Fantasy Football: Anatomy of an Auction Draft

Last week, I wrote a fantasy football auction primer, which basically gives a roadmap on how to prepare for and execute your auction. As I said there, succeeding at a fantasy football auction isn’t all that complicated, so long as you follow some pretty basic steps.

But over the many years it took me to become even a remotely competent auction player, I found that the most helpful thing of all was actually watching how someone prepared and then seeing how or what they were thinking as their auction played out. I think that’s probably why Mike Tagliere has a restraining order against me – sorry, Mike. I had to learn!

But, rather than have you follow around Tags prior to and during his fantasy football auctions this season, I thought it might make more sense to run through an auction I did last year using the exact principles I laid out in the auction primer. My hope is that this will allow you to see how those principles get put into practice, and it can hopefully be another tool to help you prepare for and dominate your auction.

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Before I get into the preparation, let me give you a little background about the format, so you’re not wondering why I went through the entire auction without drafting a tight end! The league is .5 point PPR, with the following roster positions:

2 QB
2 RB
4 WR/TE
1 RB/WR/TE
5 Bench

So, as you can see, there is no separate position for a tight end, and there is no position for a defense or kicker. I actually love this format, and plenty of tight ends get drafted anyway. Like many leagues, everyone begins the auction with a $200 budget.

One final thing – I share the team with one of my closest friends, Fitz. Just didn’t want you to wonder who that guy was when I write “Fitz started freaking out because we missed on every serviceable running back.” Fitz freaks out a lot!

Alright, are you ready? I’m ready. Let’s do this.

The Preparation

As mentioned in the auction primer, the three basic steps to preparing for a fantasy football auction are to create reliable auction values, divide your players into tiers, and build a spending plan. For the first part, I recommended using the FantasyPros Auction Calculator, which creates values based on your league format and settings using consensus projections. That’s exactly what Fitz and I did, which gave us the following values:

As you can see, the chart breaks down players by position, and includes their values and bye weeks. The values, while incredibly important, are much more of a guide than a rulebook. We’re going into our auction knowing that we’ll need to push past those values sometimes, and we’re ok with it.

You’ll notice some italicized players. Those are where Fitz and I denoted the end of our tiers. Again, tiers are all about personal preference – where some would have had Devonta Freeman in the top tier of running backs, Fitz and I were just a little less comfortable, and so kept him a tier below. You do you, guys.

Fitz and I export the values into an Excel spreadsheet, and we will have it open the entire auction, highlighting players in yellow when they are nominated. That allows us to always have an easy-to-decipher visual representation of the remaining players. Combined with tiers, that allows us to feel like we have a constant handle on the caliber of players that are remaining at each position.

That brings us to end of our preparation. So, let’s not overlook that fact. This league completely dominates my winter – when things are going well, I’m elated, and when they’re not, I’m depressed. And to prepare for this uber-important league, Fitz and I have spent just a few hours, using the FantasyPros Auction Calculator and creating our tiers. I just didn’t want you guys to think that I’m ever selling you short when I say that I believe that preparing for and succeeding at your auction takes careful consideration, but doesn’t need to dominate your time.

The Plan

Once we set our auction values and our tiers, our next step was to build a spending plan. This is our outline as to how we ideally see spending our money. Here is what Fitz and I came up with:

These are in a separate excel spreadsheet, with formulas underlying each of the bold numbers so that they will automatically update if we change any of the other numbers in the column. If our top running back winds up costing $45 instead of the $38 we have budgeted, we would write in the player’s name and change the 38 to 45, which would result in the total in our running back formula going up to 67, and our TOTAL number on the bottom jumping to 207. That means we’d have to find a way to cut $7 out of our budget somewhere else on the fly. By having excel formulas, you can easily move money around and always make sure you stay within your budget.

As you can see from our breakdown, Fitz and I intended to have a solid running back group, though we felt we might pass on the biggest names, who usually go for very high values and, according to our sheet, probably are not quite worth it. But getting one or two of the top-10 backs felt important to us, as we had been scarred by missing out on decent RBs the prior year and rolling with Jonathan Stewart and an injured Carlos Hyde all year. We left ourselves with little bench money, but felt that there would be solid players still going for the $1 – $3 range at the end of the auction, and a thinner bench would be worth it to beef up the starting lineup.

The Auction

The auction took roughly four hours, or at least I think it did – I may have blacked out from stress for a while there. The commissioner gives us three separate five-minute breaks at various intervals, which Fitz and I use to quickly panic, regroup, and then formulate a plan going forward. Given how our auction went, I think those breaks provide good dividing lines for giving a rundown and I have organized the discussion accordingly.

The Beginning

After several caffeinated drinks, blasting “You’re the Best Around” from the Karate Kid soundtrack, and giving each other a reassurance that we would not end up with Jonathan Stewart, we were ready to begin.

The first 15 nominations were as follows:

Eddie Lacy: $31
Cam Newton: $38
Aaron Rodgers: $38
DeAngelo Williams: $8
Julio Jones: $42
Adrian Peterson: $37
Ezekiel Elliot: $38
Antonio Brown: $48
Todd Gurley: $40
Dez Bryant: $29
Jonathan Stewart: $19
Devonta Freeman: $33
Odell Beckham: $42
DeAndre Hopkins: $36
Amari Cooper: $31

As you can see, the caliber of player and prices paid varied widely early on. I mean, DeAngelo Williams as the fourth nomination? But that’s what makes an auction great. You never know what’s going to happen.

Looking at that list, I felt pretty good about it at the time. Both running back and quarterback prices seemed reasonable based on past years, so I felt confident we would be able to execute our spending plan. But what caught my attention was the Amari Cooper buy. Cooper was a fine receiver, and if you’ve listened to the FantasyPros podcast, you know that Mike Tagliere and I are all-in on the breakout year. But we did not have him as a top-10 receiver or close to it, so why would he go for just $5 less than stud (or so we thought at the time) DeAndre Hopkins?

With the Cooper price, it just felt like there might not be a discount on second-tier wide receivers, so why wait around for them just to overpay? When A.J. Green was nominated next, Fitz and I struck, eventually taking him home for $35, which was our top price in light of Hopkins’ price of $36. As you can see, that’s well above our value of $28. But, as I noted, football values are a guide, not the rule. Play your auction. Fitz and I had budgeted for $30 as our top receiver, so we took $5 total off of the prices laid out for our next three receivers, and kept moving.

The nominations and bids below, with which Fitz and I were not involved, followed until we reached our first break:

Le’Veon Bell: $33
Jordy Nelson: $28
Marcus Mariota: $21
Lamar Miller: $37
Rob Gronkowski: $30
T.Y. Hilton: $23
Thomas Rawls: $20
David Johnson: $37
Russell Wilson: $35

After the high of the A.J. Green buy wore off, Fitz and I entered the first break a little nervous. For whatever reason, we hadn’t been able to pull the trigger on any of the elite running backs that had gone off the board, and had even seen some third- and fourth-tier running backs nominated already.

Although there were still a decent number of second-tier running backs left, Fitz and I prepared for the prices to be too high and to miss out. That felt like it would be disastrous, but if we were going to wildly overpay (according to our values) then we would only have done it for the top-tier guys anyway.

Looking closely at the list of recent nominations during the break, the Marcus Mariota price stuck out to us. As with Amari Cooper, if a third-tier player at a position was going to go for a decent price, why not just bite the bullet and get an elite option? We contemplated switching gears and spending big on quarterback if the opportunity presented itself.

Post-First Break

Doug Martin was the first nomination out of the break, and although Fitz and I were in on him, we just refused to pay the exorbitant price of $34. But when Drew Brees came out and the bidding slowed at $31, Fitz and I struck, taking home an elite quarterback for $32, a solid price and our exact value.

At this point, Fitz and I had reluctantly accepted that we’d probably have to roll with guys like Ryan Mathews and Melvin Gordon (little did we know how well that would have worked out!) as our running backs. If Martin cost $34, then surely the remaining similarly-tiered running backs would cost the same, and we just refused to pay that much. But at least we had locked up an elite quarterback and receiver. We lowered our budget for our second quarterback in light of paying more for Brees than we had budgeted for our number-one quarterback, keeping the total budget for our quarterbacks at $45, and carried on.

But shortly after we won Brees, out came LeSean McCoy. As I said, we expected the bidding to finish at or near Martin’s $34, but somehow, it didn’t. Instead, it died at our $27 – we had our solid running back.

We felt relieved that we had at least one decent running back, and, after all that, were pretty happy with our start. We were happier still when four picks later C.J. Anderson came out and we won him for $28. Suddenly, we had gone from preparing ourselves to have zero reliable running backs to having two extremely solid second-tier backs, at least in our opinion.

As the bidding for the next player was taking place, Fitz and I were reworking the spending plan. Since we had budgeted $60 for our two running backs but spent only $55, we could add those $5 back to our receivers, making up for the A.J. Green buy. But then we noticed the player who had been nominated, Latavius Murray, had stalled at $18. We really weren’t thinking about adding another decent running back at that point, but we did have a flex position and that price felt too low. We bid $19 and took him home.

In the span of about three minutes, we had gone from despair to elation, and suddenly had the best running back group in the league. Sure, we had spent more on our flex position than budgeted, but we were in great shape. We felt confident we were on the verge of a killer auction.

Post-Second Break

27 picks and an hour-and-a-half later, all our optimism had waned. Although we loved each of our big buys thus far, we just did not have the budget to get involved in heavy bidding going forward, and we watched countless wide receivers go off the board. The remaining guys who we considered solid were really getting slim, and we worried that in our haste to get running back depth, we had neglected our starting wide receiver spots and would come up empty.

Finally, Eric Decker, one of the last remaining second- or third-tier wide receivers, came out. Neither Fitz nor I loved him, but he was absolutely a solid option. We stayed in on the bidding until $21, and took him home. Money was going to be really tight from then on, but at least we felt we had spent it (relatively) wisely.

Immediately after Decker, Joe Flacco was nominated. He was pretty much exactly what Fitz and I had envisioned for our $13 quarterback after we had purchased Brees – someone who wouldn’t hurt you and could probably be relied upon for decent yardage and a touchdown or two per game. Our bid of $11 was ultimately the winner, we took the $2 in savings and pushed it elsewhere, and were happy to lock up our quarterbacks.

Post-Third Break

At this point, there wasn’t much we felt we could do. We had a mere $27 left and needed to fill two remaining WR/TE spots and all five bench spots. It was going to be tight, and we just sat around waiting for the right time to strike on an undervalued wide receiver or tight end.

About 15 picks after we purchased Decker, out came Torrey Smith, a player Fitz and I both liked as a sleeper. We bid a modest $2, and that was all it took. Although Smith wasn’t anything to write home about, we felt he could be a decent fourth wide receiver in a league like this. And with those savings, we thought we might have a little extra room to up our spending into the low-teens for our third wide receiver. We had $25 left, needing just a third wide receiver/tight end, and some bench depth. There was room to work.

12 picks later, DeSean Jackson, another guy Fitz and I felt we liked more than the industry, was nominated. Although there was some fast bidding early, it stalled out at our $7 bid, and just like that, we had our third wide receiver. Not only had we filled that spot, but Jackson had cost less than we had anticipated. With $18 left and only bench spots to fill, we thought we might be able to get another $7 – $10 wide receiver, pushing Smith to our bench, and still have enough to get some decent depth. And a few picks later, that’s exactly what happened, when we landed Tyler Lockett for $9.

At this point, we had our starting lineup filled out, as well as a bench wide receiver, and we felt very good about how it had worked out. But there was still a little work to be done.

The Bench

We were left with $9 to fill our four remaining bench spots. We were desperate to find a backup QB to fill our bye weeks, but there were almost no starters left. We also knew we wanted more running back depth, because Fitz and I were raised in a time where running backs ruled the world, and refuse to accept that the NFL and fantasy football has changed!

At this point, very few people had significant dollars left, so it was all about striking at the right time. Our top target remaining was LeGarrette Blount, a guy who we thought was perpetually undervalued, as he was pretty much guaranteed the goal-line work for the Patriots. We took down the bidding for just $3. We then nominated and got Mohamed Sanu, who we felt was a solid backup, for $1.

We finished off the auction with Case Keenum for $2 and Theo Riddick for $3. While we were happy to have Keenum, he had the same bye week as Brees and would probably be out of a job soon. But, beggars couldn’t be choosers. And we were extremely pleased to land Riddick with our final buy, a guy who we thought could easily fill a starting role in a .5 PPR format like this one.

The Wrap-Up

Our final roster was as follows:

QB: Drew Brees ($32)
QB: Joe Flacco ($11)
RB: LeSean McCoy ($27)
RB: C.J. Anderson ($28)
WR/TE: A.J. Green ($35)
WR/TE: Eric Decker ($21)
WR/TE: Tyler Lockett ($9)
WR/TE: DeSean Jackson ($7)
WR/RB/TE: Latavius Murray ($19)
B: LeGarrette Blount ($3)
B: Theo Riddick ($3)
B: Torrey Smith ($2)
B: Case Keenum ($2)
B: Mohamed Sanu ($1)

It was far from a perfect auction, but we were happy with how it turned out. There had been wild swings of emotion, with long bouts of inactivity matched with rapid-fire purchases. But through it all, at no point did Fitz or I feel out of control. Because we had our auction values. We created our tiers. And we built our spending plan. And truly, if you do that, you’ll always give yourself a shot.

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I hope this little exercise has helped to show you how to put the tips laid out in the auction primer into practice. And in case you’re wondering, despite some tough injury luck, Fitz and I managed to back into the playoffs and, thanks to making some sacrifices to the fantasy gods and hugging the wallaby, took home the championship.

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Dan Harris a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Dan, check out his archive or follow him on Twitter at @danharris80.