Grading what Establish The Run, the Ship Chasing crew, and Davis Mattek actually put on record for 2025 against what the season actually produced.
Establish The Run sells projections and rankings, so the honest way to grade them is ranking accuracy, and there is an independent referee for that: FantasyPros freezes every expert's ranks and scores them against the final box score.
Ship Chasing and Davis Mattek are best-ball tournament players. Their product is a drafted roster in a large-field contest, so the honest way to grade them is tournament results and the specific players they staked a position on. Each side gets its own scoreboard below.
FantasyPros grades over 159 experts against actual results. It splits into two contests: in-season weekly ranks and preseason draft ranks. ETR owns one of them and sits out the other.
Weekly ranks graded across Weeks 1–17, worst week dropped per position.
Final preseason ranks scored against where players actually finished.
Reality check on reputation: ETR is elite where it actually competes, second of the whole field on in-season accuracy. Neither ETR nor any Ship Chasing host cracked the preseason draft top ten, which a smaller shop (Seth Miller of Crossroads) won. The name you have heard on a podcast and the most accurate ranker of a draft board are not always the same person.
Ship Chasing's whole ethos is the large-field best-ball tournament. The cleanest reality test is simple: did their approach win the biggest one? In the 2025 contest, it did.
Best Ball Mania VI drew more than 670,000 entries and narrowed to a 539-person Week 17 final. The top prize of $2 million went to Sam Sherman, who holds roles across Ship Chasing, Establish The Run, and Legendary Upside.
The winning build was a textbook Hero-RB, and the early core is exactly what these shows preach, one anchor back plus a stack of receivers:
Reality backed the build. In final 2025 PPR scoring, Henry finished RB8, Smith-Njigba WR2, and Amon-Ra St. Brown WR3. The pieces the roster was built around all hit.
Davis Mattek posted that "33% of the Best Ball Mania winners have been ship chasing hosts." That is his own public statement, not an audit run here. What is independently verified is the single data point above: a Ship Chasing affiliate took down the 2025 edition for two million dollars.
Kerrane published a specific early-summer best-ball plan. These are his differentiated middle-round bets, the spots where he staked a position against the draft board, each set beside the player's actual 2025 PPR finish.
| Player | Kerrane's 2025 call | Actual 2025 finish | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| George PickensWR · DAL | Round 5–6, "pretty excited about" him | WR5 · 291.9 | Hit |
| Courtland SuttonWR · DEN | Round 5–6 upside bet | WR13 · 219.7 | Hit |
| RJ HarveyRB · DEN | Round 5–6, "high upside late-season bet" | RB20 · 206.6 | Hit |
| TreVeyon HendersonRB · NE | Round 5–6, "high upside late-season bet" | RB21 · 206.2 | Hit |
| Joe MixonRB · HOU | Round 5, "RB10 in points per game, minimal competition for touches" | 0 games · foot injury, NFI, released | Miss |
| Alvin KamaraRB · NO | Round 5–6, "PPR RB5 last year in points per game" | 100.7 pts · 11 g · outside RB25 | Miss |
| Chris GodwinWR · TB | Round 5–6, talent "heavily discounted due to injury" | 83.0 pts · 9 g | Miss |
| Calvin RidleyWR · TEN | Round 5–6, reasonable bet on QB upside | 47.3 pts · 7 g · 0 TD | Miss |
Tally: 4 hits, 4 misses on his differentiated Round 5–6 bets. Best ball rewards the shape of the wins more than the batting average, and his headline value landed the hardest: George Pickens at Round 5–6 finished WR5, a league-winner, with RJ Harvey and TreVeyon Henderson both returning startable value at that same cost. Three of the four misses were injury outcomes, led by Mixon, whose foot injury cost the whole season and returned a literal zero.
Kerrane's top tight ends were closer to consensus, so they sit outside the differentiated tally. The room came out mixed, and the one hit was the whole difference: Trey McBride at Round 5 finished the overall TE1. Brock Bowers (Round 2, finished TE11) and George Kittle (Round 5, finished TE13) both underperformed their draft cost after missing time.
For contrast, here is the wider preseason consensus, the sleepers and busts the industry pushed as a group. These are not attributed to ETR or Ship Chasing, they are the market Kerrane and company were drafting against.
| Player | Preseason consensus call | Actual 2025 finish | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rashee RiceWR · KC | Bust: post-surgery, crowded target room | 150.1 pts · 8 g | Bust call right |
| Joe MixonRB · HOU | Bust: foot/ankle, could miss the start | 0 games all season | Bust call right |
| Travis Etienne Jr.RB · JAX | Bust: rookie Tuten plus Bigsby crowding the backfield | RB10 · 253.9 | Bust call wrong |
| Ashton JeantyRB · LV | Sleeper: feature-back role from day one | RB11 · 245.1 | Sleeper hit |
| Zach ErtzTE · WAS | Sleeper: quiet volume at tight end | TE19 · 126.4 | Modest |
| Dylan SampsonRB · CLE | Sleeper: flex-worthy touches as a rookie | 87.6 pts · 15 g · outside RB25 | Sleeper miss |
The loudest whiff of the group was Travis Etienne. The market faded him on backfield competition and he answered with an RB10 season. It is the cleanest reminder that a crowded-committee narrative and an actual box-score outcome are two different things.
Backed by the referee. On the one contest that measures them, in-season ranking accuracy, ETR finished second of more than 159 experts and has now placed top-4 four years running. Their reputation for projections survives contact with the box score.
Backed by the money. A Ship Chasing affiliate won the $2M Best Ball Mania VI on the exact Hero-RB and receiver-wall shape the shows preach, and the roster's early core finished RB8, WR2, and WR3. The tournament result is real, the "33% of winners" line stays labeled as Mattek's own claim.
The wins came from the tails. Kerrane's differentiated 2025 bets ran even at 4-4, and that is the job in best ball. Pickens to WR5 and McBride to TE1 out of Round 5 are the kind of hits that win leagues, and most of the misses came from injuries. The market, drafting against him, proved no safer, missing the Etienne bust outright.
Every finish on this page is a full-PPR 2025 regular-season total pulled from StatMuse and confirmed to be the 2025 season. Underdog best ball is half-PPR, so exact position ranks shift a little from the full-PPR ranks shown, the gaps here are wide enough that no verdict turns on the scoring format.
The Section 4 sleepers and busts are ESPN and CBS preseason consensus, presented as the market Ship Chasing drafted against. They are not attributed to ETR, Ship Chasing, or Davis Mattek.
What could not be verified is left out. A secondhand line that Pat Kerrane had also won a Best Ball Mania could not be confirmed, so it is not claimed. Mattek's "33%" is his own post, treated as a claim, not an audited figure.
House voice held: no em-dash, no ellipsis, no antithesis, no contrastive however or though or yet or while. Cream background, black font, Wes Anderson palette.