393: Auction Draft Strategy

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode three hundred and ninety three of the Late Round podcast when many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I've been doing fantasy football auction drafts for years. A lot of you probably don't know this, but way way back in the day before I was with Number Fire and FanDuel, I used to do a lot of auction draft work for Rotal World. So I've developed some ideas and concepts over the last handful of years around this topic, and hopefully those concepts can help you out. Like last week's show, my plan today is to put myself in your shoes if I'm entering an auction draft. What are the things that I would do before the draft started to prepare and what would I be looking for while I was drafting. Those are the simple questions that I'm looking to help answer today before getting the thing. Though baseball is back this week. The MLB season is set to begin on July twenty third, and FANDL is celebrating with a special one million dollar contest. Enter the one million dollar MLB Opening Day Special and compete for your share for the one million dollar prize pool, including a chance to bring home the one hundred thousand dollars first place prize. Someone is going to end up the night one hundred thousand dollars richer. Don't miss out in the chance for that's someone to be you. For more details, vi was at fandel dot com or download the Fandel app today. Eligibility restrictions apply. Everyone who plays fantasy football is familiar with snake drafts. You get one pick per round and you're forced to pick. That means if you're up to draft and there is a big drop in tier before your pick, you get what's perceived as a devalued selection. Let's say that you have Saquon Barkley and Ezekiel Elliott in their own tier at the top of drafts this year, right behind Christian McCaffrey, but you have the fourth overall pick. If the first pick goes to Christian McCaffrey, and then Barkley and Zeke go to two and three, then your fourth spot in the draft is an unfortunate one you're forced to pick despite the fact that the pick one spot before you saw a player in a completely different tier. Snake drafts are linear. You go from one pick to the next, to the next to the next, and the same gap exists between each pick. In an auction draft, that's not the case. Christian McCaffrey can be a whole lot more expensive than any other player rather than just being one pick better than Saquon Barkley. Since you're not forced to pick in auction drafts, this makes tiering players even more important. It's important to tier players in snake drafts that you know when you can wait on a certain player or position, But being forced to make selections means you can't be totally flexible with how a draft plays out. You technically don't need to understand the player pool as a whole as well as you do in an auction draft. You can just pick because you're being forced to so entering an auction draft, the question you should ask is how can I understand this player pull better? And that's where tiering your rankings comes into play. Some of you may not know how to exactly tier rankings. You can do it in a lot of different ways, but the most straightforward way of doing it is to get your rankings or some form of rankings, you don't have to have them done yourself, and then create tiers where there's a clear drop off in production. Because here's the thing. We've got projections, and we've got what we think is going to happen with a player in a given season. But projections aren't everything at all. Really, they're just a median outcome. There's a lot of variants in fantasy football, and by working with only projections, you're not always capturing that variance. That's why I always say that the projection building process, it's there so that you can understand range of outcomes more than actually getting that projected number. But you can create tiers that are semi subjective. That's not a big deal. You don't need projections. And this is coming from a fantasy analyst who looks at the game analytically. I'm very open to the subjectivity involved in this game, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It allows you to put your game theory hat on and then dominate. So go through rankings and make tiers. You can have as many tiers as you want. But the idea of a tier is that every player in that tier is more or less interchangeable in rank For instance, you might have aj Brown ahead of Terry McLaurin in your rankings, but if their median outcome isn't far off from one another, if you see those two as fairly similar and you know that variance exists, then you could realistically place both of those players in the same tier. So you've got your tiered rankings list. But there's an obvious key component missing, and that's pricing. Pricing players can be really hard or it can be really easy, depending on what you want to do. Since I'm under the assumption that most of you aren't working off of projections to make auction values, we'll walk through the pretty easy way of doing things and thinking about things. For the vast majority of you. Your auction drafts are going to happen on a big platform like ESPN or Yahoo. Those sites already have existing auction prices for every single player. You can use Google to find them, or you can actually enter a draft room and get those values. Now, keep in mind, the dollar value per player is going to be dependent on the amount of money your league has to spend. If your twelve team league gives each manager two hundred dollars in auction budget, that means twenty four hundred dollars is being spent in that auction in totality. If you're in a fourteen team league, then that's twenty eight hundred dollars. That means the larger the league, the pricier the players, which makes sense because if you're in a big league, your team is going to be worse on paper. So if you have to spend more to get a player, your team is going to look worse. And then keep in mind, those numbers shift even more when keepers are involved. Like I talked about on last week's show, do your best to get auction ADP data from those sites, though you might have to actually enter a draft to get some of that data, but it's important to have a baseline, especially since in more casual leagues, people are bound to spend close to what's listed on that site. It's not a bad idea to then take your tiered list and have a column where you've got a projected auction value. Because you're not working with projections, it's not necessary to have super specific auction values for each of your players. By looking at the projected auction values the average cost from those sites, you can start to find values, and it'll allow you to know when you may be getting a value when someone is nominated. So instead of getting auction values for players based on your own rankings and tiers, you've got auction values for what you expect those guys to go for. That's what you'll be working off of during your draft. And again, I'm walking through a less scientific way of doing things because I think that that's going to help a lot of you listen to this show. Now the draft starts, and in an auction draft you've got to be a lot more flexible than in a snake draft. But I have ways to help you with this, and I think this is the most important part of this episode. The first thing to remember is that snake drafts and auction drafts really aren't totally totally different. Yes, snake drafts are linear and auction drafts aren't. But the same snake draft focused principles that I've talked about on this show apply to auction drafts as well. For instance, we know a late round quarterback strategy is a valid strategy, it works. That applies to auction drafts too, But it's just cheap quarterback instead of late round quarterback. Now that's an easy idea to grasp. But how about this one. I've talked a lot about how standard RB twos and fantasy drafts the guy's being drafted in round four. Let's say they're typically pretty bad bets. If you chart points scored versus average draft position, there's a pretty steep drop off in the trend line after the first couple of rounds of drafts at the running back position. And that really showed up when I did the study on finding league winning players. If you know that the opportunity cost changes dramatically after the first couple of rounds of drafts, and you know that from a value perspective, a seventh round running back is a better player to bet on than a fourth round one, then spend that way in your auction draft. Use your auction dollars in that fashion. It's similar to tight ends. The correlation between tight end one to tight end twelve. Over the last decade in terms of ADP versus points scored, it's been nonexistent, and it has everything to do with the fact that the middle round tight ends suck. They historically are terrible, So if they suck, you're not even remotely forced to choose those players in an auction draft or those types of players. Meanwhile, since a lot of sites and projections are going to translate that ADP or that projection into some cost, those players are still going to go for more money, generally speaking, than late round tight ends, so you can extract some value with late round tight ends. All I'm saying here, like I said, is that the exact same principles still apply to auction drafts. You're fading certain players and snake drafts for a reason. It's not like their price is drastically changing an auction draft on average. Now, speaking of fading certain players, auction drafts play into one of my main fantasy football philosophies really well, and that philosophy is that instead of targeting particular players to draft, you should be targeting players that you generally want to fade. There are going to be a lot of players who are relevant in fantasy football every single year, and you're going to be wrong about players every year too. To help with that, you can embrace variants. And what embracing variants means is that Instead of saying I absolutely need to get AJ Brown, you say I'd love to get AJ Brown, but there are four other players in his tier for a reason. If someone is bidding up AJ Brown too much, I can hold back because I know that there are other players in that tier. There are other alternatives, and I know that my projection of AJ Brown isn't automatically right. This is no different than how I approach trades, by the way, instead of saying I need to target this player on this other team, I'm saying I need to give this other team what this team needs, and I'll likely find some player on that team that I would willingly take on. Because a lot of players are going to be relevant in fantasy football and you're going to be wrong, So embrace that. It's fine to have a general fade list or players that you don't want to draft. All players are valuable at some cost, but generally speaking, we know what the value of each player is. But this is all part of being flexible. Now. Another thing to keep in mind mid draft is being reactive to price changes based on what the ADP versus points scored curve tells us. It's not a bad idea to go with some sort of stars and scrubs approach in your auction drafts. I'm not saying spend ninety percent of your budget on two players. I'm just saying that there's really not that much differentiation historically between middle round players and late round ones, especially when you consider cost. That's just a general trend. What this means is you probably should be spending more on high end players than what the average cost is telling you. If you look at Yahoo or ESPN prices for your auction draft, you're going to find a pretty gradual fallen cost from one player to the next. I have I have no idea how those sites are getting their values for the record, but I would imagine it's like this because there's some conversion being done from projection to dollar value. But like I said before, there's more to drafting than a projection. Essentially, if you know that you're mostly going to not heavily target middle round players, the running backs who go in round four and round five because you're not forced to. If you know there's going to be some cost savings there, then you can spend a little bit more than the projected value on high end players because price projections are taking those middle round player costs into account in order to create this auction draft economy. But in reality, those types of picks, those middle round picks, they don't hit at a substantially higher rate than later round ones. So if you see one of those higher end players at the beginning of your draft being bid up to their average price but not higher, that's likely going to be a good player for you to get. That's a good start to your stars and scrub strategy. If they do go for a lot more cash than you're expecting, then you have to react. Maybe instead of targeting a true stud a CMC or a Saquon Barkley, you're then able to get an additional second rounder like Kenyan Drake or some other running back that you like. There, it's all about being reactive and understanding your tiers and understanding that even though it's an auction draft, it's not that much different than a snake draft. You're still fading the same type of players, and you'll be able to extract even more value in an auction draft too, because you're not being forced to make a selection in those dead rounds. Now, the last thing that I want to bring up is something that I dubbed the U theory years ago on rotal World. It's an anecdotal theory, but I think it's a logical one. It's something that I noticed happens all the time. In auction drafts. You're often going to be faced with obvious tiers. We know there are only a handful of running backs who have produced at a very elite level in the past and that are bankable for twenty twenty production. And oftentimes there's gonna be a consensus drop off in tier at some place in your draft, like after certain players fall off the board, you start to see a lot more ambiguity at running back. Keep the U theory in mind during those instances. What the U theory is is, picture the letter U at the left top part of the U. You've got some sort of price for a player. It's generally pretty high, and then as you move through that tier, players generally won't go past that price point unless some teams happen to really really want that player. But players won't drastically go for more than that original player price in that tier. They'll usually go for less. Now as you move through that you as the tier ends, people start to panic. They'll say Kenyan Drake is the last reasonable player to target here before a huge drop off, which may or may not be the case for you. But when there's a consensus tier drop, more than one team manager is thinking this, and that drives up the cost for that player. So what I'm saying here is get players before it's too late. And by too late, I don't mean before the tier is completely drafted. I mean before the last couple of players in that tier, because their prices are bound to be higher than you expect. Again, that's mostly just anecdotal, but test it yourself. It happens all the time. Now, I know that I've thrown a whole bunch of stuff at you on this show, so I think a recap is a good idea. Here. I've got nine things that I just talked through. Number one, tier your rankings. Number two, use the pricing on fantasy sites to set your initial pricing. Since you're likely not going to be working off of projections. Number three, adjust those prices based on your league size and auction budget. Number four, don't overstate the difference between auction drafts and snake drafts, and that leads into number five. That middle round players are still bad bets for the most part, and they're still priced that way in an auction draft. Number six, have an open mind with the players that you're drafting. Your consideration set should be large and not small. Fade players don't target players Number seven because of the ADP versus points scored curve and what that tells us about opportunity cost. It's usually best to go as some form of stars and scrub strategy where you're getting a few top two round players and then filling the rest of your lineup. Do keep in mind, though, and I probably should have said this earlier, but this year may be a little bit different with stars and scrubs given the pandemic. We'll have to adjust accordingly. And number eight keep the U theory in mind. People panic at the end of tears, driving the cost up for those players. And there is a number nine that I haven't talked about. Spend one dollar on your bench spots. You may be able to spend a little bit more depending on your cost savings during the draft, but think of each bench spot going into your draft as a one dollar player. Again, like last week's show, this one didn't necessarily provide the most precise process on the planet, but I'd argue that it's better to be that way in an auction draft. Auction drafts are just as much game theory and logic driven as they are about being precise with projections and player evaluation. You don't need a fancy algorithm to walk away with an awesome draft, I promise you, and you can use the same principles that you've learned about snake drafts to dominate your auction one. That's gonna do it. For today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got to subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week with the Mailbag episode.