The LegUp Sidekick
The LegUp Sidekick is a dynamic rankings tool.
Much like the playoff best ball tool we launched in 2023, the Sidekick reorders our rankings after every pick.
Except you don't have to put your picks in anymore.
All you do is select a player. The Sidekick automatically updates the rankings.
Are you in slow draft hell?
Not anymore. You have individually customized rankings waiting for you in every draft.
Multi-tabling fast drafts?
The Sidekick generates customized rankings for every draft... including simultaneous fast drafts.
The Sims are in the Sidekick
Below, I'll dive into the details of how the Sidekick works and how it's able to support various features and formats
But the top line takeaway is that the Sidekick's player recommendations are now sim-driven.
To achieve this, we overhauled the Legendary Upside ranking process, creating ranges of outcomes for every player in the draft pool, in the process quantifying front-weighted vs. back-weighted production profiles.
We accounted for injury, bench, and suspension risk, as well as a number of other factors. Then, we (ShaidyAdvice) created week-by-week simulations, accounting for the effects of both in-game and season-long correlation. The end result is a set of sims that predict exactly how many points every relevant NFL player will score in each week of the season.
As much as I'm excited to tell you about the details of the upgraded Sidekick... nothing beats trying it out for yourself.
What Does the Sidekick Cost?
Both Yearly and Monthly Subscriptions Include:
- Pre-NFL draft best ball (Big Board, etc.)
- Post-NFL draft best ball (aka. hot best ball summer)
- Playoff best ball
- All LegUp Content (all posts, rankings, premium podcasts, etc. are included).
Yearly Price
- $499/year
- Year = a full 12 months from your sign-up date.
- The three covered drafting windows total approximately 10 months per year, working out to about $50 per month.
- Year = a full 12 months from your sign-up date.
Monthly Price
- $199/month
- Price increases as we get closer to the season.
- However, you lock in your monthly renewal price for as long as you keep the subscription active.
- Price increases as we get closer to the season.
Do I Get Credit for my Current LegUp Sub?
Yes.
When upgrading to the Sidekick, any remaining value on your LegUp subscription will be prorated toward your Sidekick subscription. Sidekick subscriptions include all LegUp content.
If you're an existing subscriber, you'll also remain on the same billing cycle, with the cost of the Sidekick prorated by the time remaining until your LegUp subscription expires.
Is Playoff Best Ball Included?
Yes.
By signing up for a yearly Sidekick plan, you're locking in access to the playoff best ball version of the Sidekick, which has several major improvements on 2023's initial tournament-winning design.
Installation and Features
Installing the Sidekick is very simple. Here's a quick tutorial and a rundown of some of the key features.
Building Better Teams
Ok, let's dive into the details on the new sim-driven Sidekick.
First, let's discuss what this new process enables the Sidekick to do that it couldn't do before.
Fundamentally, now that we have realistic scoring distributions in hand for every week and every player in the pool, we are able to start looking at the question we care about most... how do we build better teams?
Coherent Team Building
One weakness of every available best ball tool, before now, is that player recommendations weren't truly impacted by who you've already drafted.
Sure, the Sidekick accounted for correlation. But neither Brian Thomas nor Travis Hunter is 'Jaguars WR', they are... Brian Thomas and Travis Hunter. They are both exciting plays, but are also very different plays in critical ways.
We can now account for that, treating players differently based on their ranges of outcomes and which weeks of the season they are likely to score the most points.
If you've drafted with the Sidekick in the past... I know you have some teams with too many rookies on them. I do too. Rookies provide crucial and often underpriced late-season upside. As a wise man once said, Week 17 is all that matters.
And, in general, the normal LegUp rankings tend to be hot on rookies; they tend to be targets.
But we can't overload our teams with back-weighted production. We still have to get to the dance. The new sim-driven recommendations will do a much better job of balancing Week 17 upside with sufficient advance-rate firepower.
Likewise, if you utilized custom rankings with the Sidekick that tend to have more of a lean toward veterans, you likely built some teams that were underpowered in the best ball playoffs.
Advance rate screenshots are cool.
Tournament-winning screenshots are better.
The nature of this rankings bias depends on the ranking set, but the issue is inherent to dynamic rankings... unless you're using a sim-driven approach.
With the addition of sims, the Sidekick isn't just accounting for surface-level information (e.g., team or position). It's now able to factor in the potential scoring distributions for the players already on your team and how that base of points fits with the players still available to you as the draft progresses.
The Sidekick is then able to recommend the players most likely to help you win the tournament.
Understanding the Draft Landscape
Player archetypes aren't the only nuances we can account for now.
Before now, we were limited to backward-looking analysis. What worked in past seasons? How do we apply that to the current season, while also adjusting for a new player pool and new prices?
As ADP prices have fluctuated significantly from season to season, and with WR prices reaching unprecedented highs both this season and last, this type of analysis has become increasingly challenging.
By contrast, simulating an NFL season is a forward-looking exercise. We won't be able to perfectly predict the season. But the information this analysis provides is directly related to the current player pool at current prices.
We're not looking at what would have worked; we're predicting what will work, given this year's unique draft landscape.
What Can I Get Later?
I think it's vital to understand how the available options in a given round compare to the positional options available later in the draft... in every round. This is because the old ADP rules have been scrambled by recent WR pricing that is truly, by fantasy football standards, revolutionary.
The Sidekick is now able to help make sense of the new ADP landscape.
In addition to giving the Sidekick realistic week-by-week scores for every relevant player, we've used the ADP of a given tournament to tell it which players you are likely to be able to draft later.
The Sidekick now knows what you can get later.
This allows us to get a little weird.
One of the limitations of the original Sidekick is that we were limited in terms of which branches of the game tree we could comfortably explore. Are there +EV builds that truly punt WR4? Probably. Are you going to get any with the original Sidekick? No.
We built the Sidekick to help keep drafts on the rails. If exploring particular structures was likely to do more harm than good... you were going to need to venture down those dimly lit paths at your own discretion.
But Shaidy just turned the mother fucking lights on.
With the entire season simulated, we can confidently explore builds we've never touched before. And you know what? There's a very good chance those builds wouldn't have worked if we'd tried them in the past.
That's because we're not building for the past.
We're building for this year.
We're building to win this year.
Every draft is a new puzzle. The Sidekick is built to help you solve it.
It's Better to Punt Than Capitulate
As an example, suppose you're in Round 11... but you only have four WRs.
The original Sidekick would likely nudge you toward a WR. Because, as a rule of thumb, it's a good idea to build out WR depth before the position gets wiped out.
But what if WR has already been wiped out?
What if you're in a room full a WR slappies who have been snapping up every available WR with a pulse since the draft began?
These drafters have created some serious values at RB, QB, and TE. Are you supposed to pass on those simply to service the gods of structure?
In that type of setup, the sim-driven Sidekick won't nudge you to WR. If anything, it will think taking a WR is kind of... crazy.
The sim-driven Sidekick's view is roughly—if your available WR options aren't much different from guys available in the final rounds, you're not going to "fix" your team by forcing a WR5.
That's a spot where the sims are likely to steer you to the best player available.
If structural "rules" are leading you to a bad pick... throw out the rulebook.
Adapting to New Formats
At this point, it's probably helpful to note what we did not tell the Sidekick.
As part of shifting to a sims-driven process, we did not tell the Sidekick how to draft.
We did not demand stacks.
We did not ask for bring-backs.
We did not say what structures were good or bad.
We did not insist on when to take three QBs or when to stop at two.
We didn't... tell the sims-driven Sidekick very much at all.
The upgraded Sidekick has the following information:
- Realistic week-by-week fantasy scores for every relevant player.
- The contest details for the specific tournament you've entered (ADP, scoring, prize structure, format).
That's it.
This simplicity allows us to support a variety of formats, including contests like Eliminator, and is what allows us to dial in recommendations to specific tournament structures (e.g., DK's $20 vs. DK's 555).
Would you like a draft overlay that is able to dial in recommendations based on the final size of a contest?
Good news... the Sidekick is now able to do that.
What the Sidekick Doesn't Do
With a ton of new features now online, I want to make sure we cover what the Sidekick does not do.
First and foremost, the Sidekick does not have any information about your specific draft room other than who you've drafted, and which players are gone vs. which are available. And although it knows which players are no longer available... it doesn't know which opponent selected them.
So, if there is a team that looks like this...
... the Sidekick does not know that.
If I were in a draft room with a team like this, I'd be a lot less inclined to push QB.
Or, to use a less extreme example...
Let's say I were drafting a Trey McBride team out of the 1.03, with the drafter at 1.01 having Joe Burrow and the drafter at 1.02 having Jalen Hurts. I'd be inclined to judge those opponents as less likely to select my stacked Kyler Murray at the end of Round 8. And so, I'd probably push Kyler around the turn, with the plan to take him at the 9.03. Murray might be the best pick for my team in Round 8... but I can squeeze more value out of the room by pushing him there.
By contrast, I'd be much less likely to push Murray if neither of the drafters in 1.01 and 1.02 had taken a QB and one of them had Marvin Harrison Jr.
Obviously, as drafters, we can get even more nuanced with this type of draft room planning.
When considering positional runs, dictating the turns, or pushing for more ADP value, you're going to add a lot more value than you'd get by simply following the top recommendation in the Sidekick every time.
LegUp's range-of-outcomes inputs also drive the Sidekick's sim-driven recommendations. So, if you're – to use a randomly selected example – not a fan of Drake Maye, you may want to take less Maye than the top recommendation would suggest.
This is one of the advantages of having a list of +EV picks available to you in the Sidekick.
There are multiple good picks in virtually every round of every draft.
Your Trusty Sidekick
The Sidekick, powered by the Legendary Upside best ball rankings, dynamically adjusts rankings as a draft progresses, accounting for roster construction, same-team stacking, and bring-back correlation.
It also incorporates smaller edges, like steering you away from QBs with overlapping byes (within reason) and toward building in stacking optionality.
Crucially, the Sidekick also understands the importance of diversifying your teams. We accomplish this by using a slightly different set of sims for each of your drafts. Everyone has realistic week-by-week outcomes, but everyone has a slightly different set.
This accomplishes two fundamental goals:
- The Sidekick won't funnel you to the same teams every time.
- The Sidekick won't funnel you to the same teams as everyone else using it.
You'll still want to review and manage your exposures outside of the Sidekick. But our hope is that the review process should start in a place that you're much happier with.
What Rankings Power the Sidekick?
The Sidekick's default rankings are the LegUp best ball rankings, which automatically update.
However, for BBM-style tournaments, you can toggle this setting.
The first option is to set the rankings to ADP. This will essentially treat your player takes as the market price. Your rankings will be ADP (which, like the LegUp ranks, auto updates).
You can also upload custom rankings. In this case, you'll need to keep the rankings updated yourself, but this allows you to disagree with player takes at LegUp and with the market's evaluation of players and still get sim-driven player recommendations.
The Sidekick can toggle between the LegUp rankings, ADP, and a custom set within seconds.
Pat Kerrane
What Sites Does the Sidekick Work With?
The Sidekick is live on both Underdog and DraftKings.
Anything Else Included?
Yes.
In addition to including access to all LegUp content, the Sidekick plan includes two other tools.
We have a handy market visualizer tool that helps quickly get you up to speed on where we differ from the market.
We also have a Jaccard similarity tool that leverages Sackreligious' Jaccard Similarity calculations to help you quickly visualize how diversified your portfolio is.
If you're curious, here's how my portfolio compares to Sackreligious' through the Jaccard Similarity lens.
I am taking a more diversified approach to player selection—I'm just as surprised as you are—but Sackreligious is still not far behind in how diversified his portfolio is. I have a 37th percentile diversification score; Sackreligious is 31st.
This shows that Sackreligious is doing an impressive job of building teams that are distinct from one another, even while concentrating his player bets.
And even though I have a more diversified target list, I might actually want to mix up my structures and pairings a bit more.
How Do I Sign Up?
If you're ready to sign up—click the button below:
Drafting is better with a Sidekick.