A notepad was sitting on a New England coffee table as Monday Night Football was about to kick off. Numbers, team names, jersey colors. A makeshift guide for two people who don’t watch much football but desperately needed to track every snap between the Falcons and Rams.
Upstairs, Sam Sherman was live on YouTube, sweating through what he’d later describe as “one of the most stressful feelings I’ve ever had in my life,” watching $2 million swing on every single play.
Sam’s fiancé, Emmy, and father, David Sherman Jr., were downstairs, consulting their cheat sheet of “good/bad players” to root for on every play, screaming and cheering as they tracked whether each touch was helping or hurting.
After the dust settled (and there was plenty of dust), Sam was crowned the Best Ball Mania VI champion and took home a cool $2 million.
Sherman won what has arguably become the new pinnacle of fantasy football competition, as he became the new king of the NFL Best Ball streets.
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Underdog Fantasy Best Ball Mania VI Winner
Sherman, 31, lives in Boston, works in management consulting, and just got engaged this fall. He’s been playing fantasy football since third grade, when he and his elementary school buddies started a league that’s still running today. And he got into fantasy sports even earlier than that in second grade, with fantasy baseball.
“My grandfather (David Sherman Sr.) was huge into football,” Sam explained. “He passed away a couple of years ago, but he’s kind of who I inherited my love of football from. He had us watching on the couch with him when we were little kids, and he loved our fantasy football league. He would track all of the winners, and he had this printed-out folder with all these matchups over the years of our fantasy league.”
Sam also won his home-league championship on the same Monday night he was sweating out his Best Ball Mania VI title. The guy he was facing in the home league sent Sam a video of himself pacing around a hotel room, not caring about their championship game at all, just rooting for Sam to win the $2 million.
“Every Single Play, I Felt Like a Million Dollars Was On the Line”
Sam had agreed to stream the final sweat on YouTube. Looking back, he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. “I agreed to it, and it came to a point where this could go really badly, but it all worked out.”
Sam was upstairs on the Ship Chasing stream with Pat Kerrane, Davis Mattek, and Pete Overzet. His father and fiancée were downstairs with their good/bad player list, tracking jersey numbers and team assignments on every snap.
- The players to root for: Darnell Mooney, Blake Corum, and Tyler Allgeier.
- The players to root against: Puka Nacua and Kyle Pitts.
“My fiancé, or I think it was my dad, actually, wrote down almost a good players and bad players list on a notepad with what team they were on, what number they had on their jersey,” Sam said. “So each play, they could consult the list and figure out if it was good or bad.”
The first half went smoothly. Almost too smoothly. Sam wasn’t even stressed. Being on the stream actually helped—Pat and the crew were cracking jokes, discussing other topics, providing a healthy distraction from the mounting pressure.
And then it happened. Bijan Robinson. 93 yards. Touchdown. Right before halftime.
It turned out the good/bad player list wasn’t perfect. Sherman didn’t tell his family to look out for Robinson, as nobody thought a near 100-yard touchdown was in the range of outcomes.
“I wasn’t honestly even considering Bijan as a factor, so I thought you needed 40-plus (fantasy points) to really track me down, but that was almost 20 points in one play right there. And that’s really when the sweat started, and I was kind of on the edge of my seat the whole game after that.”
Robinson became the scariest player on the field.
“It felt like every single time he touched the ball, he was live to take it for a 50-yard touchdown. He was just playing out of his mind that game. Every single play, I felt like a million dollars, or a 2-million swing was on the line, and I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
His father and fiancé both came upstairs for the final play. The one that sealed it. When it was over, Sherman had won $2 million.
Sam’s Underdog BBMVI Winning Team
The fantasy football content creator who “retired” before the 2025 season had started playing best ball about five years ago, around the second year of Underdog’s Best Ball Mania. Sam then started doing content for a while, built a following, and then stepped away.
This year, he drafted close to 90 teams total across multiple contests—57 of them in Best Ball Mania VI. The winning team was drafted on June 1st.
Of those 57 teams in Best Ball Mania VI, Sam advanced 10 to the playoffs. The $2 million championship team? It scored 1,590 points during the regular season—the lowest of any team Sam advanced. He had seven other teams that didn’t make the playoffs that scored more than 1,590 points. That’s best ball.
ABOVE: Sam Sherman’s Best Ball Mania VI winning lineup, which made him a cool $2M on Underdog Fantasy!
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The winning roster? Derrick Henry in Round 2 as the anchor running back. Then a ton of wide receiver capital. George Kittle and Tony Pollard came through huge. A bunch of roster pieces that outperformed expectations—Tyler Allgeier, the Saints stack with Tyler Shough, Chris Olave, and Juwan Johnson, and Carolina’s Bryce Young with Tet McMillan.
“Sometimes, the misleading part of it for people is you go into the tournament, and you’re like, holy crap, 670,000 people, I have to draft the best player at every single pick. I have to swing for the fences on every single pick,” Sherman said.
“And that’s just not really how the contest works. Yes, it is ultimately first out of 670,000 people, but it’s really top two out of 12, then top one out of 13, then top one out of 16 again. And then, you’re in a 500-person final.”
Sam did fast drafts exclusively this season (a 30-second pick timer compared to multiple hours per pick)—not because he thinks there’s a huge edge, just because that’s what he enjoys.
“Ultimately, I would say I don’t think there’s a huge difference,” he says about the slow versus fast draft debate. “I do think in the fast draft you’re more likely to have the teams that are really screwing things up, though.”
Sherman’s Path To The Underdog BBMVI Title
The path wasn’t clean. It was never going to be clean.
The $2 million team had consistently put up “mid scores” during the regular season, Sam said. Then the playoffs hit, and every week the championship team posted its highest score of the season to date.
In the final week of the regular season, Sam’s championship team was sitting in fourth place in its pod. The team jumped two spots to second place and barely snuck into the playoffs.
Things got wild for Sherman in Week 16. Going into Monday Night Football, Sam needed 50-plus points from Brock Purdy and George Kittle combined. He thought the team was dead.
“I honestly thought this team was pretty dead going into that Monday night game. I was like, okay, yeah, Purdy can put up 35, and Kittle can put up whatever, 20, but I didn’t think it was realistic or going to happen,” he said.
“And then they had a massive Monday night game, even with Kittle. I think he got injured late in that game, but they still got enough points to take first place in that pod.”
The team Sam passed to advance out of his Week 16 pod belonged to a user named “Borat.”
Impressively enough, “Borat” had another entry reach the BBMVI finals and took second place for a million bucks, finishing right behind Sherman. What are the odds?
“I have this approach of I don’t start sweating my best ball teams until the semifinals because it’s just more harm than good. I just don’t want to get my hopes up.”
And then of course, Sherman had every reason to sweat during the Week 17 victory, where he scored higher than 538 other entries in the finals.
Best Ball NFL Advice From The Champ
Sherman’s portfolio of players was fairly flat, but he does take some stands. According to the new Best Ball Mania champ, he had five players over 25% exposure and another seven or eight over 20%. Tyler Allgeier was one of his highest exposures. Other top shares included Davante Adams and Dallas Goedert.
“If you only shoot for upside on every single pick, I think you’re not quite playing best ball the right way,” he said. “That might be a better strategy for a full season-long cumulative points contest where you really do need that. In this type of best ball mania structure, you want to balance your floor and ceiling,” Sherman added.
But the most interesting strategic wrinkle? This team was heavily correlated for the Week 17 Best Ball Mania VI finals.
“I do have it in the back of my mind as a tiebreaker,” he explained. “I think on this team, for example, I did Luther Burden opposite Brock Purdy and George Kittle in Week 17, and I’m sure Burden wasn’t a huge stance of mine.
I actually think I took him a little bit earlier than he was going then. I’m sure I was deciding between Luther Burden and I don’t know, Jayden Higgins, or someone like that in a similar range. And I thought, hey, I have the Week 17 tiebreaker, and I’m looking for some rookie upside. Let’s go with Burden.”
Sherman said he always stacks his quarterbacks with pass-catchers unless it’s a rushing QB like Lamar Jackson or Jalen Hurts. The Purdy-Kittle connection. The Bryce Young-Tet McMillan duo. The Tyler Shough-Chris Olave-Juwan Johnson Saints stack that paid massive dividends when New Orleans vastly outperformed expectations.
“I think that team level correlation is huge, both from an individual week standpoint and from the season-long with the Saints example,” Sherman said. “Tyler Shough and the Saints’ offense, overall, vastly outperformed expectations, and that kind of brought Chris Olave and Juwan Johnson along for the ride there.”
What’s Next For Sherman?
If you ask Sam about gauging success in best ball, he doesn’t have a perfect answer. Nobody does. “It’s so hard, and I’ve had down years where you feel like, oh man, what am I doing spending all my time doing this? Am I really any good at this– if I just lost money this year?”
His advice? “Don’t try to base your entire success or failure on one season’s results, and also try diversifying contests a little bit…I know that sounds crazy, that’s good advice from the guy who just won 2 million on this,” he said.
The “retired” tweet is still pinned on his “X” profile. But things change when you win $2 million playing best ball on Underdog.
“I do think I’m going to start creating fantasy football content again, the timeline of when that happens and what that would be, I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet, but I really love doing it,” Sherman said.
The margins are absurd in best ball. One different break here or there, one injury, one blown coverage, and everything changes. Does that mean you played the season wrong? Probably not.
But sometimes—just sometimes—the breaks go your way when it matters most. And it did for Sherman this season. The good/bad player list was kind to him on Monday Night Football, but it wasn’t without the sweat of his life.
His success and love for sports could certainly circle back to sharing moments with his Grandfather, as a kid, on the couch watching football, and keeping track of fantasy wins.
Sherman’s 1st-place BBMVI finish marked the biggest fantasy football victory on the planet, and without a doubt, David Sr. is proudly celebrating his grandson’s win of a lifetime.
