If you’ve ever participated in an auction draft, you know that there is no turning back to boring snake drafts. You can craft your team exactly the way you want and the strategy component on is ten-fold a typical league. Unfortunately, most people have yet to experience it so the vast majority of fantasy football content centers around snake drafts. In fact, every analyst I’ve talked to prefers auction leagues, so if your commission needs some convincing, point him to this article. With all that said, I’ll give you my auction values at the bottom of the page (and in a spreadsheet for you to use as a cheat sheet), but first, I’ll tell you what my perfect auction draft would look like. To do this, I gave myself the standard $200 to spend and selected my team from Yahoo’s average auction values and rounded every player up.
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Roster
Pos | Cost | Player | ECR | ADP | ADP Rd |
QB | $11 | Aaron Rodgers | QB3 | #52 | Early 5th |
RB | $37 | Todd Gurley | RB11 | #11 | Late 1st |
RB | $23 | Leonard Fournette | RB17 | #24 | Late 2nd |
WR | $35 | Mike Evans | WR8 | #21 | Late 2nd |
WR | $23 | Stefon Diggs | WR14 | #38 | Early 4th |
WR | $13 | Brandin Cooks | WR15 | #39 | Early 4th |
TE | $6 | Hunter Henry | TE6 | #70 | Late 6th |
FLX | $16 | Chris Godwin | WR19 | #50 | Early 5th |
DST | $1 | Justin Jackson | RB53 | #170 | 15th Rd |
K | $1 | Tony Pollard | RB76 | #182 | 15th Rd |
B | $11 | Sony Michel | RB23 | #53 | Early 5th |
B | $7 | Chris Carson | RB21 | #41 | Mid 4th |
B | $6 | Calvin Ridley | WR22 | #55 | Mid 5th |
B | $4 | James White | RB29 | #68 | Late 6th |
B | $3 | Corey Davis | WR36 | #92 | 8th Rd |
B | $3 | Latavius Murray | RB30 | #89 | 8th Rd |
Summary
You can scoff at the risky players on this team, but when you can back it up with incredible safe, depth, the risk is well worth it. If three of Todd Gurley, Leonard Fournette, Sony Michel and Chris Carson are both healthy, this team is the top championship contender. If not, James White and Latavius Murray are strong RB2s to hold down the running back fort while Rodgers and a rock-solid wide receiver corps do their thing. You are probably wondering how I amassed all this value as I grabbed the equivalent of the following draft picks:
- Late 1st
- Late 2nd
- Late 2nd
- Early 4th
- Early 4th
- Mid 4th
- Early 5th
- Early 5th
- Early 5th
- Mid 5th
- Late 6th
- Late 6th
- Early 8th
- Mid 8th
That shouldn’t be possible, and in a snake draft, it most definitely is not, but there are great values to be found in auction leagues. The top 12 players all have massively inflated average auction salaries.
In fact, this opens up about $120 in additional value just on these dozen players alone. People want their stars and they will be an outrageous cost to get them. Now, there are rare cases where you’ll be able to nab one at a reasonable price, so don’t tune out when they are brought up for bid, but be careful to not getting in an unnecessary bidding war, knowing ridiculous value awaits you for the second and third-tier of players. Once that point in the draft is complete, people are assessing the damage and start bidding extremely conservative amounts. This allows me to nab fringe-WR1s like Brandin Cooks for a dozen bucks and sure-fire #1 (if he is healthy) for double that. Folks, if Leonard Fournette plays 16 games, he’ll produce as a top 5 back. You can get him for 40% the cost of Christian McCaffrey.
Let’s keep in mind that fantasy football is a game of depth. There are always injuries and busts galore and by midseason, half your roster is turned over. If you have Calvin Ridley, a target-hog like Corey Davis and potential RB1s in Chris Carson and Sony Michel to fall back on, you are going to do well. Take the value as it comes to you. Additionally, you’ll notice that I didn’t draft a kicker or D/ST. You can read the full reason here and here.
Auction Values
You can see and copy/paste my full auction values cheat sheet here. For the sake of organization within the article, however, I’ll just post screenshots here.
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