even in Superflex formats. To score that many points, your starting players need to average the following weekly points:

Position	WEEKLY THRESHOLD	SEASON TARGET
QB	24 points	~410 points (17 GATs)
RB	22 points	~750 points (34 GATs)
WR	22 points	~1100 points (51 GATs)
TE	17 points	~290 points (17 GATs)
FLEX	15 points	~250 points (17 GATs)

The total? ~2,800 points. These targets are your roadmap. It guides how and when you pick from each position group. I’ll go into each position and how you might approach it. But first…

What is a “GAT”?

Games Above Threshold (GAT) is a metric that estimates how many individual weekly performances a player delivers that exceed a position-specific fantasy point threshold. To calculate past GATs, sort a player’s weekly scores from highest to lowest and count the number of games where the average exceeds the threshold. This indicates how often the player contributes a “starter-worthy” performance.

• I did this already, follow me on X (@FFNollij), where I will be posting the charts by position and player

For 2025 projections, GATs are estimated by comparing a player’s expected fantasy point output to historical trends and positional benchmarks, then approximating how many games will surpass the threshold based on that projection.

Why should I use GATs?

You need to deploy your draft capital as efficiently as possible. Looking at the chart above, you need a minimum of 34 GATs from your running backs, or two roster spots multiplied by 17 weeks. Let’s say you went heavy RB early and expect 51 games above threshold. With only 17 “overflow” GATs available in the flex those scores could apply to, it’s unrealistic to assume that all of them perfectly fit into your flex. Spread them out among your positions.

Incorporating this style of projection (counting GATs by position) and tracking throughout your draft significantly increases your chances of winning a total points best ball tournament. Because we want players who can hit your lineup when they have those scores, and over-drafting at a position can lead to good scores going unused.

We want all of our best scores to count. That is why its called best ball.

Projecting Games Above Threshold (GATs)

Estimating how many games a player will exceed a fantasy point threshold is more art than science. Like season-long projections, it’s an informed guess. I’ll walk through my process, but feel free to adapt it to your approach.

I start with historical scoring trends over the past 3, 5, and 7 years and align them with positional ADP to estimate expected season points. Since ADP reflects cost, it’s a useful baseline. For example, the RB8 is projected to score around 247 points in this format.

In that case:

• The market expects the RB8 by 2025 ADP, Jonathan Taylor, to score 247 fantasy points
• Taylor, conveniently, scored 244 points last season (in 14 games)
• Historically, about half of his games played are above the threshold

Therefore, we would assign him about seven GATs at his current market projection. And when we draft Taylor, we would cross off seven GATs from our RB position. If you expect a better season, bump that up; if worse, adjust down (and maybe avoid him altogether).

For rookies, we rely entirely on projections, since there’s no past data to guide expectations. Using projected fantasy points, estimated games played, and player comps, we can approximate how often they might exceed their positional scoring threshold.

You can find a GAT rankings HERE

With so many factors playing into rookie year production, lean on the experts who do this for a living. Check out the FFAN Consensus Rankings for a list, or jump to one of our football articles for in-depth analysis.

Assuming you’ve done that, let’s get positional.

Quarterbacks (Target: ~410 Points)

How many quarterbacks do you “need”? The answer is two. You can do three, but you can’t draft just one. Why? First, if you only drafted Josh Allen in 2024, and his 16 GAT average per season the past three years, you would have gotten 385 of the approximately 410 points you need from the position. Thus leaving you short of our GAT target and our overall points goal. Second, you also have one bye week where every Josh Allen team with any scoring QB puts you in a deficit.

So two is ideal, leaving you an extra roster spot for your running backs or wide receivers.

I don’t recommend drafting four quarterbacks. When you’re drafting for the ceiling outcome, you have to assume you picked correctly, and the three quarterbacks you draft will get you 17 GATs to reach 410 total points. Case in point, last year my 36th place team (out of 56k) was led by Jayden Daniels. Sam Darnold and Russell Wilson both provided usable scores to my QB position. Drake Maye didn’t hit my lineup a single time. He even had some decent weeks, but the moral is that if you pick correctly, you don’t need a fourth. And to win a total points best ball tournament, we must assume we’ve picked correctly.

Tip: If you draft a high-end QB like Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen, your second QB only needs to contribute ~35 points (two to three GATs). Save draft capital here.

Want to draft two top QBs? That’s called Double Bully or Elite QB, a viable micro strategy, but remember, you’ll be sacrificing draft capital. And it’s probably going to come from…

Running Backs & Wide Receivers (Target: ~1850 points)

And if you get behind on both of these positions, you’re probably cooked. These are your two largest pools of fantasy points, accounting for roughly 60 percent of your total.

Here’s how the framework helps you exploit the draft:

Understand the 2:3 Ratio

Historically, 2 RBs ≈ 3 WRs in fantasy output. For example:

• RB8 = 247.1 points
• WR12 = 247.8 points

Tip: Track draft trends. If WRs are being drafted faster than this ratio suggests, RBs may be undervalued, and vice versa. This is your edge.

Knowing which position to target is great, but knowing which players in that position group are worth targeting is key. We do that by estimating how many games a player can offer above the point thresholds.

Quick example with the caveat “past performance does not guarantee future results”. Let’s look at the Titans’ running backs.

• Tyjae Spears played 12 games last season. In ten of those games, he scored 13 points or less; that’s bad. But those other two games, he scored 21 and 27 points, giving us two GATs and a friendly four-point buffer above our 22-point threshold.
• Conversely, his backfield mate Tony Pollard had eight games of 13 or more points, pretty decent. But, he contributed only one game (21.9 points) near our threshold, meaning he was less valuable to our team if our goal is to score over 2800 points.

Pollard crushed Spears in total fantasy points on the season, but was at best a flex spot. Drafting for the flex will not win you a total points best ball tournament. Choose wisely.

Tight End (Target: ~290 Points)

I’ll be honest, this is the toughest position (for me) to project. But I do know that at the top of the draft, the tight end to wide receiver ratio is 1:6. This means the TE1 is expected to score about as many points as the WR6, and this trend continues to the TE6/WR36.

After the sixth tight end, it slowly draws down to a 1:3 ratio by TE24 (being similar to the WR72).

Drafting from the top six tight ends is pretty straightforward. And if you do that, you probably want to stick to drafting two tight ends total for mostly the same reasons as the quarterback position. So, how do we decide which later-round tight ends to draft?

Pull out the GATs. That’s “Games Above Threshold”, if you forgot. Using this as our guide, we would be more likely to target guys like

• David Njoku, 7 GATs average the past three seasons
• Zach Ertz, 8 GATs in 2024

As opposed to:

• Dalton Kincaid, 1 GAT in career
• Chig Okonkwo, 3 GATs total the past three seasons

Drafting tight ends with better GAT potential puts you well on your way to winning any total points best ball tournament.

TL;DR

• Target 2,800 total points (in PPR format) using the framework
• Monitor the 2:3 RB-to-WR ratio during your draft to find falling positional value
• Use GATs to guide your investment in each position
• Prioritize GATs over season-long volume

Use the framework. Draft smarter. Win more.