Auction Strategies

July 21, 2010 9:30am CDT

Are you tired of always getting a low pick in your draft, never having a chance to own the Adrian Petersons of the world? Do you think success in fantasy football depends too heavily on draft position? Then maybe the auction format is for you. It is not only a more equitable format than a straight draft, it is more strategic and, in my opinion, more fun too.

The genius of the auction format is that if you want any player, you can get him -- as long as you are willing to pay for him. Everyone is working with the same salary cap (usually $100 or $200), so you can buy whoever you want, but you can't buy too many of the best players. In other words, no team is going to look like the early '90s Cowboys unless a bunch of their sleepers turn into studs.

Preparation and strategy for an auction are much different from those for a straight draft, however. So this article is going to provide some pointers on those.

Before you go into the auction, you have to assign a value to each player in the pool, who is likely to be rostered, so that you can get a sense of when you should stop bidding on him. Some people simply use an auction cheatsheet from a magazine or Web site, and that's better than nothing. But those don't account for any unusual scoring systems or roster requirements, and they certainly don't account for the tendencies of the owners in your particular league. You can use those values as a starting point, but to get the most out of them, you're going to need to customize them.

There is no magic formula for figuring out how much you should spend on each player available in the auction. Some people devise elaborate mathematical formulas that convert statistical projections into auction values. That often works in fantasy baseball, but it's less reliable in fantasy football because there is greater statistical variation from year to year in football numbers than there are in baseball numbers. In other words, statistical projections are more likely to be way off base in football than they are in baseball. This is mainly due to two factors: smaller sample size (16 games per year instead of 162) and greater chance of injury. Therefore, statistical projections should inform auction values, but they should not dictate them.

You don't have to be a math whiz to come up with usable auction values. One way to do it is to take the total number of dollars available to be spent (e.g. a 12-team league with a $100 cap and no keepers has $1200 to be spent) and allocate those dollars to each position. You can do the allocation based on how your league has spent its dollars in past years, or by your own strategic preferences. (Note that in most cases, there will be no need to spend more than the minimum bid, usually $1, on each kicker and defense.) Then estimate, based on league roster sizes and past drafting histories, how many players at each position will be taken. Then take the top players at that position (as many as you project to be taken at that position) and split the allocation for their position among them. Using the 12-team, no-keeper, $100 cap league as an example, if you decide to allocate to running backs 50 percent of the money available, and determine that 48 running backs will be acquired (an average of four per team), then you need to allocate $600 (50 percent of the $1200 to be spent in total) among the top 48 running backs available. You should consider a number of factors when allocating those dollars, including statistical projections, playing-time (and injury) projections, offensive systems, your scoring system, roster requirements, and long-term potential (if it's a keeper league). Also, whether your competitors tend to value particular players differently from the norm, and of course your own hunches -- the game isn't any fun without those.

Obviously, if you play in a keeper league, there is less money available to be spent, and some of the better players will not be available in the pool. The more keepers the league has the greater the inflationary impact there is on the values of the available players. In a league with a high number of keepers, it will cost you more to snag the best available players than it would in a redraft or a league with a low number of keepers, because there are fewer options available among the significant fantasy contributors. The same holds true when more studs are kept for low prices; a league where Chris Johnson is retained for $5 or less is going to have some serious inflation.

The best way to construct your team is going to depend greatly on the size of the league. The differences in strategy and valuation between large leagues and small ones are tremendous, particularly when it comes to valuing and bidding on the best players. Make sure you don't employ a large-league strategy for a small league and vice versa. Here are some points you should consider for the different league sizes.

10-team leagues or smaller: Stars-and-scrubs strategies tend to work in leagues of this size, so don't be afraid to go an extra dollar or two to land the studs, and to fill out the bottom half of your roster with $1 players. The reason for this is that with a smaller number of owners, there are fewer players that will be rostered, therefore the value of a $1 player in a small league is much greater than the value of a $1 player in a large league. That means, barring extreme incompetence by any league mates, that every single player who is purchased is likely to have some fantasy value. The difference between a $1 player and a $5 player may not be all that significant. In that climate, having a player or two who is a lock to put up outstanding numbers every week can potentially separate your team from the pack, creating a huge advantage.

14-team leagues or larger: Stars-and-scrubs strategies tend NOT to work in leagues of this size, so drafting for balance is much more important. The reason for this is that with a larger number of owners, there are a lot of players who are going to be rostered, and many of them will end up not having any fantasy value. Therefore, in large leagues, $1 players are crapshoots at best and, until they prove otherwise, they cannot be relied upon to help a fantasy team from week to week. And the difference between a $1 player and a $5 player may be very significant, so unless you are extremely confident that you are much better at identifying sleepers than your league mates, you probably don't want to have more than a handful of $1 players. Instead, you want to spread your money around so that you can have viable fantasy contributors starting at every single position -- and some more on the bench if possible. You probably don't want to spend more than 20 percent of your budget on any single player (unless it's a keeper league and inflation suggests that you do so, or your keepers cost so much less than what they are worth that you can afford to).

12-team leagues: Here's where it gets interesting. These leagues are small enough that the stars-and-scrubs strategy might work, but large enough that the spread-it-around strategy might work, too. You don't want to leave yourself with too many $1 players, since they are not guaranteed to be viable fantasy contributors, but you can afford to have more of them than you would in a larger league. You don't want to spend more than a third of your budget on one player, but it might work to devote a good chunk of your budget to three or four top players (just don't expect to land a top-five running back). And make sure that you have enough money at the end to fill out your roster with players you think will make a positive fantasy contribution. If 10-team auction leagues are won by studs and 14-team auction leagues are won by $1-5 sleepers who pay off, 12-team auction leagues are won by $10 players who end up being worth $20.

There are different schools of thought on who you should put up for bid and when. Common ones are to never nominate players you want until toward the middle of the draft, so that you force others to spend money early. Or you can throw out the players you want early, so you have enough money to buy them. You can also mix and match, nominating a mix of players you want and don't want, so as to prevent your competitors from identifying who you do want and bidding you up. In some leagues, people are cautious with bidding on the first few nominations, so don't be afraid to buy one of the first players nominated if he is going for less than what your auction values say he should. It is also usually a good idea to consider position. For example, if you are already set at running back, but other owners still have quite a bit of money to spend and running back slots to fill, then throw out running backs that will drain their budgets, so you will not be at a disadvantage a few rounds later when your sleepers start being nominated.

It is important to make adjustments on the fly during an auction. At a straight draft, there are long stretches where you don't really need to be paying attention, but at an auction, you can't afford to be distracted for even a small amount of time. If you did your homework when devising your auction values, they shouldn't be too far off from what the actual prices turn out to be. But there will never be a 100 percent correlation, because no two owners (much less 12) evaluate all players the same way. You need to be able to sense when certain players (or positions) are going for more or less than what you expected, and adjust what you are willing to pay for those remaining accordingly. If you bring a laptop to the auction, there are software programs that can do this for you, but you can also make these adjustments yourself. To be able to do it successfully, though, you need to write down (or type in) every player on every team and their salary, and keep track of how much money every team has remaining.

Even though you've already distinguished players by dollar values, grouping them into tiers helps, too. You need to know when there are only a few players left in the top remaining tier at a position of need, so you don't get shut out. Bidding wars often occur when there is one player left who is considered to be far better than all the remaining players at his position are, and you don't want to get caught up in those. It's one thing to overpay for a stud; it's quite another to overpay for a player who's not any more talented than a bunch of others at his position. The easiest way to lose in the auction format is to consistently pay $15 for $10 players, $10 for $5 players and $5 for $1 players. At some point you have to cut bait and move on.

As the auction is winding down, make sure that you can afford to spend more than $1 on most of your remaining roster slots (again, kickers and defenses being exceptions in most cases). This will allow you to make sure you snag some of your deep sleepers. In fact, if your league rules allow it, you can start the bidding on those players at $2 or $3 to reduce the chances of someone else snagging them from you. If you can't afford to spend more than $1, you're going to be left with whomever your competitors don't want, and chances are that won't be someone you desire. The larger the league, the more important this strategy is, as $1 players in small leagues are still going to be pretty good.

If you follow these tips, you are likely to have a successful auction, and you may very well never want to go back to a straight draft.

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