891: Simplifying Your Auction Draft Strategy

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacheris j Jake Zacher reson What's up everyone? It's JJ zachar Eson in this episode eight hundred and ninety one of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. The fantasy football content space is filled with snake draft content. It's filled with the standard twelve team. You pick a guy, then I pick a guy that our league mate picks a guy. That type of content, and that's because the vast majority of fantasy leagues use snake drafts. As a content creator, myself, I'm gonna want to make stuff that people want to listen to. I'll definitely dig into more niche topics, but I'm trying to help as many people as I can win it fantasy football. Snake drafts rule fantasy football still, but as we know, a lot of people playing auction drafts too. In those drafts, a team nominates a player to be bid on like an auction, and league managers bid that player up until no one wants to bid them up anymore, and the highest bid then gets that player. That means that if you don't want a top ten running back or a top ten wide receiver on your fantasy team. You don't have to. You don't need one of those players. If you want to get multiple top five wide receivers, you can do that if you really want to. There's a little bit more flexibility with auction drafts. That's something that a lot of people enjoy, myself included. Now. I've gotten questions about auction drafts for years. I get them every single summer, and the main one that I get these days is is there auction draft information in your draft guide as well? And the answer to that is no, there isn't, at least not directly. After talking to so many fantasy managers through the years, I think there's a big disconnect happening. People seem to think that auction drafts are just so totally different than snake drafts that I'd almost need to write an entirely different raft guide that's catered specifically to auction drafts for things to really be worthwhile for their draft. But auction drafts don't have to be as mathematical as you think. People always want auction prices in cheat sheet form, and I get it, truly, I get it, But even more so than what you see in snake drafts and in auction draft being reactive is your number one priority. Being able to respond to what the draft is doing. Your ability to be nimble. That's more important than what my auction prices might say. On today's episode, I'm going to simplify things for you. I'm going to show you why snake draft content can still be beneficial for your auction drafts. I'm going to hopefully give you a process that you can use in your auction drafts that's easy to understand and easy to implement. It's time to stop complicating things so much. Now. Before we get into the info, I want to send another reminder to check out Underdog Fantasy. There are best ball drafts going on constantly over there, and you'll often find me in those drafts because I've been drafting hundreds of teams this offseason. But there are tournaments in league types of all sizes. There's probably one out there for you, and I've got a special offer. If you're new to Underdog go sign up and use promo code Late Round. When you make a deposit, you'll not only get a deposit offer on that deposit, but you'll also get a late round draft guide send to your email for absolutely free. That's a twenty five dollars draft guide to your email inbox. So check it out underdog Fantasy dot com promo code Late Round. Make a deposit and you can get that draft guide. So my goal with this episode is to put myself in your shoes. I play in a lot of auction leagues myself. I actually used to write auction content for a while for roatal World and their magazines back in the day. I used to really really dig into this stuff, and I still do to some degree. So I'm not coming into this without any sort of background on the format. I want to be clear there. Okay, now that that's out of the way. If I'm you, how would I approach an auction draft? Well, the first thing that I would do is take a step back and really evaluate the landscape. Part of the reason me giving you dollar values for an auction draft, and why that's not always worthwhile, is because those dollar values can change pretty dramatically from one league to the next. Honestly, it's not a whole lot different than rankings. I write about this in the draft guide, but a problem with snake draft rankings and how they completely take over the fantasy football conversation in August and really any month, is that every league is different. People are so concerned about half PPR leagues and full PPR leagues and if these rankings are for half PPR or full PPR. But the real thing that you need to be concerned about is how many players at each position you're required to start in your lineup when it comes to overall rankings, that's going to really change things up. Like just think about a single quarterback league to a super flex league. In super flex leagues, the price for a quarterback rises dramatically because teams need them more, the demand increases. Fantasy managers don't think about that enough with running backs and wide receivers when they download a ranking sheet off the internet. How many wide receivers in running backs is your league starting versus how many wide receivers and running backs are these rankings. Assuming you're starting when you're required to start more wide receivers. Let's say then those wide receivers become more important. They'll go earlier in your snake draft, and they'll become more expensive in your auction draft. There's also the number of teams in your league that comes into play, and this is more glaring and more obvious in an auction league. But if you're in a fourteen team league versus a ten team one, that fourteen team league is gonna look worse on paper. Your team in that league is gonna look worse because there's a larger gap between picks. You're sharing the player pool among more teams, so each team is gonna look weaker on paper in in our draft, the more teams in your league, the more expensive each player is going to cost because there are more dollars in the league's economy. In a ten team league, where every team has a two hundred dollars auction budget, two thousand dollars is being spread around. In a sixteen team league with that kind of budget, thirty two hundred dollars are being spread around. That's more money to be spent on players, and that means all of these players are going to be more expensive. And one more thing related to the dollar value of players keepers. You guys, when your league has keepers, that's going to change player values because keepers will almost always be cheaper than their market value. So when that's the case, teams then have more money to spend, which will raise the prices for non keepers, so you, of course want to figure all of that out first and foremost. All of my rankings are for twelve team half PPR leagues that start one quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers, one tight end in one flex. And this past week I did create auction values for my rankings on the Patreon and I'll be throwing those into the draft guide this week as well. But again, those are for a baseline league that I just talked about. They're not for all leagues. You have to do some adjustments, like if your league starts fewer wide receivers, let's say, then you should expect those wide receivers to be cheaper than how my rankings have them. And then the question becomes, well, JJ, how much cheaper? And my answer to that is be reactive. Again, I'm trying to give you the tools without having to be super mathematical. Here. The best fantasy football players in the world aren't just looking at a sheet of paper and drafting off of that sheet. They're reading the board. They're reacting to what they're seeing. If running backs are falling off draft boards faster than my rankings are saying, eventually you've got to react to how things are going in that draft. You at the very least know what my positional rankings are saying, but my overalls may be a little off for your league. That's gonna happen, and to me, that's not a flaw. That's part of the game of fantasy football. Having to think on the fly to extract value is a huge separator between being okay at drafting and being great at drafting. And the thing that's nice about auction drafts is that it's sometimes easier to be reactive than what you'll see in a snake draft because you're always active. In a snake draft, you have to sometimes wait a really long time from one pick to the next. In an auction you can get in on the action during every player nomination, and that means the most nimble drafters are gonna be at the greatest advantage. With all this in mind, Step one is, of course, knowing your league, understand the overall dollars that are gonna be spent, and understand your lineup requirements. The more you need a position, the more expensive players at that position are gonna be. That's no different than what you're gonna see in a snake draft. Step two, in my eyes, would be research the platform that you're drafting on. A lot of you are going to be doing auctions on ESPN or Yahoo, and they have auction prices per player that are gonna populate in the draft room. And while I don't have hard data on this because I'm not able to access that data, I would guarantee that many many leagues see their player prices hover around the prices that are listed in that room. Because once again, this really isn't any different than a snake draft. It's just that instead of ADP average draft position, we're looking at dollar values average cost. Those dollar values are your ADP to work off of. It's your baseline. Now, it's not a bad exercise to take whatever rankings and tier sheet hopefully mine that you're gonna use for a draft. Take that sheet and mark players where there seem to be huge discrepancies between what the platform is saying and what the rankings are saying. Once again, you should be doing this in snake drafts too. This is all for your prep. I would say to make sure that you have a tiers list because tiers going to come in handy, even more so in an auction draft than a snake one. So if you've only got rankings, just tier those rankings group players up that are interchangeable in rank That becomes important while you're drafting. So your set, you understand your league, you understand how player prices change, and you've seen some players who seem to be more costly on that platform that you're drafting on versus what your rankings are saying and vice versa. You're ready for the draft. This is where things start to get way more interesting. All of the snake draft stuff that I talk about my draft guide or on this podcast, it still largely applies to auction drafts. The biggest difference is that an auction draft doesn't work linearly like a snake draft does. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. In a snake draft, every team is making one pick after the other. It's linear in nature. It's pick one, then pick two, then pick three, then pick four, and so on. But that's not really how fantasy football has scored or how things go down. Christian McCaffrey, as the one oh one, is projected to be x number of points better than Cede Lamb, who's the one O two, and he's projected to be hy number of points better than Tyreek Hill, who's the one to oh three, or whoever you have in the one two three spots. Those variables won't be equal to one another. Christian McCaffrey's output to Cede Lamb's output is not necessarily equal to Cede Lamb's output to Tyreek Hill's output. It's not necessarily linear. There are dropoffs that occur, but those dropoffs aren't captured in snake drafts. Like you ever sit in a snake draft and you're ready to pick a player who's just so obviously the best player available and he gets sniped right before you, and then you have to settle for a player at the top of his tier as opposed to the bottom of his because again, we want players at the bottom of their tiers the last player drafted at that tier in a snake draft, because you're extracting the most value that way. That's the unfortunate side to snake drafts is that sometimes there are these big dropoffs from one pick to the next, and sometimes it's just pure luck if you're in the right spot or not. That doesn't necessarily happen in auction drafts because you're not forced to make a selection. Every player is priced for who they are as fantasy assets, not because someone is forced to make a selection, which could hypothetically drive a player's price up. Now, does that mean that something like the running back dead zone doesn't exist in auction drafts? Not necessarily. Like I said, all the ideas that I've talked about and published in the guide or on this podcast, they generally still apply. Like a dead zone running back who's a player to avoid in snake drafts is generally going to be a player that you don't want to buy into in an auction draft because there are reasons from a player analysis standpoint to not draft that player. There's just a chance in an auction draft that it's not as dramatic because no team is forced to pick a player in a certain spot or for a certain cost, so they're not raising the average cost for that player by being forced to pick. But if you look at a lot of auction rankings, you'll see that the dead zone backs or the stuff that I've talked about with a pocket passer trap, they still hold similar value as they would in a regular snake draft, which means that you can use those same principles from one format to the other. So you understand your league, you've got your rankings and tiers. You're aware that a lot of the same ideas will translate, but how do you know how to allocate your dollars. Here's where the idea of this not being as mathematical really comes into play. Tiers to me are groups of players who are relatively interchangeable in rank Like I said earlier, you're tiering players because we're projecting fantasy football stat lines and football performance, and there's variance to that. You don't have to have insane conviction to say that you like Justin Jefferson more than Jamar Chase. They're both very good players who have incredible ceilings every single time they touch a football field. If you've ever seen a ranking sheet by yours, truly it's an overall ranking sheet that's divided up by tier. So running backs and wide receivers they can be in the same tier, and then you can sort all of that by position to get positional rankings in tiers. When a player is in the same tier, it means that I largely am cool with getting any one of those players, which means in an auction draft. You should be cool with getting those players for a similar price. As your draft unfolds the market is setting itself. You should at the very least be aware of the prices that players are going for, because then you know that it's generally okay to spend that kind of cash for players in that same tier. But you're really paying attention to two things here, and again it's no different in a snake draft. On one hand, you're paying attention to what your individual rankings are saying. On the other hand, you're paying attention to what ADP is saying. Let me run through an example. Let's say that you've got Jamar Chase and Justin Jefferson in the same tier, and you've also got Amen Ross Saint Brown in that tier. But let's pretend the site that you're drafting on, for whatever reason, has Chase at fifty five dollars, Saint Brown at fifty five dollars as well, and then Justin Jefferson at forty five dollars. That alone should tell you that Jefferson is probably going to be the better target in your draft. Chase, though, goes for fifty eight dollars in your auction, Amen Ross, Saint Brown goes for fifty seven dollars, you should hypothetically be willing to spend around that kind of dough for Justin Jefferson, but because of where he's listed, you probably won't have to. But the draft itself is setting the market for those players, for that tier of player, and you need to react to it. So anytime a player gets drafted, make sure you're marking that down, because then you'll have some idea of what you should spend based on your rankings and your evaluation on a player in that same tier, give or take a dollar or two. Now, since I'm talking about tiers and the importance of tiers and auction drafts, something else that I'd need to bring up as this concept that I talked about a decade ago for road A World, and that's the you theory. Oftentimes all fantasy managers will have similar tiers of players, like there will often be a group of elite quarterbacks, let's say, and everyone knows who those elite quarterbacks are. In auction drafts, you want to do your best to not be the first or last person to draft one of those players from that tier. But mostly you don't want to be the last person Now, the reason I say that you don't want to be the first is because you run the risk of overdoing things and setting the market price too high. If you ever been in a snake draft where someone takes the QB one in that draft and then no other team follows and the QB two doesn't get drafted until like two or three rounds later, well, the team who drafted that QB one completely screwed themselves. They lost a ton of value on that pick. If there's a tier of elite quarterbacks that's three or four guys deep, then you know that you'll have another chance to get a quarterback from that tier. So again, let's just through an example. So this is clear. There's a tier of four quarterbacks at the top, QBA, QBB, QBC, and QBD. Each player is projected to get drafted for thirty dollars or so. QBA goes up he's nominated. Team start bidding. Chances are that first quarterback in his tier will go around what the market price says in your individual draft, or if there's no obvious central dollar value, just know you run the risk of overbidding on that guy. If you'd rather play it safe, just bid them up and wait for the next quarterback. Just do your best to not wait until the last player in that obvious tier because everyone knows there's a drop off in performance after that player, and that player will often go for more money than the other guys in his tier because people are panicking. Now, it's mostly anecdotal, but check it out during your draft. It's hard to analyze that without anecdotal evidence because I don't have data on the order of nominations, if that makes sense. But it's the youth theer because at the start of the U it's the first guy in that tier, there's some risk in drafting him. He could go for a high price, then the price is lower before shooting back up at the end of that tier like a you. Now, with all this rambling, does this mean that I never select a top player in a tier or the first player who's nominated in a draft. Look, my tiers are generally not just one player deep, So I'm okay with waiting a little bit in order to extract as much value as possible in order to see what the market is doing. But it's still okay to go for that first player in a tier if it's clear that his price is lower than it should be, whether that be because of what your sheets are saying, or what your calculations are saying, or because of what your league's room eightyp says. But the idea here is to sort of analyze the market as the draft is going on via your tiers. If you don't have tiers, then you wouldn't know when to really go up or down on a price from one spot in your rankings to the next. Really, though, that's not that different than what you see in your snake draft. I talk about this in the guide, But you want to be cognizant of what's going on around you and your snake draft because you want to extract value there too. It's just a little bit easier to comprehend when you're using dollar values like you do in an auction. Now, in terms of the types of players that you should be drafting, the strategy that you should go with, keep the trend lines in mind. And what I mean by that is I've had a chart that I've used for years now that shows average draft position versus actual points per game scored. This is how I get the expected Fantasy points numbers that I always talk about. Now, I charted every player who's gotten picked in the top two fifty of drafts since twenty fourteen. I looked at their overall ADP versus how many points they scored, and that creates a scatterplot, which then creates trend lines of expectation how many points a player will be expected to score at a certain average draft position. And those trend lines are very very steep at the top before they flatten out. They're steep in the early rounds, which tells you that the guys that you get early in your draft, they're the difference makers. So when I'm doing an auction draft, obviously with league competitiveness in mind, I'm very open to getting more than one first round pick. Are players who go in the first round of snake drafts, or maybe three guys who go in the first two rounds. You don't necessarily have to go full stars and scrubs. But the obvious point that I make in the guide each year is that you've generally got to spend money to make money at wide receiver and running back. The best wide receivers in running backs and fantasy football are generally getting drafted in the early rounds. Don't lose sight of that fact. When you're in an auction draft, I would not want to leave that draft without a player who typically gets drafted in the first round and a half of drafts. The hit rates are so much substantially better in that range than the rest of your draft. And then as your draft unfolds, I'll generally generally focus on just dollar players for my bench. You get the waiver wire. Don't forget that. Your goal in fantasy football is to always maximize your starting lineup's ability, and that's via spending cash on that starting lineup. You don't need to do it all at once either. You can be the bowllie in your draft room if you pick and choose your battles during an auction draft, and that's a way to extract value as well. But do your best to allocate a dollar or two usually a dollar for your bench spots. When you look at those curves that I just talked about, there's really not a massive difference between a standard seventh round pick compared to like a ninth or a tenth round pick at most positions, and as you get further and further in a draft, those differences mean even less, Like a fifteenth rounder versus an eighteenth rounder. That's a three round difference, but it's not the same kind of difference as a first rounder versus a fourth rounder. There's a much much greater delta in that latter example. Now, I know that we just went through a lot, and there's even more that we could talk about, but I wanted to give you a blueprint, a way to really think at a high level about your draft. Say you don't go into this thing think it's some alien format, some format that's not like snake drafts whatsoever. It's a lot like snake drafts. But here are the basic steps to remember as you approach your auction draft. Number one, know your league and understand how the auction draft economy works. Number two, tier your players, but also recognize how ADP is sort of tiering players as well. Number three, then you should react to how your league mates are spending based on those tiers. Number four, keep the U theory in mind, and do your best to avoid drafting the last player who gets nominated from his tier, especially if it's an obvious tier. Number five, you should be more open to a stars and scrubs approach in most leagues, keyword being most You would rather have that than a balanced roster that lacks star power. The difference makers in fantasy football really come from the first couple of rounds in snake drafts, and those players are going to be the most expensive ones in your auction draft, and then number six, the last and final step. Don't go overboard with a bench budget. So many of these concepts are really transferable from snake drafts, whether it's how we're using rankings, how we're tiering players and using those tiers, or the types of players who hit and don't hit. All you have to do is in your mind convert draft slot to dollar value. And if you want some sort of baseline for that, you're more than welcome to use my new auction values that I created for patrons or for people with a draft guide. That update will come on Friday when the draft guide is updated. But hopefully this long game theory driven episode helps. I know it wasn't that mathematical, but this doesn't have to be mathematical. Some might say it's common sense and they don't need this episode, but I tried to address the things that people have asked me in the past and now anytime someone says is their auction content in your draft guide. I can say yes, but you need context for that, and it's episode eight hundred and ninety one that's gonna provide that context. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you yet subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, you know if it. Follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB, and make sure you're subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel as well. I'm doing draft live streams there, so make sure you're subscribed. You'll get notified when I'm live. That's YouTube dot com slash at Lateround FF. Thanks for listening. I'll be back tomorrow with another episode of Becoming a Best Ball Bro