Football Draft Kit: Auction Draft Strategy

There's no "right" way to run a fantasy football league. But if there were, it would be an auction draft. Plenty of words have been written about why auctions are preferable to snake drafts, but the real truth comes down to one point: auctions eliminate victimization. Didn't get the player you wanted? Point the finger at yourself, bubba.

Snake drafts allow an owner to blame forces beyond his control, i.e, draft slot, for compiling a roster that's as productive as the 1922 Hammond Pros. In an auction, it's all on you.

That realization should be motivating – you have a power to improve your team's chances of winning your league that snake-draft owners do not. So, make the most of it. Take advantage of the opportunity, rather than being a passive participant.

There's no one way to navigate a football auction, but the following ideas might help you make better use of your budget and get more out of your roster.

Draft Prep

Proper preparation will help you build a competitive roster. Determine what players are worth to you, whether that's using RotoWire's auction dollar values as a guide or coming up with your own valuations. Either way, have a working knowledge of player values. Put simply, you have to know what you're bidding on.

At the same time, do not get hung up on the precise numbers. When the auction starts, your valuations might look out of touch with the way the market shapes up. That is OK. Those values are a baseline, a frame of reference.

In addition, study the tiers of players. Which players in each tier do you like? Which are you lukewarm on? Which do you despise? Owners often claim to be "looking for value," but how will you recognize value if you don't evaluate it beforehand? Knowing not just the player pool but how those players fit into your auction strategy is essential.

This isn't Baseball

In a football auction, each team in the league is allocated a fictional budget, usually $200, with which to buy players for their roster spots. Of course, there are any number of ways to spend that money. Your job is to get the most bang for your buck. But how do you do that?

Unlike baseball where building depth is often the goal, in football, landing elite players takes precedence. Top-shelf players make a bigger impact in football simply because there are fewer starting positions. Coming out of a football auction, you don't necessarily have to be as good up and down the roster as you have to be great at the top.

Instead of spreading the wealth and looking for the best of the middle-tier players – even though they might both fit your budget and ensure no glaring holes or even weak links on your roster – invest heavily in the top talent, content to take cheap flyers on the rest of your roster in a stars-and-scrubs approach.

So, what's that mean in dollars? In the 16-team RotoWire Steak League auction, it is common for owners to use upward of 65-75 percent of their $200 budget on two running backs and two wide receivers, or one running back and three wide receivers (it's a 3-WR league). That leaves about $50-60 to buy the remaining starting positions and bench. (In the Steak League, assuming you went 2 RB, 2 WR at the top, that leaves QB, WR, TE, K, DL, LB, DB and six bench spots.)

In this approach, it is profitable to eschew high-priced quarterbacks. It's the same concept as waiting on quarterbacks in a snake draft – there's not as big a difference in fantasy points between the top and middle of quarterbacks as there is with wide receivers and running backs.

Same is true of tight ends. If you pass on Rob Gronkowski, go ultra-cheap and invest in upside. Delanie Walker, for example, went for $1 in the Steak League last year, as did Tyler Eifert. Even though tight ends like Greg Olsen and Travis Kelce were good to sufficient, they were not great values based on their auction prices. And if your cheap tight-end play busts, like many will, there likely will be a tight end or two who emerges during the year who was not even drafted (i.e., Gary Barnidge, Zach Miller, etc.).

Finding Value

There's no dipping your toe in an auction. As soon as the first nomination is up – boom! – it's on. As such, some owners will use the first few nominations to get comfortable, to take the temperature of the market, to wait to find value while the stars are bid up early and money flies off the table. It's not a bad idea on the surface – before you can confidently bid you need to know what the market is bearing. No one wants to overpay.

However, the result, almost invariably, is that value comes in those first handful of rounds of the auction. In last year's Steak League, Antonio Brown went for $46 early and Odell Beckham Jr. as bought for $45. Later, Mike Evans went for $37, Randall Cob went for $33 and Martavis Bryant went for $30. Which was better value?

So how should you navigate the auction, especially the early going? Supply meet demand.

At the beginning of the auction, with a limited number of owners bidding, there are fewer dollars chasing a larger pool of players. Later in the auction, the owners who sat on the sidelines early are still flush with cash while the pool of difference-making players is now smaller – too many dollars are now chasing too few players, creating inflation. Owners who went heavy early, in spite of an undefined market, got better deals.

The irony is, the owner who waited for the market to be clearly established still outbid the market because of scarcity. So what good did waiting do?

It's similar in the later stages of an auction, where you do not want to have too much money to play with. If you play it too cautiously early and back off going the extra buck or two because of a perceived lack of value, you could end up with too much money money late, which means you'll end up paying more than you wanted, only now it will be for a worse player. That's how one Steak League owner (ahem) ended up making Tre Mason a $10 player (goodness me).

Last season, if you recall, rookie sensation Todd Gurley was coming off a knee injury and was uncertain to be ready for the season. There was some disagreement not just about when he would return, but how effective he would be when he returned. Thus, there was more interest than usual in Mason. The Gurley owner in the Steak League understandably wanted Mason. I, on the other hand, figured I would throw a dart on a running back who could get considerable playing time if Gurley had a setback and did not return for weeks. Darts are not $10, though. Getting to the end game with too much cash allowed me to overpay for something I did not really care about anyway in the grand scheme of things.

Finding value also entails hitting $1-2 late-round darts. That's, of course, easier said than done, but you have to at least know where to aim when you're standing in front of the dartboard. Some of the most important per-auction work is identifying players who could take a step up in class. A cheap Jordy Nelson in 2011 won a lot of leagues.

However, all of the owners in your league are doing the same thing. In most auctions, slipping a cheap breakout type through does not come easy. That is why you should have a number of breakout types lined up, not merely backup running backs who would be thrust into a bigger role with an injury to the starter. Everyone knows those guys. Go deeper. Maybe you get outbid for your first three or four, but then maybe your $2 holds on a player who, if things break his way, gets more opportunities.

In that vein, keep in mind these ideas:

• Don't stress about "overpaying," as long as it's on an elite player. If it's not a keeper league, the dollar value doesn't matter once the season starts anyway. If you're going to pay up, make it on an upside play rather than roster filler.

• Know exactly when the tiers of talent within a position begin and end, and, more important, jump in when the tiers start running low. Every owner is looking at similar information. If there are four running backs left in tier 2 and six owners need to fill an RB spot, jump in quickly before you find yourself in a showdown with one or two owners for the last quality player at that tier. It's like musical chairs – recognize when the song is about to end and target your chair while others are are whistling away their time.

Bid with Purpose

Those who randomly throw out players for bid with little thought behind it are missing the opportunity to learn about and exploit both the market and the competition.

There are any number of valid reasons to nominate a player. Maybe a it's a player you want or maybe it's a player you don't want and you just want to get other owners to spend their money. Or perhaps you're testing the market, or are trying to reduce the demand for another player at that same position as your nominee. Whatever the case, nominations play an important role in helping an owner navigate the auction.

Not only is an owner obviously required to track the finances and rosters of all teams – and with tools like RotoWire's Draft Software and/or the auction draft rooms offered by most commissioner services these days it is simple – so too should he evaluate the competition throughout the auction, just as he evaluates the player pool throughout. What needs do other teams have? What kind of strategy do they seem to be employing? How many teams might be interested in the players you are targeting? Asking these questions can help you get an inkling of what your competition is thinking. You're trying to predict their actions so you can exploit them to your benefit.

Finally, also seek to exploit your competition's biases when possible. Is there an owner who loves to own players from his favorite team? Throw those players out early to get money off the table, and bid them up. Or maybe it's an owner who always buys the players he nominates. Bid those up, too.

The Final Analysis

Auctions, as opposed to their snake-draft cousin, are not an easy draft-day stroll. They demand preparation, strategy and vision in ways that snake drafts cannot match. But those elements and the power that comes in roster construction make auctions more fun than snake drafts. It's the game within the game of fantasy football, if you will. And, perhaps, most important, the flip side to eliminating victimization is that auctions also eliminate excuses for winning. Unlike snake drafts, no auction owner has ever been gifted the best player in the draft. You had to win him. And if you win an auction league, you definitely earned it. No one can say you lucked into it.

This article appears in the 2016 RotoWire Fantasy Football magazine. Order the magazine.