Preparing for your Fantasy Football Auction Draft

Man, there is nothing like Auction Day. Finally, after an entire off-season of trying to get over losing your championship match because your kicker missed two field goals, you’re back. At breakfast that morning, we’re turning off Paw Patrol and Thomas the Train Engine in favor of the NFL Network. On your morning drive, we’re losing the Hootie and the Blowfish in favor of ESPN Radio (wait, am I the only one who still listens to Hootie and the Blowfish?). By the end of the day, you’re going to have bought the greatest fantasy football team the world has ever seen.

And then, once you get to the auction, nothing goes right. Suddenly, running backs are all going for $5 to $6 over your values. That awesome Dez Bryant buy you had right out of the gate? Julio Jones just went for $3 less. You look up and you’ve still got three roster spots to fill, but you can’t imagine ever starting any of the remaining players. It’s a nightmare.

We’ve all been there. Auctions are an incredible amount of fun, but they’re always five seconds away from being total disasters. Those five seconds drop to about one second unless you’re a) super-prepared and b) understand what you want to do in the auction. So, let’s work through both steps so that on the morning after the auction, you can really enjoy that Chuggington episode with your kids, instead of wondering how you spent $11 on a 30-year-old handcuff running back coming off microfracture surgery.

Nail your draft with our auction mock draft simulator

To say that you need to adequately prepare for your auction may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many owners print out a cheat sheet the day of the auction and just take their chances. “Come on, I know football. I’m a huge fan and I’ve been playing fantasy for years.” No. No. No. That MIGHT work for a draft, but an auction is a different animal. Putting in the legwork beforehand is essential, and it will also make your auction experience much more enjoyable.

The good news is that if you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking to do more than just totally wing it at the auction. Well done. So, let’s dive in on preparation, and then we’ll talk about some strategies for the auction itself.

1) Have player values you can trust

I can’t tell you how many years I randomly grabbed a fantasy football magazine and just adopted its auction values as mine. Not surprisingly, those auctions rarely turned out well. Leagues come in all shapes and sizes with various roster positions. One auction value does not fit all. Even if it did, how do you know you can trust how the magazine or website came up with its projections that are the basis of those values?

Every player has a specific value based on their projected stats and your league size/roster breakdown. If you’re randomly adopting values from a magazine or a site without understanding what went into creating those values, you’re already a step behind. So, am I saying you need to individually create projections for every single player, and then calculate your own auction values? No, thankfully not (but I used to do that before this whole technology craze, so if you want to spend a lot of time and burn a lot of goodwill with your spouse to do it all yourself, just let me know). But you need to make sure you can trust whatever values you’re going with.

Look, you’re reading a FantasyPros article, so you can accuse me of being biased. But, one of the cool things about doing this article is that I got to try out FantasyPros’ new auction calculator that we’re rolling out this year. It’s simple. You put in your league parameters (roster size, positions, starting budget, number of teams, etc.) and boom, you’ve got customized auction values for your league. Other sites have similar calculators, but here’s why I’m using the one from FantasyPros this year. It uses consensus projections from across tons of experts. In other words, I don’t need to worry if I agree with how one random site or expert came up with the projections underlying the site’s auction values. Why? Because I’m getting the average of pretty much ALL those experts. I don’t know about you, but I feel much more confident in taking the average projections of 40 industry experts than I do any individual one.

If you like a particular site or magazine, that’s totally fine. Just make sure you go through and check the projections before adopting values whole-heartedly. After all, this is your auction, and if you don’t believe that Brandon Marshall can repeat his stats from last year, then you shouldn’t pay a high price for him no matter what the site says.

Note: For a lot of this remaining section about preparation, FantasyPros and other sites can help you out. Rather than explain what we and the other sites can do each time, I’m just going to go with, “We can help with that.” That means that you can get that function in our Draft Wizard. Got it?

2) Create tiers

Much more so than fantasy baseball, position breakdown is incredibly important in fantasy football. Therefore, rather than sorting players in order of descending value, break them down into positions, and then sort by descending value within each position (We can help with that).

Once you have your values separated out by position, you need to create tiers at every position. Whatever floats your boat in terms of separating the tiers is fine. A lot of people use color coding (friendly tip – if you’re color blind like me, don’t put the red tier immediately on top of the green tier. That was a long and confusing auction for me), or just put a bold or squiggly line in between each tier (We can help with that).

Tiers serve several functions at the auction. First, and most importantly, they give you a bit of a roadmap to follow. If you’re in a furious bidding war over a player, but there are six players at the same position left in his tier, you can probably pull back a bit and feel comfortable you’ll land a similar player later. In contrast, if a player is the last guy in his tier, you might want to go that extra dollar. Second, when you’re at that point in the auction when you just desperately need other people to spend their money, you can probably feel comfortable that there will be a bidding war when there’s only one top tier player left at a position, and so can nominate that player.

3) Get mocked and loaded

See what I did there? There is no better pre-auction preparation than doing mock auctions. You can try out every strategy under the sun, and there are no consequences. If possible, try to find a mock auction where you can customize the mock to fit your league parameters (an auction with two RBs and no flex will go a lot differently than one with three RBS and two flexes).

Briefly, I’m jumping off my “(We can help with that)” party line to explain why I think FantasyPros’ mock auctions are the best way to go. First, they’re customizable, which, as I just said, is what you want. Second, unlike other sites, our mock auctions are done against artificial intelligence based on consensus values. So a) they’re quick, b) they’re accurate, and c) you don’t have the problem of guys signing up for mocks and thinking it’s funny to spend $45 on a kicker, or staying in for one round and then leaving. But, whatever site you use, do mock auctions. A lot of them. They help.

Now, if you’re not feeling mocks, at the very least, take some time to go through and map out a few different scenarios before the auction. Take your auction values and see how your teams look when you spend your money in different ways. I mean, you may be dead set on grabbing a top-3 QB, but so may six other guys in your league. While that may be the plan going in, you need to have a backup plan for how your team may look if you don’t actually nab a top QB. So, take your auction sheet and create a few different teams (making sure to stay within your league’s budget). Vary them – go RB heavy with one, get a stud QB in another, etc. That will give you at least some sense of calm if your Plan A goes off the rails, because you’ll know how to craft teams with different strengths.

Final thought: If you’re doing your auction on a website, make sure you either do at least one mock auction on that hosting website or at least enter the draft room a few days before the draft. Every draft software is different, and some take a little getting used to. You’ll feel a lot better if you’re entering the room knowing how to nominate and bid on a player.

4) Keeper Leagues

For those of you in keeper leagues, you’ll need to adjust your values for inflation. Just to explain that concept if this is your first year dealing with keepers, when players are kept at below their actual value, that means that owners simply have more money to spend at the auction than there is talent. If a player is worth $10, but an owner is keeping him for $3, that means there’s an extra $7 out there to be spent on the same amount of value. Therefore, many players, especially good players, are going to be bought at the auction for more than your unadjusted values say they should be. In other words, you may be dead-on that Le’Veon Bell is actually worth $60 in a redraft league. But, in a keeper league, he’s going for more.

So, what do you do? You need to find a way to account for this extra money. (We can help with that). There’s actually a pretty standard way to bake in inflation, and I think most people who have done keeper leagues have used the same formula. Before I jump in, I know what you’re thinking. Man, this article is fascinating. I can’t wait to read this next part. But, I’m about to disappoint you because this is super boring. If you’re not in a keeper league, or you plan to use some website or software to do it for you (again, We can help with that), please just skip to the next section, and stop judging me.

Here we go. Let’s assume a standard 12-team league with a $200 budget. Your league’s total budget is $2400 (12 x $200). Now let’s assume that everyone has kept three players at $6 apiece (Am I using this section to make you help me figure out the inflation in my own keeper league? Yes, yes I am). So, each team has spent $18 and kept three players, meaning a total of $216 has been spent on 36 players coming into the auction.

To calculate inflation, you need to take your value on each of those kept players – forget about their keeper price for a second; I’m talking about what you have those players valued at if this were not a keeper auction – and add it all up. Let’s assume that although each team kept three players at $6 apiece, all of those players actually had a value of $20 apiece. That means that the total value being kept is $720 (36 players x $20 each), but the total price being paid is only $216 (36 players x $6 each).

Now, take the total value of players who are will be purchased in your league ($2400) and subtract the amount of value protected ($720), which, in my example, leaves you with $1680 in available value.

Then take the total value of all players again ($2400) and subtract the actual price paid for those keepers ($216), which leaves you with $2184 in available money to purchase that value.

Now, divide money left by value left: 2184/1680 = 1.3. That’s your draft inflation multiplier. Every $1 of value is actually worth $1.30. So, Le’Veon Bell and his $60 value? Yeah, he’s now worth $78 ($60 x 1.3). That’s your value on him in your (my) keeper league. Yes, that number seems crazy. But a) you can’t take your fake money with you (I should know, I’ve tried), and b) you’re going to have to pay what seems like a silly price on most players, so shouldn’t you do it on someone who’s a stud?

Phew, we’ve made it. We are now officially prepared for our auction. Values – check. Tiers – check. Mocked until the cows came home – check. Tried using a pen and paper to calculate inflation and then found a site to do it for me – check. Now the real pain begins, Danny boy (Note: If you can tell me what movie that line is from without googling it, leave it in the comments section, and I will answer any fantasy football question you ask for the entire season on Twitter – no questions asked. Or, at least for the first person who answers it). Now we’ve got to actually nail a successful auction.

Also, check out my previous article discussing fantasy football auction draft strategy.

Dan Harris is a correspondent with FantasyPros. For more from Dan, check out his archive or follow him @danharris80.