Attacking the Eliminator format on Underdog

A deep dive into a fun, unique best ball contest

May 23, 2024

As you likely know if you’ve seen any of the recent content, last week I made one of my trips out of state to enter a bunch of slow drafts. I’ve done a couple YouTube shows this week where I went through some of those builds and made a bunch of picks on air, and I have to give a huge thanks for the support on that project as I start to get it going. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, in a way I truly didn’t expect.

I tend to be self-defeatist about stuff, but I’ve gotten some great help on the project that made things less daunting, and it’s just been so uplifting to see the solid viewership on these first videos on a basically unused channel, that we’re already up over 600 subscribers (go add to that number on YouTube if you haven’t! It’s free and non-invasive and really helps!), and most importantly that people seem to be really enjoying the content.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be posting that audio to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well, for those of you who are podcast-only types. My only request is even if you hate YouTube, you should still go subscribe to my channel over there, which will help this whole project and lead to me making more shows like these.

One final thing — for those of you interested in actually watching on YouTube, I realized my channel is probably a good candidate for turning on notifications, as I likely won’t be sending out email blasts every time I go live in the future, and I also won’t be doing the shows on a consistent schedule. I haven’t really thought through how I’m going to let the engaged audience know when I do these shows in the future, but I think YouTube notifications is probably the appropriate tool for the specifics of my channel and content. So if you’re one of those people who has been excited about this project because you have some midday flexibility and will likely be able to tune in live at times, setting up YouTube notifications/alerts is my suggestion.

That said, I’m going to go live here about 10 minutes after I click send on this post, at 2 ET. If you happened to open the email quickly, come join me for some Underdog picks!

When I made that trip and entered several slows last week, I couldn’t help but sign up for five Eliminator drafts. As it happens, I’m currently doing three (unrelated) Fantasy Cares Eliminators, which are the charity contests I mentioned in a previous post that several of you joined. That format’s quite a bit different than the Underdog one, but the common thread that makes both of these “eliminators” is that each week, teams that score poorly are removed from the contest, i.e. eliminated.

There are no reprieves. It doesn’t matter how good your team is or how many total points they’ve racked up for the season. One bad week and that team is done.

It can be a crushing blow, honestly, to lose a good team in a format like this. And yet, these types of contests are among my favorites. Every year, my friends and I do an eliminator contest during March Madness (I believe we originally got the parameters for this from some type of Bill Simmons content, over a decade ago). The idea of “survivor” pools is stylistically similar here, as well. For all of these, the allure is that potential you could be bounced any given week, and then the way things escalate the longer you do stay alive, really ratcheting up the tension and ultimately excitement.

Over the years, I’ve found there’s an immediate reaction in these contests, which can essentially be described as prioritizing floor rather than ceiling. The conventional wisdom would have you believe we need balance and stability to be successful every week — we need to focus more on not being bad, rather than seeking to be really good.

I’ve developed a different approach, and in this article will argue there are pretty major flaws in that logic. But here in the intro I just want to emphasize they are another reason I really love this format. Any format with uncommon rules and incentives is going to favor people who choose to think dynamically about the parameters, and commit to finding unique strategies. In fantasy football, this means truly understanding the goals and benefits of concepts like structural drafting, thinking through the probabilistic ranges of various players (and positions), and correctly weighing the ever-present balance of risk and upside.

Many of the participants in a contest like this are not going to go deep enough into considering the optimal approach. I don’t necessarily believe that I have that figured out, but I do want to try to exploit my belief that I’ll put more effort into figuring that out — and thus have an edge — than the market. It’s long been the case that any format where a significant portion of the field isn’t playing optimally is ripe for attacking; think about little things like how stacking revolutionized the early days of both DFS and best ball when the popularity of those formats rose, or more recently how the in-season Battle Royale streets have evolved just over the past couple years.

The Eliminator and other contests like Weekly Winners are these great offerings from Underdog that are still in their infancies and are overshadowed by the bigger contests like Best Ball Mania. That’s of course why Underdog is offering these unique structures — they are a great change-up, and give people interested in chasing these types of untapped edges different formats to chase and learn about. But if you look around the industry, you’ll see far more content dedicated to BBM, which with its massive prize pool — and also more years of data to chew on — does make sense.

I don’t have any data from past Eliminators to share here. But I do have what I think are some useful angles to consider for building these teams, and to be honest it has me jazzed about really hammering this tournament this summer. On my next trips over the border and therefore in future YouTube videos where I’m making slow-draft picks, I’ll likely be adding more and more Eliminator drafts, as they are just $10 to enter and — among the things I’ll talk about today — they offer multiple ways to play, and goals to achieve, depending how your individual draft plays out.

I should note, if for some reason you still haven’t signed up for Underdog — maybe you’re like me and need to travel across the border to draft, as I’ve heard from a few of you — you can use promo code “SIGNALS” when you create your account.

Alright, let’s start making some cases for how to play the Eliminator format.

Pod math

Let’s start by looking at the format, including how you can advance each week. The first thing to know is much like other Underdog contests, you’re put into random pods. Of course, because it’s an Eliminator, that doesn’t just relate to the playoffs; it’s every week, all year, and the size of those pods and how many people will advance from them varies.

A couple immediate thoughts here:

As the season progresses, the pod advance rate shrinks, while the pods get stronger. Don’t miss the second part of that: Each week, the fat is getting trimmed, and even teams that start hot then hit injuries will get weeded out quickly when those injuries hit. As you move through the year, every week you will face teams that have both been good enough all year to keep advancing, and also (and an important distinction) have been good enough recently to advance out of the more recent, tougher pods. Throughout the year, your pods get tougher in multiple ways, filled with relatively stronger drafts.
Loosely put, if we want to win this thing, there’s a pretty clear advantage to earlier byes, where our roster will be a fuller strength later in the year. That said, as we’ll look at below, Weeks 12 and 14 are the weeks with the most byes this year, and going out in Week 12 offers a $50 prize — five times your initial entry — while going out in Week 14 offers a $100 prize — a 10x. While trying to win the contest likely means prioritizing early byes in an intelligent way, there’s a case to be made for stacking the Weeks 12 and 14 byes with a cash game mentality, treating that given entry as a better bet just to get to those weeks where money is earned. I wouldn’t necessarily go into a draft with this mentality, but it’s an important consideration for if you get into a room where people are really hammering the early byes, and the value all seems to be in Weeks 12 and 14. In that setting, I am perfectly fine trying to maximize my potential for a 5x or 10x by stacking Weeks 12 and 14, but I’ll still want to have outs to advancing through those weeks if things really fall into place for me (e.g. I won’t likely go so far as to stack all my QBs with the same Week 12 bye — although I would love to take a Week 12 and a Week 14 bye together in this situation so I theoretically have them both every week from Week 1 through Week 11).
I’ve conditionally formatted the “Advancers” column because I find it interesting to consider that the pod variance is ratcheted up some weeks. For a week like Week 10, there are only four other teams in your pod with you. Even if you have a relatively strong week, all it takes is getting posted with three other even better weeks to get eliminated (bye comparison, even with an identical 60% advance rate in Week 13, you need to be beaten by six of the other nine members of your pod, so the variance will be relatively flattened). But that does work both ways — while it’s later in the season and the pods do get stronger as we go, it’s possible you wind up in a relatively weak Week 10 pod, and advance with a pretty meh score simply because two of the other four teams in your pod bottom out.

Bye weeks

It probably goes without saying, but you want to be careful about stacking bye weeks in this format. In BBM, we sometimes joke about people worrying about bye weeks too much, because you’re just trying to advance from the Week 1-14 portion of the season with the maximum points, and while stacking bye weeks has a negative impact that one week, the data tends to show it’s more or less offset by being at close full strength all the other weeks.

We need to completely forget that concept when we’re talking Eliminator, because the reasons to fade concern over bye weeks are almost solely that you can make up the damage done that one week over the other weeks, but we don’t want to be imbalanced like that in the Eliminator.

There’s something to be said about not trying to predict things too tightly, and I won’t necessarily bypass a pick I think is a full tier ahead of any other options solely because it starts to imbalance me a little bit in terms of byes. A theme of this post will be that there’s going to be uncertainty, and we do have to allow ourselves to get lucky in some ways, just like with any approach to any major tournament. You can’t win any of these contests solely through optimization.

But even to that point about having a player a full tier ahead, part of the element of uncertainty is having humility that my tiers might not even be correct. The one part of this that can be said to be fact is the bye week. Like I said, I’m OK with some imbalance if I think it meaningfully boosts my overall build — because then the bet is just praying for pod luck or a crucial spike week from the non-bye players at that position at the right time — but I do want to take spreading out my byes seriously as a tiebreaker.

That can also mean proactively picking players from teams that are less likely to create bye stacking issues later in the draft. Let’s look at a visual from The 33rd Team I’ve been referring to while drafting, which just lists the byes but in an easy format:

Some assorted thoughts:

The NFL absolutely sucks at this. This is beside the point, but having four total byes from Weeks 7-9 combined, then throwing six teams in each of Week 12 and Week 14 — but none in Week 13 — is ludicrous.
In an absolutely perfect world, I’d like at least one player on bye in each of the eight weeks where there are byes, because that’s helping to reduce how heavily I’ll need to stack the key weeks. The math of it is with eight weeks of teams on bye, and 18 roster spots, you’ll average 2.25 players on bye for each week where there are byes. In other words, you’ll definitely have multiple players on bye some weeks.
Across the Eliminators I’ve done both on Underdog and through Fantasy Cares, I run into issues stacking byes most frequently in: Weeks 12 and 14 (naturally), and then Weeks 5 and 6, which are the more fantasy-relevant of the weeks with four bye teams. These would be my definition of “the key weeks.” As I noted above, builds that start to stack Weeks 5 and 6 start to be attempts to win the whole contest, whereas builds that start to stack Weeks 12 and 14 start to be more “cash game” plays at 5x-ing or 10x-ing your entry. Typically, if I start to hit some Week 5 byes, I’m more likely to pair that with some Week 6 byes and start optimizing that direction, and vice versa.
Week 10 has some intriguing players, but Week 11 is fairly weak, and circling back to the note above about those being high-variance weeks with smaller pods, I do have a minor bias away from Week 10 and 11 byes because I feel pod strength might be relatively solid in those high-variance weeks — particularly in Week 11, it’s hard to imagine staring at my opponents’ rosters and seeing several key guys who got them there are out. As a result, I have a minor bias toward wanting to be at full strength those weeks (this does not mean I’m fading Trey McBride in this or any format).
The best team to target is likely the 49ers, who get Week 9 off with only the Steelers, a team I’m mostly fading anyway (outside their RBs). Week 9 also offers a 71.4% advance rate (5 out of 7 per pod), which is actually stronger than three of the earlier weeks (meaning that despite advance rates dropping over the course of the season, Week 9 is a relatively easier one to advance out of for where it falls on the calendar). The 49ers thus make for a particularly compelling team to stack, and we’ll talk about approach to team stacking more in the next section.
The other two-team week is Week 7, with intriguing teams in the Cowboys and Bears. The advance rate is relatively weak then, at 62.5% (5 of 8 per pod). Still, neither of these teams have particularly strong later-round targets (I like the Bears’ RB situation, but haven’t been into any later-round WRs for either of these teams). I’ve been breaking ties toward players with this bye, like a Keenan Allen when I’ve seen him slide (people are likely concerned about a 30-plus-year-old with a history of hamstring issues in this format, and rightfully so), because getting a solid Week 7 bye contributor locked up can provide flexibility later (i.e. Week 7 is a week you can wind up without anyone, but it’s the third-earliest week and thus one we should be targeting).

What about bye week and team stacking?

As we talked about in the last section, we’re going to need to have multiple players on bye at the same time, for some weeks. As such, when I’m talking about stacking byes, I’m talking about getting up to four or more players on one roster who are on bye at the same time, or two or more within one position group.

Thinking about it within position group is probably best, but for the non-QB positions you do want to think about the cumulative impact on your Flex as well. For WRs and to an extent RBs, two players within those position groups on a bye is more palatable, naturally. But if you were to wind up with a build with only seven total WRs, for example, you do have to consider how you whittle things down to just five for three spots (plus Flex help) when you have two on the same bye.

And that’s just having two — it’s relatively easy to start thinking about adding a third for a given week, and so on. My main point here is I believe there’s a meaningful edge to simply balancing the bye weeks within your positional groups.

Further, how you start to stack bye weeks is meaningful as it relates to the expectations for the individual players within the build. For example, if you take a double anchor RB approach and those players both have the same byes, it’s meaningful that the other three or four RBs on your roster that you’re hoping to get two usable weeks from that week are all longshots from the later rounds. It would be especially problematic to stack the bye week of the first two RBs you select in the earlier part of the season (say you want to go Jahmyr Gibbs and Saquon Barkley early, who both have a Week 5 bye). That’s a ton of draft capital to spend on RB early, so you’ll presumably need to wait until later to build out that position, but later-round RBs tend to be options you need to wait on to see dividends. It’s unlikely they’ll be as ready to produce in Week 5 as they might be if your top RBs had Week 12 or 14 byes.

This example is trying to get at a point that balancing your byes throughout your draft is an important way to consider it as well. Ultimately, you don’t know which players will get injured, and you don’t know who will be contributors. But the earlier picks are the better bets, obviously, and you can try to play the percentages by balancing when your expected point-scoring is available and not available.

The point of the RB example was one of the key ways you can put yourself in a tough spot is by relying too much on a specific player or couple players to be good on a specific week, especially if they are thin bets. Conversely, one of the major advantages to spreading out the byes during different areas of the draft is the balance increases your outs in each situation. This runs contrary to a point I will make in the next section, where I will argue the field is not aggressive enough in Eliminator formats. But this is essentially a conservative strategy I believe to be smart, specifically conservativism as it relates to bye week management.

The other major question around stacking is what to do with team stacks. Certainly, I’m less likely to do heavy team stacks (4+ players) in this format, because again we’re starting to stack byes. That said, while the focus of the Eliminator format is how you need to advance each week, it’s still like most Underdog contests with a big Week 17 field. In this case, if you make the final, you’ll play a one-week contest against a field of 115 finalists.

The format includes $100,000 to first, $50,000 to second, $40,000 to third, $30,000 to fourth, and $25,000 to fifth, which is a nice slow dropoff that you love to see. That continues down to $10,000 for 10th place, and I generally really like the payout structure.

Despite that, there’s still going to be a top-heavy element to all of these. While the top 10 spots all offer five figures, there’s a major difference between contending for $100k and really anything outside the top 15, where everything from 16th through 115th is somewhere between $500 and $5,000.

That means you still want some one-week upside, and I’m still interested in finding intelligent ways to stack up my QBs, although I don’t necessarily want to do that if both the key WR and QB are high draft picks, because then I am tying up a lot of my point-scoring into that week, as discussed before. There are still clever ways to do this — getting into the schedule to find a Week 5 matchup you’re vaguely comfortable with this far out as your secondary stack could help justify a start that included Jalen Hurts stacked up with A.J. Brown, for example.

But in terms of optimal structure, I do still want to incorporate some spike-week potential for Week 17 without overloading those stacks, particularly if they come on busy bye weeks. One of my favorite stacks in normal formats is the Texans, but they are an example of one that’s harder to pull off here, on account of the Week 14 bye they share with five other teams, including their Week 17 bring-back, the Ravens.

The shape of fantasy scores

Everything I’ve written so far is, to me, fairly 101-level stuff for Eliminator formats. In this section, armed with those structural plans, I want to get into more of a theoretical approach to team-building, and what you should be trying to do that the rest of the field might not do as well.

To start, I want to put one concept bluntly: When trying to win any massive contest like this, you have to get many things right. This concept has permeated best ball drafting for years, driven home by phrases like “draft like you’re right,” and discussions about how you can’t actually be strong at every position in a fantasy draft. The foundational principle is there are opportunity costs to every decision, and trying to achieve “balance” is going to create a deficiency in necessary depth somewhere (usually WR, where people tell themselves their rosters are stronger than they are, thinking it’s not an issue that their WR4 and beyond are all much weaker bets than they want to believe, and failing to understand how evidence has shown time and again that the way WRs score — with more volatility — is a driving force for the importance of good depth there).

One of the things I’ve written before is people seem to believe RB points are worth more than the points scored by other positions. It’s a weird bias we have because of how dominant an elite RB can be, and because we’ve all had teams where it can be extremely hard to find RB points in a given week. The replacement level can feel very low, and the ceiling can feel very high, and in that way the success of your team can feel most tied to the success of your RBs.

But this is more of a ceiling argument than a floor one. In fact, what we know about Robust RB and other strategies that lean heavily into the high seasonal volatility of RBs (as opposed to the weekly volatility of WR scoring) is that they stack bust risk and create major floor issues. Robust RB teams tend to finish last a high percentage of the time; one of the major benefits of Zero RB teams is this feeling that even when it doesn’t break super well, you’re still sort of middle of the pack.

Put differently, if you want to build a fantasy team that completely collapses and scores like 60 points some week, your best bet is stacking early RBs.

This is a major point I think some drafters will get dead wrong. They’ll believe that in an eliminator format, they can’t use extreme strategies, instead needing to prioritize balance across position groups. To me, this fundamentally misunderstands how fantasy scoring comes together. Ultimately, the difference in being eliminated in a given week could come down to whether you have 10 points or 5 points in some lineup spot. But as I’ve written time and time again, we tend to overvalue this concept of “floor” when trying to figure out why we didn’t score enough points in a given week.

When we see a 10-point game in our lineup, that feels solid. When we see the 5-point game, we think that player needed to do more. The difference is 5 points, and what I would posit is that if your margin is within 5 points more often than not, you’re doing something wrong.

In all probability, if your team is actually good in some major areas, you will simply score enough that the difference between the weakest score in your lineup being 10 points or 5 points won’t matter. Even though you want to be consistent in an Eliminator format, you still want to be dominant. If we think about the very best fantasy teams — consider for example one that did very well or perhaps won the regular season $1 million prize in last year’s BBM — we should think about consistency of greatness, essentially.

The goal isn’t to achieve a perfectly middling score at the expense of real upside, with the hope of never showing downside. I’m not even sure how you’d do that. The goal is to build a team that can dominate any week because it’s just that good. You should still seek upside. Because the pods get more difficult to advance out of later in the season, you shouldn’t suddenly chase veterans with “guaranteed touches” early in the season who will probably get displaced anyway. You should still chase exciting young players in many cases — including rookies — although it is definitely worth noting that some rookies can just wind up being total zeroes when they don’t get playing time.

Ultimately, the point I want to drive home is the answer to achieving a high floor is not balance, particularly if we control for actually good teams and make the assumption that we’ve made some good picks, like we always need to. In that setting, the key to achieving a high floor is likely imbalance — being so dominant at some positions that your output in those lineup spots is not subject to as much weekly volatility, because you have the depth of great players where someone is going to put up a big week, or the combination of perfectly solid weeks will carry you, or what have you.

Meanwhile, you can take some zeroes. You can definitely take some 5-point weeks hitting your lineup, as I mentioned in the example above. This is the whole idea of drafting for upside, is when a 30-point game hits your lineup, it easily covers for a couple duds. I’ve written this before, but stacking upside provides floor, at least again if we assume our team doesn’t totally suck. Of course, sometimes our teams do just suck, but no conservative, Eliminator-specific strategy is going to save you from that reality of fantasy football.

Optimal draft strategy, positional capital

This all brings us to the question of how to approach the Eliminator, and why I would write so many thousands of words about this format. Naturally, that’s because the optimal approach to the Eliminator, as far as I’m concerned, is Zero RB.

I’ve already alluded to this in discussing how early RBs stack bust risk, but when we build true Zero RB rosters with no Anchor RB, the flexibility that provides is we can get to say five really strong WRs through about Round 7, while also being able to hit an Elite QB and Elite TE.

That last part is really key, because one of the major things an Elite QB can provide is floor. The idea of later-round QB strategies in best ball is you can replicate higher-end QB scoring through spike weeks, but you do open yourself up to different types of risk ranging from benchings to guys just not being good, or their offenses sucking (which is sort of the same thing), and they just never throw enough TDs and the weekly production is just never there (I’m describing Kenny Pickett if this is unclear).

I’ve also written and talked a lot about Elite TE in 2024, and why it’s important to buy some upside there. An additional benefit to playing either an Elite QB or TE is you can draft just two, which is something I don’t think many Eliminator builds will do. And I understand why — having just two QBs, for example, means that for two weeks you’ll have one on bye and you better have the other one healthy, or you’re taking a zero.

That’s an obvious risk. It’s also the type of risk I’m willing to take on, because at a certain point we do have to assume some things go well. Whether it’s the Eliminator or otherwise, we can’t win these contests trying to contingency plan for everything. Put differently, if you go three-QB and three-TE in every Eliminator build, you’re like going five-RB and seven-WR, and those types of builds can have real depth issues as well if you start to assume an injury (like the two-QB travesty example does). It’s so much easier to tell yourself the lack of depth at QB will kill you when you have just two, because that’s an easy line to draw, but I’d argue the lack of depth at RB plus WR can run that same risk when you only devote 12 draft picks to those two so you can allocate the other six to three at each onesie. It’s just a more hidden risk (kind of like how a lack of WR depth can kill you in so many formats, but people never really see or feel that the way they should).

Meanwhile, what is the advantage to early RB? It’s that Legendary Upside my guy Pat Kerrane talks about, right? It’s ceiling. You hit on the season-defining player, and he’s a superstar. There’s a risk associated with it, but you take on that risk because you’re trying to hit on a 30% win rate kind of superstar.

This is where I will lean on the floor aspect of the Eliminator format to argue that we don’t need to take on that risk for pure ceiling. We actually want the relative stability of heavy-WR draft structures. We want redundancy and contingency plans at WR in case we do have some wrong, to make sure we have dominant scores there every week. When I wrote that idea a minute ago about five WRs through seven with an Elite QB and Elite TE, in the back of my mind I was thinking about how I should actually be getting to six WRs or maybe even seven by about Round 10. If you get a second strong TE in that window, and then say seven WRs through the Tyler Lockett range, and you also have an elite QB (and probably want to hit a solid QB2 not long after that either), you’ve built in so much floor that it doesn’t even matter if literally your final seven picks are all RBs and you never took one before.

I’m not saying to pursue that extreme of a draft plan in all leagues. I did take Gibbs in one of my Eliminator drafts out of the 1.12, where I prioritized his Week 5 bye and how his touch mix doesn’t include as many up-the-gut rushes, and how that can lead to more hope for good health. But I promise you I won’t take an RB2 early in that draft.

Ultimately, while I’m always going to be heavy on WR capital in the early going, the impression I get is people think Eliminator formats should slide you toward more balance, and more boring players. In my opinion, it should slide you away from balance, toward more redundancy with the early WR depth, and more of a willingness to completely take zeroes at RB, if necessary.

My build preference in Eliminator is probably pretty similar to other formats. I’m likely going to be in the 2-6-8-2 range, or slight variations. If I do go to three picks at one of the onesie positions, I’m going to prioritize QB, because taking a zero there is going to be more costly than at TE, where best ball rosters routinely have to accept low scores because of the nature of that position. That means that while 2-6-8-2 might be the goal in a perfect world, I could see 3-5-8-2 or 3-6-7-2 actually winding up as a larger part of my portfolio, depending how drafts fall to me. There’s also an advantage in the three-QB builds in that you can make three different skinny stacks, and we talked earlier about how you don’t want to do the big team stacks in this format.

These build types would feature a lot of early WR capital, allowing for 8 (or maybe even 7) to be enough. I would probably prefer to start feathering in RBs in the later single-digit rounds, where you can still find some nice bets on volume that provide an RB floor to a Zero RB team. It’s still crazy to me how you can have your cake and eat it too with that format now that viable higher-volume backs go outside the first 80 picks.

But like I said, I’m willing to take risks both because I know I have to get some things right, and because I don’t think it’s an insta-elimination just because I took a zero at RB2 one week. The mentality in the Eliminator for most seems to be that you can’t survive a zero anywhere in your lineup, but that’s simply not true. I know this because I’ve done this, particularly with Zero RB teams and taking really poor scores at RB. I’ve written you countless examples of them over the years.

A big-scoring week is defined not be an absence of low scores, but by the presence of elite upside. Again, you throw in a couple 30-point weeks at WR, or your Elite QB does Elite QB things, and you’re not sweating that 2.8 you took from Kendre Miller because Alvin Kamara is still playing too much.

There’s also the part of how the season unfolds. The way the Eliminator schedule exists, you would prefer your team to be weakest early, and then to gradually get better. As we know, if Zero RB builds have one fault, it’s that they tend to get off to slow starts. But then if you do start to hit on late-round RBs, they can pair with the early-round upside you’ve paid for on draft day at the positions where you absolutely have to pay for that, and suddenly you have an absolute rocket ship toward dominant late-season rosters.

Is this going to be the case for every Zero RB draft? No. But when done correctly, and with a little luck in picking the right players, the Eliminator offers a format that is designed for us for draft exactly the way we want to anyway. As if I didn’t need more of a reason to love this format.