Fantasy Football Auction Strategy: 26 Dos and Don’ts

A Fantasy Football auction can get your blood flowing and they are much more intense than regular straight drafts. If you haven’t tried one — or if you haven’t done one in a while — get on it! Now, they even have auctions on Fantasy sites like ESPN, MyFantasyLeague.com and CBSSports.com, which we’ll get into. This article is meant to help you in those Fantasy auctions, as well as ones you do live and in person.

Have you ever gone to an estate sale? Where a speed-talking auctioneer sells pieces of furniture, collectibles and antiques one by one to the highest bidders? If you have, you most likely walked out of there with an elephant table, an Ugly Dickshot baseball card and a single bookend from 1954.

Fantasy Football auction strategies are much different (and more fun!) than straight drafts –- especially if you are doing a live, in-person auction rather than online. Several services are offering auctions, like MyFantasyLeague.com, as a way to fill your rosters, and while it can be more convenient to do it online, it’s definitely not as fun as in person.

What’s the Big Deal?

In a straight draft, you’re only able to draft the players that are available to you when your pick comes up. But in a Fantasy Football auction draft, you can purchase the top two players in the league if you want. Granted, you’ll have a bunch of $1 players (scrubs) filling the other six or seven spots in your lineup, but still! You have the freedom to bid on whomever you like –- it’s like going to a restaurant and ordering the lobster as an appetizer, the steak for the entrée and sushi for dessert.

(I’m so bad at analogies, it’s like I’m a giraffe bouncing on a trampoline … See!?!)

In this day and age, most Fantasy Football players are in more than one league. You gain new friends through the years, and your old league continues on, so you end up joining another league … and then another!

If you are thinking of starting up a second league to go with your straight draft league -– definitely consider making it a Fantasy Football auction league. This is probably the smartest way to go about it, rather than just trying to convert your old league over.

Also, remember that if you’re league is a keeper league, you’ll have to think about how inflation works from one year to the next, in order to not allow someone to keep a superstar for a low price year after year. (I was actually in a dynasty auction league that you might be able to gain some good rule advice from.)

Acting Out Some Fantasy Football Auction Action

Set what you think is a reasonable price for the top 168 players (14 players, 12 teams) you expect to get drafted, and try to use that as a gauge or you can use Fantasy Football auction values found at several websites, some big and some smaller.

While some sites offer regular auction services, MyFantasyLeague.com offers slow extended auction drafts — think eBay for Fantasy Football! It’s awesome! This is, in my opinion, the best way to do an auction online, if you can’t get everyone together in one room.

People nominate a handful of players, and each owner gets to bid on him until 24 hours passes from the last bid. In other words, if you bid $45 on Ezekiel Elliott, and no one bids on him for 24 hours after your bid, then he’s yours!

Remember that once the first few players go off the board, you should mentally adjust your values. If the stars are more expensive than you initially expected, then you know there will be more bargains later on in the draft.

Try to separate players at each position into tiers, and then work on getting the cheapest players (not always the lowest-rated) in the highest tiers possible at each position.

For each dollar you save in one of these tiers, you can pick up a better bargain later in the draft. You’ll begin to see a shift in prices after about 40-50 players are off the board (about four of five players on each team). That’s what I call the “Fantasy Fulcrum” — when the player values shift and some of the stars that slipped through begin to go at cheaper rates. Try to save money so you can take advantage when this happens, but make sure you still get at least a couple high-price players for around the money you budgeted early on.

Are you good with Excel? Set up a spreadsheet for your league — or at least one for your team — that keeps track of how much you have left in your budget for each position. Some league services will even show you how much your maximum bid is for any player. That’s calculated by subtracting $1 from your total available salary dollars for every player open roster spot, then adding $1. In other words, if you had five open roster spots and $10 left, your max bid would be $6 or ($10-$5)+$1.

Dos and Don’ts of Fantasy Football Auction Drafts

The following advice is for auctions that set a $100 salary cap. This might not be the most common, but it’s easy to understand that any dollar values we mention are also essentially percentages of salary cap. (If your league uses a $200 salary cap — then just double what I talk about here. Math!)

DO: Nominate kickers for $1 immediately until you win a kicker. From the very first time you nominate a player, make sure it’s a kicker, going down the rankings, starting with the best. One of two things will happen: You’ll win the best available kicker for just $1, or one of your opponents (who still has a ton of money) decides kickers are worth the money and they bid him up. Ideally, two owners will battle for Stephen Gostkowski or Steven Hauschka. If you wait until later to get your $1 kicker, you will get a much worse one. But since you are nominating them first, you’ll likely get the BEST $1 kicker in the draft.

DON’T: Forget to plan on who you’re going to nominate as you go. Have a short list written down that you move along with throughout the draft, so that when it’s time for you to nominate, you aren’t rushing around and accidentally nominate a player you were hoping to save for later.

DO: Nominate players you don’t want early on in the draft – especially players that have recent injury news scaring you away completely. Right now, Rob Gronkowski would be my first nomination. Get him out there early so people can spend money, while you sit back and wait for players you want. Another thought is to nominate a player like Kelvin Benjamin, who is certainly intriguing, but you know that people will get into a bidding war on for his services, in spite of coming off a major injury. You want them to battle over him while there’s a lot of money still in their pockets.

DON’T: Jump bid for no reason. Just because a $25 player is crawling upwards from a $1 nomination, be patient. Go $1 at a time. Let someone else jump the bid up by $10 or more. Worst case scenario is a little time passes and you eventually get your player at a good price, or you bow out. By jumping the bid up, you risk overbidding on a player you could have gotten cheaper. Think about this: Everyone complains about hurrying up and getting the auction over — but why? It’s the BEST time of the year, so enjoy it and take your time!

DO: Get a couple superstars early. Don’t save too much money, or else you will find out the bargains you saved for are TOO cheap. Then guess what happens?

DON’T: Leave money on the table. As the draft is winding down, and you realize you have a chunk of money, and all that’s left are some $1 and $2 players, then don’t be afraid to bid high on your FAVORITE cheap sleeper, just to make sure you get him (and you won’t be mad at your unspent cash). When you have more money than everyone else late in the draft, start bullying and nominating players for $3 and $4 rather than just $1.

DO: Pay attention to whom you bid against. When you win a player, make a note on which owner you beat for which player. This will come in handy in-season when you are looking for draft partners. You know right off the bat that this person valued this player like you did – more than anyone else in the draft. That means you should be able to get great trade value in return. (But don’t bring up the fact that you remember he bid high on him during the auction.)

DON’T: Spend big on tight ends. Much like quarterbacks, the tight end position is a weird one because there’s so much talent, but you only need to start one. So let everyone else spend $10-15 on the big-name players, and just wait to score a Dwayne Allen or Zach Ertz for a few bucks. The money you save at this position can be budgeted into your running backs, which could mean the difference between a Rashad Jennings and a Giovani Bernard.

DO: Nominate stars left in the positions you already own (early in the auction). In other words, if you just won Drew Brees for $20 – nominate Aaron Rodgers as soon as you can. You don’t want other people to get better players for cheaper prices later on just because the money is gone. You know you can’t use Rodgers, so make someone else spend their money while they have it. Also, in a live in-person auction, you can even say, “You can’t let Rodgers go for just $19! He’s waaay better than Brees, who I just spent $20 on!” And this helps guilt people into bidding more. Maybe.

DON’T: Just assume the auction values you find online are for the same budget your league allows. For instance, on ESPN.com, they use a $200 budget for every team. But CBSSports.com uses a $100 budget.

DO: Only nominate players you want late in the draft – and for just $1 (unless you are in fear of leaving money on the table, which should not happen!) Don’t try to scare people away from bidding with a big, bold $25 bid on a player, even if you think that’s his value. What’s the best-case scenario? You get him for $25? Start low, and let the bidding happen naturally. Best-case scenario there is you get him for less than $25.

DON’T: Be afraid to spend a couple extra bucks for a player you are dying to have. Yes, you are costing yourself a couple dollars at the end of the draft, but if you manage your auction well the rest of the way, you should be able to rebound easily. Just be careful not to do this with several players, or else you’ll end up having stars and scrubs – and not on purpose.

DO: Chill out after you get a few superstars. Let everyone catch up to you and hopefully pass you in money spent, while you get ready (and re-calculate) for the bargains.

DON’T: Have the same bidding style each time. Bid quickly on some players and wait a few seconds on bidding on other players. It sounds dumb, but if you have the same cadence at all times, people can tell when you are about to fold or not and they will bid you into submission.

DO: Remember the power of NINE! If you are going back and forth with bids on a player, and you are approaching $18 or $28 for a player, go right to $19 or $29 with your bid. There’s something psychological about going into that next set of 10s, and this will force your opponent to enter into a totally new price range with his next bid. Think about it: Prices in stores are always $19.99 or $29.99 – never just $20 or $30.

DON’T: Spend big on QBs. If you want to spend little on quarterbacks, make sure you nominate high-end QBs early and often to get the most money spent on them. But later on, only nominate QBs you don’t mind winning. Unlike a draft, the values in auctions are instantly comparable. In other words, Brees cost one owner $20, and you bought Blake Bortles for $5, then you can do the math to say that Brees is obviously not 4x as good as Bortles in Fantasy value, especially when there are only 12 starting quarterbacks in most Fantasy leagues.

DO: Bid $2 on players you really want late in the draft, since it will be tougher for you to bid $3 (which you would have to do if someone bids your $1 nomination up to $2).

DON’T: Sit near the chatty, obnoxious guy. He will distract you, and you will miss out when someone else nominates your sleeper. By sitting away from him, you force your opponents to sit near him — so it’s a win-win!

DO: Wait on Defenses, since they are nearly as volatile as kickers, with little differences between the top 10. You’ll get a bargain if you’re patient enough, and you’ll often find that your defense rankings from about 6th through 12th is much different than everyone else’s. It’s not like other positions.

DON’T: Be distracted by chatting in the draft room (or in the live draft chat room).

DO: Be ready with players to nominate, whether it’s in an online queue or at a live auction. Think about whom you’d like off the board a few steps ahead.

DON’T: Use the Plus-$1 button in an online Fantasy Football auction. Don’t be lazy and just keep clicking Plus-$1 in a bidding war because an opponent may jump the bid up by $10 – and then boom, you just accidentally bid $11 more than the last bid – they should call it the Pus-11 button. Just type in your bid each time – it’s not that strenuous.

DO: Bluff once in a while. Talk up players you don’t want and keep quiet about players you do like. If you talk up a bad player that is currently being bid on, you’ll drive down the salary. Let two opponents battle each other back and forth, burning up salary, on a player you don’t want. That will make the players you do want cheaper.

DON’T:  Follow big site’s auction values blindly. They usually overvalue the lower players by a large sum. For starters, you’re not going to see every team in your league draft a backup QB. So figure there will be 18 QBs drafted, and it stands to reason that the final three or four will be $1 players. (Honestly, I bet you only the top 14 QBs go for more than $1. If you spend $1 on the 22nd-best quarterback in a $100-budget auction league, you will not win. Ever.

DO: Spend a few bucks on a great defense/special teams (DST). You’re going to save enough money on other positions, so you might as well spend $3-4 on a top-notch DST.

DON’T: Stress out about your Fantasy Football auction. You’re going to think this is 10 times better than a regular draft.

DO: HAVE FUN!!!

Using a great Fantasy Football auction strategy is like playing a poker game, full of strategy and unsavory people! Keep your cards close to the vest and don’t go all in on a rookie!