Draft Strategy: Auction Leagues

Auction drafts are not super common, but they have been gaining a lot of popularity over the last couple of years with fantasy platforms offering that ability more often to its base. Auction leagues—they are the most fun that you will ever have drafting players, but they will also cause the most anxiety that you've ever had drafting players. And I absolutely love auction leagues because I think it is the most fair way to draft. It gives every single owner a shot at every single player, and then you'll just battle it out and see who ends up bidding the highest.

If you're not familiar with auction leagues, essentially what happens is you're given a budget—let's say $1,000—before your draft begins. And it's not a snake draft or anything like that. There is no order that you'll be drafting in. What happens is one person will nominate a player. Everybody will bid on that player for, let's say, one to two minutes. And then at the end of the time, whoever has the highest bid will win that player. Then everybody playing in the league will continue to nominate players until all the roster spots have been filled.

It's super important for an auction league to have really good budget control. You can't go super crazy on players and go outside of a budget that you create before the draft begins. You want to sit down and allocate a certain portion of your budget to certain players or certain positions. For instance, there are going to be some owners who break the bank and may spend 70% of their budget on three or four players. That is an insane amount of money to be spending on just a couple of guys. However, if you have good budget control, you're not going to go above and beyond—which is going to give you the opportunity to not only win some of the auctions for the higher-end players, but save some of that money for another step that we'll be talking about shortly.

For instance, I always want to secure my RB1 and my WR1 very early in any auction because what ends up happening is a lot of people will say, "Well, I'm going to save my money and I'm going to wait to see what happens," while other people will spend and be just fine with it. But you get caught up in a problem where later on you're trying to spend money, other people have saved their money, and now you're paying way more for a player than you ever should have. Or you're paying just as much for a lower-tier player that you would have if you had gone after somebody a little bit earlier in the auction.

Running back ones, wide receiver ones—normally I like to budget about 35% for my RB1 and my WR1 and get them as early as possible. Target maybe three or four guys at running back and wide receiver that, if they come on the board, you are willing to go all-in—as long as you don't go above the budget that you have set.

Please do not get into bidding wars over quarterbacks and tight ends. A lot of times people will overspend on those two positions thinking there's not enough depth later on for tight ends. People are going to spend like crazy on Trey McBride, Brock Bowers, George Kittle, and then after that, Sam LaPorta, T.J. Hockenson, so on and so forth. For me personally, I want to spend way more money on running backs and wide receivers. Then hopefully, at the tight end position, I can grab one of those middle tight ends that I really, really like—but I'm not going to get into a crazy bidding war trying to get Trey McBride as my TE1.

Same thing goes for quarterback. People are going to spend a ton of money on Josh Allen, maybe Jalen Hurts, Jayden Daniels—everybody at the very top. They're going to be spending a ton of money on them. If you want to wait a little bit and go for some quarterbacks in the back half of QB1 status, you're going to save quite a bit of money. And instead of getting into a crazy bidding war for those guys, you can allocate that back to using on running backs and wide receivers.

Make sure you channel your inner Macklemore and go to the thrift store—because you've got to bargain shop in auction drafts. And if you are too young for what I just said, then I don’t even know what age I am anymore. You need to bargain shop in auction drafts. You need to do a very good job of it, because if you end up spending way too much money than you want to, or if you're spending 35% of your budget on only two players, that's where you're going to get into trouble a little bit later on in your auction draft.

Overspending on players leads to less money available later on. And that's when a lot of the bargain shopping can happen—when you get some of those under-the-radar guys that you really want on your roster. When you bargain shop, make sure you put down 10 to 20 names that you love. Let’s call them sleepers. If you were doing a regular draft, these would be the sleepers that maybe you would draft a round or two ahead of where their ADP is. Same thing here—find 10 to 20 sleepers that you really, really like that, instead of drafting a round or two earlier, you may be willing to pay just a couple of extra dollars more than what they would end up going for, because you know that they are breakout candidates.

Never, never, never nominate your targets—because it doesn’t do you any good. If it comes to you and it’s your turn to nominate a player, nominate somebody that you don’t care about, because let everybody spend their money. If you are not interested in drafting, let’s say, Derrick Henry this year and it comes up—post him. Post Derrick Henry because you’re not going to be bidding at all. Or maybe you post him and it doesn’t get nearly as many bids as you thought it would, and now it becomes maybe a bargain for you. Whatever it may be, when it’s your turn to start nominating players, don’t nominate guys that you want. Let everybody else spend their money on a player that you don’t care about—so you nominate them.

Also, don’t think you’re getting super tricky by nominating some sleeper that you have that normally you would draft in the later rounds, but you’re like, “Hey, if I nominate him in the first round or two right now, nobody’s going to want to spend a bunch of money because they’re going to have to save.” Don’t do that. Because if somebody else views this player as a sleeper just like you do, and they have extra money in their pocket, that might be, “Hey, I’ve got the money. I might as well spend it. I really want this guy.” All of your sleepers—everybody that you want later on—if you really want to nominate somebody, nominate them way later in the draft, so everybody is running out of money at that point and then you can get them at a cheaper price.

And finally, I don’t ever spend money on a kicker or a defense. Some people think they’re being super clever by spending, you know, $10, $15, whatever it may be, on a top kicker or a top defense. There’s no reason to do that. At the end of your draft, there’s going to be tons of bargains on kickers and defenses. People are going to be scrambling to add people last minute to fill out roster spots in the last couple of rounds. Take your shot at a kicker or a defense that maybe you pay a dollar or two for—but there’s no reason for you to be spending up on them.

There’s a ton of different ways to go about doing an auction draft, and this is just a few of the points that I am making sure I go through when I do an auction draft. If you haven’t tried one out yet, make sure you do so very soon. And I promise you—it’s going to be a whole lot of fun.