How to win your fantasy football auction draft
Auction drafts present a few different challenges from snake drafts.
In a snake draft, your draft position is fixed. But in an auction draft, you can draft whoever you want as long as:
- they are on the auction block (ie, the player has been nominated)
- you outbid everyone else
- you have the remaining balance to pay the final bid
- you have an available roster spot
This is great, but presents some interesting problems you have to solve. So let’s talk about how to win your auction draft.
How auction drafts work
First, lets run through how an auction draft plays out:
1. Each manager is given a salary cap and a fixed number of players they must draft. This means, there is a maximum you can bid on an individual player, which equals your remaining budget minus the number of slots left to fill on your roster times the minimum bid.
2. Players are nominated in round robin fashion. Each manager gets a turn every round to select any player available to nominate. Similar to a snake draft, but instead of drafting the player, he is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
3. When you nominate a player, you can set the starting bid point up to your maximum bid. Most managers stick with the minimum.
4. Once a player is on the block, any manager can bid on the player as long as they don’t exceed their maximum bid. If no other managers bid on the player, the manager who nominated the player claims him at the starting bid.
5. The bidding continues until no other manager makes a higher bid within the time limit.
6. The manager with the highest bid claims the player.
7. This is repeated until every manager’s roster is complete.
Sounds more complicated than it really is. I suggest you try a couple of mock drafts to get a feel for it if you’ve never done one before. But don’t use the mock draft as your baseline for what particular players will go for.
Mows let’s talk about the 3 biggest challenges you’re going to face and how to minimize them on draft day.
Challenge #1: Impulse bidding (ie, you want to win the bid because of your stupid competitive nature)
Auctions put you in direct competition with every other bidder.
In a fantasy football auction draft, everyone wants every single player who gets nominated, for the most part. The more elite the player is perceived to be, the more others are willing to pay to get him.
For the upper crust players, this can lead to reckless bidding wars. Not because the player is “worth it,” because the bidders don’t want to lose. They go insane.
To curb this, you need to do 2 things pre-draft:
- go through your draft rankings and pool similar players into tiers
- assign a “maximum” bid to each tier
The idea is to check your impulses as the draft unfolds. Knowing you’re likely to behave impulsively and having a plan to curb it puts you ahead of 99% of your league.
The maximum bid is just theoretical. You’re bidding to perceived value. Perceived value is relative.
In other words, as you bid against others, you have your predetermined max to constantly remind you of the value you assigned the player on the block.
And it’s also useful to pool players together so you feel comfortable abandoning a bid if there’s other players in the tier still available. Just reset and try again.
Challenge #2: blowing your wad (ie, burning all your budget on 2 or 3 elite players and settling for scraps to fill out your roster)
Related to impulse bidding is getting overhyped to the point of blowing all your budget on 2 to 3 players.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach. In fact there’s a name for it: studs and duds. Because what ends up happening is you burn upwards of 90% of your budget on a couple players and you have to fight for scraps everywhere else.
Please don’t fall for this. Because you’ll spend the rest of the season scraping long shots off the trash heap and stressing over injuries to your studs.
The objective of any fantasy draft is to build a roster loaded with value. Not one that’s too heavy.
So to curb this, you need to think of your budget in terms of percentages. Like a pie chart.
Expect to pay up to 40% on an elite performer. 20% to 30% for an above average performer. And 5% to 15% on 3rd and 4th tier starters. For bench players, 0.5% to 3%.
Armed with this, you can determine how you’d like to allocate your budget:
- you could draft 2 elite players and 1 above average, then settle for 3rd, 4th, 5th+ tier players (the studs and duds method)
- you could ignore elite players and draft 3 to 5 above average players, then fill out with average and bench players (the balanced method)
- you could draft all average players and hope a couple of them turn into studs (the frugal method)
Or any combination you see fit.
Challenge #3: building a quality roster (ie, resisting panic and the art of roster design)
The last challenge is simple: drafting as many high potential players as possible across all positions with the least amount of risk.
The more high potential, low risk players you can grab, the better. But this is also everyone else’s goal.
As players fly off the board and you lose bidding war after bidding war, you may feel the need to bid a little higher than you planned for a particular player at a particular position.
It’s almost a guarantee you’ll be put in this position. Especially when you look up and see all the elite players and most of the above average players gone.
I just want to reassure you that A) there’s no such thing as over bidding for value and B) there’s also no such thing as “getting a bargain” and C) panic and desperation is fine if warranted.
To limit the number of panic bids you need to make, it’s a good idea to pre-determine who you want to draft at every position. Even going as far as building out your bench.
So start with your dream starting lineup and backups. Realistically estimate what those players will go for. Make adjustments as necessary to fit your budget.
Also keep in mind, if you don’t fill out your entire roster, you’ll need to save room to draft enough players at the minimum bid to fill it out.
Now you have a complete roster template. Then for each slot, identify comparable players in priority order.
Can’t get that #1 wide receiver without demolishing your budget? No problem, you can swing again with your next best option.
Now you have a pool of players to choose from at every slot, so you’ll be able to see when you’re running out of options and need to be more aggressive with your bids.
Game day strategy
With a plan to tackle the biggest challenges, let’s put it all together into a cohesive strategy.
Pre draft
The first thing you need to do is build your draft sheet. This is a comprehensive list of players ranked by projected season performance. Ideally using projections. Even more ideal is projections coupled with Value Over Replacement (VOR).
Lucky for you, I made a video about how to create your own VOR draft sheet.
After you’ve got your draft sheet, go through each position and group players into tiers.
If you’re stuck with only rankings, you’ll have to use your best judgement. If you’re using projections with VOR, it’s easier to spot where the big drop offs are.
Last plug I promise, this video will guide you. It’s not that hard, albeit a bit tedious. But it’s worth the effort.
Next, determine how you want to allocate your budget, keeping in mind what you can expect to bid to win players at different tiers:
- up to 40% for elite tier players
- 20% to 35% for great players
- 10% to 20% for good players
- 5% to 15% for flex players
- less than 5% for bench players
Side note: as you’re doing this exercise, ignore kicker a team defense. You should almost never bid more than the absolute minimum for these positions unless you have budget to burn and they’re the final 2 slots on your roster.
This isn’t an exact science, but knowing when to bid aggressively versus not is important. If you want elite players, you’re gonna have to pay a premium.
Now, define your dream roster, adjusting down based on what you can expect to pay for each player.
Then, fill each slot with a pool of reserves in case you can’t grab the player you wanted at a price that doesn’t bankrupt you.
You’re now ready to draft.
The draft
You have your plan. Now all you have to do is execute. Easy, right.
Auction drafts tend to play out in stages:
The first stage is over enthusiasm. Everyone is amped up and looking to grab and snatch whoever is on the block. But not you, because you have a plan and know exactly when to bid aggressive and more important, when to abstain.
The second stage is hangover. Half your league mates begin realizing they’ve blown a lot of their budget and either can’t bid enough to get good players still left or are shell shocked. This is the stage where the meat of your roster can be filled out.
The final stage is cleanup. By now, everyone has their starting lineup set, now is the sad minimum bidding for bench players. There’s still value to be found here, so if you still have budget remaining, time to grab the best players left, and take some risks.
Ok, that was a lot. If you still have questions, drop them in the comments. Or send me an email: a-ron@lineuptheory.com.
Now get out there and kick the dirty fucking shit out of your dirty fucking draft. Bye.