Salary Cap Leagues Spending Strategy & Advice (2022 Fantasy Football)

So, you want to draft Jonathan Taylor but don’t have the number one overall pick. Maybe Justin Jefferson is your target, but you drew a late-round pick. The solution? A salary cap draft. You can draft Taylor and Jefferson, but you better have your budget sorted out in the process.

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Salary Cap Leagues Spending Strategy & Advice

If you haven’t yet, check out my article on approaching nominations in an salary cap draft. As I mentioned in that article, salary cap drafts are fun and exciting but can be intimidating without a strategy, or two. Once you understand the nuances and strategies that go into nominating, it’s time to focus on spending and budgeting.

The first step in this process is to determine roughly how much you want to spend on each position. Keep in mind, your spending doesn’t have to mirror these values exactly but it’s important to have an idea of how much of your budget you ideally want to allocate to each position.

As you approach this task, it’s going to vary based on your league settings and roster format. If it’s a Superflex league, quarterbacks will obviously cost more than in a standard league. Assuming we are operating in a standard, one quarterback and one tight end league, running backs are going to eat up the most money. It’s a difficult position to predict and the position is much more shallow than wide receiver, so people will pay up for the big names.

You don’t necessarily need to decide right now if you are going to bid up on a premier running back but set your budget with the idea that you will either pay up for an elite running back or elite wide receiver. Being adaptable during the draft with a willingness to shift budget around is imperative, so you’re not married to this decision.

Using our salary cap draft calculator, as you should be doing, will help you build out this budget. As you can see by the projected values, the high-end running backs will eat up a third of your overall budget, or more. Beyond calculating how much you want to spend on each position, you should be determining how much you want to spend on each starter and the bench as a whole. Remember that many players at the end of the draft will go for $1, but it can still be an effective strategy to build for depth and collect many of the $10-$25 players.

For example, your budget should resemble something along these lines for each position group:

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As a starting point, I like to set about half of my budget aside for running backs, 25% for wide receivers and the remaining 25% for a quarterback and a tight end. This is a rough outline that I will adjust based on who I’m targeting and how I anticipate the draft going, but I’m open to decreasing the RB total in favor of other positions if need be. Most importantly, you should not only be willing to adjust these totals during the draft, but you should anticipate that you will be doing so.

If you’re like me, you like to have a set of player rankings to work from during a draft. Whether they are your rankings or someone else’s, it’s beneficial to have a list in front of you. Despite not drafting from an available player pool, it’s even more advantageous to have a set of rankings handy in a salary cap draft. In a snake draft, the players are all listed on your screen and are generally drafted around their ADP. You’re very aware of the best available players. In a salary cap draft, however, players can come and go from all over the draft board.

They will still be listed on screen in order of ADP or a set of rankings, but there are many benefits to having a list out as it relates to a spending strategy. As you map out your budget for each position, you can do so on your rankings sheet so you can track your spending and know where you stand during the draft.

That’s an important first step and something that most drafters will do. What many drafters aren’t doing, however, is tiering their player rankings and attaching values to each tier. Player rankings are great, but tiers are more useful in a salary cap draft. In a snake draft, you might have to pick between multiple players in a tier that are all roughly an equivalent value, so every single ranking will count. In a salary cap, you might notice that one player in a tier went for twice as much as the current bid on a player in the same tier, which likely means you can cash in on a nice value. Additionally, when the player pool begins to dry up, you’ll be a step ahead knowing how many players are available in specific tiers and whether you need to be aggressive to get one, or if you can wait it out.

After you have budgeted out how much you’d like to spend on each position group and your rankings are set in tiers, go through your tiers and assign them a range of values. Mark down what you think would be a good price for the players in this tier up to the maximum you’d be willing to spend on them. If I have Leonard Fournette, Aaron Jones and Nick Chubb in the same tier, I might input a range of $25-$38. If one is on the board around the $25 price point, I’m looking at that as a steal. If the bidding gets up to $38 or beyond, I will probably put my money back in my pocket and search for a sale elsewhere.

At some point, the money will start flowing so quickly that you may think you’re in a Lil Wayne music video. I assure you, you’re not, and the tiered pricing will be the most helpful reminder of where you stand financially when this time comes.

As I mentioned in the nominations article, if you’re targeting Michael Pittman, it will benefit you to know how much guys like Tee Higgins, DJ Moore or Keenan Allen are going for. As players go off the board, keep track of how much they are going for.

You’ll want to nominate guys in a tier around one of your targeted players early on. The benefit is twofold; for one, you will get a baseline for how much players are going for and valued in that tier. Secondly, you might be able to snag a player cheaper than expected. If the player you nominate is below the price range you have marked down, go ahead and scoop him up. You can still snag your targeted player later, but you’ve already cashed in one good value on a player who is similarly rated to the one you were targeting.

This process will also help reel in your spending as you go through the draft. If one of your targets is nominated and the bids keep going up and up, it’s easy to get carried away and overspend on this player. But a quick check of how the bids align to your range of values for this player’s tier, along with who is still available in the tier, will guide you to ensure you are not bidding irresponsibly — especially if there are still many other players available in this tier.

These steps will keep you ahead of the game, but it can still be challenging to know when the right time comes to spend big on a star player. The truth is that there’s no right or wrong answer to this. Adaptability is the name of the game, and you should ready whenever the opportunities present themselves. One draft might feature their version of Lil Wayne making it rain in the early rounds, while some might slow play it and weed out the lower valued players. Regardless of when it happens, there will be values to be had, and if you follow the process above, you’ll be primed to take advantage of them.

Chad Workman is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from him, check out his Twitter at @tweetsbychad