While snake drafts are the most popular fantasy football drafting style, there’s another type of league and method for roster-building: Salary cap/auction drafts. These drafts offer players a completely new way to build their teams, and below I’ll provide an in-depth guide covering what these drafts are, fundamentals, popular strategies, budgeting, nomination strategies and more. Let’s dive in.
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Fantasy Football Salary Cap Draft Strategy
What is a Salary Cap Draft?
A salary cap/auction “draft” really isn’t so much a draft, funny enough. Instead, there will be an order of league mates, similar to a snake draft, but instead of drafting a player, the league mate will nominate a player for teams to wager on. Most auctions come with a $200 budget, and it’s your job to build a team using that $200 budget.
When a league mate nominates a player, the league will have a certain amount of time to bid on the player. From there, the rest of the league is similar to a snake draft in that there’s a waiver wire, and you can still make additions and subtractions later. Overall, the main idea is that your league mates nominate a player, and you either bid or pass on a player.
Salary Cap Draft Strategy Fundamentals
Build Out Player Tiers
It’s important in auction/salary cap leagues to build out tiers of players rather than be set in stone on an individual player’s value. This will allow you to gauge value more accurately. For example, if you had a tier of running backs with Jonathan Taylor and Omarion Hampton, but you can get Hampton cheaper, you’ll then need to determine whether the difference moves you more toward targeting someone like Hampton or if the cost justifies taking Taylor.
Fortunately, here at FantasyPros, our rankings are tiered, so you can see where players fall. This is something you’ll need to gauge during the draft and adapt as needed.
Be Flexible
As mentioned above, it can be difficult to go into a draft with a strategy and stick to it all the way through. So many things can happen, whether that’s a star player going for well under/over perceived value, or a lot of drafters having spent money, but only a couple of tight ends have come off the board.
Just like in a snake draft, be willing to modify your initial approach, as once you’re in the draft, things can change quickly.
In fantasy football drafts, psychology can become a massive part of it. There may be some leagues where you don’t see a star player nominated until much later on, whereas others might send out the top nine players in the first 10 nominations.
Salary Cap Draft Strategies
Stars & Scrubs
The idea behind “Stars & Scrubs” is to build your team primarily around a few star players. For example, you may be able to walk away with Ja’Marr Chase, Jahmyr Gibbs and someone like Christian McCaffrey, but this will leave you with a significantly lower budget for the remaining picks.
This is where identifying value and making the most of players in the $1-$3 range could pay off. Of course, you could have a higher weekly ceiling for points, but if one of those players gets hurt, you’ll want to ensure you have a quality bench player or play the waiver wire quite well.
This is my personal favorite strategy, as it offers the most upside overall, though I know there is risk, too.
Balanced Build
Another strategy could be to build a more balanced roster by allocating a set percentage of your budget to each position. For example, you could budget $70 for running backs, $75 for wide receivers and $25 for your bench.
This avoids massive spikes in spending and spreads it across your lineup, but it could carry a bit more risk, especially if some mid-round values don’t pan out. As a result, your weekly ceiling could be much lower, and while your team might be OK, it may not have upside for massive weeks.
That said, it all depends on which players you end up with. If you spent $70 on running back but somehow came away with James Cook and De’Von Achane (which is a bit under our current dollar value calculator), that could be just fine. Again, this goes back to being willing to be flexible.
Position Budgeting
Going back to the balanced build, you could set a tight budget on certain positions in your starting lineup as a loose guide, but, once again, this won’t always work out exactly how you plan. Sure, it could, and if it does, and you walk away with a team you feel great about, then that strategy worked for that particular draft.
However, if you were to budget $15 for a quarterback, for example, you can walk away with a quality player like Bo Nix for much less than that. That might be the right move and use that “leftover” $12 on a more impactful player, such as moving from Derrick Henry to Jahmyr Gibbs.
It’s never a bad idea to plan this out ahead of time, but be ready to pivot.
Player Nomination Strategy
Players You Don’t Want
A popular nomination strategy is to offer up only players you don’t want, and then let your league mates spend on them and reduce their budgets. This can be effective throughout the draft, especially if you notice a trend where players you’re nominating are getting a lot of action.
In that case, it could be a win-win scenario as you’re seeing players you don’t want land on other teams, as league mates are spending their salary.
Expensive Stars
This can somewhat tie into players you don’t want, but say you have the first nomination, and you nominate Ja’Marr Chase. Yes, he’s an elite player, but some league mates may be skeptical about spending a lot of their budget right away. That could result in a value for another league member if Chase went for something like $45 right off the bat instead of $51 or so a bit later.
It makes sense to nominate expensive stars as they should take up the most budget, but most drafters usually like to wait a little bit before dropping a ton of money. That said, if you know there are a few league mates who have no problem getting aggressive, use that to your advantage.
Information Collection
If you’re not really sure what direction your league mates are going to go, use your first few nominations to see how they value certain players.
For example, if you nominate a couple of tight ends in a row and your league mates have spent above the value you expected, now you know that you might need to spend up a bit on certain tight ends to secure them, especially with fewer available in the pool now.
From here, you can assess what’s left and decide whether to pursue one with a higher value or maybe be content with taking someone like Brenton Strange for a couple of dollars.
Think About Sleepers
Late-round nominations are extremely important to think about. I’d recommend keeping a list of sleepers on the side in that $1-or-so range. As the draft winds down and there’s not a lot of budget left across the league, this could let you nominate those players and potentially pick them up for cheap.
The idea here is to think about players you can get extremely cheap, but who other players won’t be interested in.
An example of this could be someone like Malik Davis or Jaydon Blue. One of them could be the direct backup to Javonte Williams, and if you can manage to get either for $1, that could be a quality bench stash, but you’d want to make sure no one else bids $2 and lose out on them.
This can be a tricky balance, but it is also a good time to use the list you have, see who your league mates nominate and take advantage.
Salary Draft Mistakes
- Leaving Money Unused: When you leave the draft, you’ll utilize the waiver wire for the remainder of the season, so there’s no sense in leaving any money on the table.
- Being Too Rigid: The name of the game is flexibility. If you’re too rigid in your player valuations, you could potentially lose out on a key player.
- Not Tracking Opponents’ Budgets: Keeping track of your opponents’ budgets will directly influence your nomination decisions.
- Bidding Wars: Definitely go after the players you want, but still keep value in mind. If you end up in a bidding war and a player starts going for significantly more than you know he should, be willing to pass and allocate those resources to another star player. That manager now has fewer resources to work with.
Final Thoughts
With auction/salary cap drafts, there’s no “one size fits all” approach. The name of the game is flexibility. You could have two auction drafts, and the vibe and player mentality could be totally different. One league could have 10 hyper-aggressive managers, while the other league has a bunch of budget-conscious league mates.
Go into the draft with a plan, but be ready to be flexible.
That said, the one constant I’d recommend is preparing a list of sleepers to target, along with tiers of players to help gauge value more easily and provide you with an outline of players to target.
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