Auction draft how much to spend

Thinking about doing your first auction draft in ? Have some auction experience but need some advice on how to navigate the prices to put together a winning roster? Here are some basic tips and advanced strategy to help you get rolling:.

For our purposes, let's consider a team, half-point PPR auction draft. Let's then look at the value of McCaffrey in relation to that. That means for the consensus No.

Looking at back on , McCaffrey averaged If you think you can land a cheap overachiever to supplement him well later, McCaffrey might be worth it to lead your backfield, especially if you think Ekeler and Carson will both slide in production more than he will. The bottom line is figuring what starter and bench composition will yield you the most points over the course of the season.

That part isn't different from snake drafts. You are just managing a budget vs. If you are going with six running backs, with two starters and four backups, it follows that you should have eight wide receivers, with three starters and five backups.

Within that framework you can adjust. Like you would in snake drafts, operate with a overall rankings cheat sheet, this time with players. Across positions, look for tiers and drop-off points. Adjust based on where you think there is scarcity or surplus of studs or steals. The action of the auction can be fast and furious.

Having both a positional and player-specific plan with your budget puts you in prime position to attack the best values and avoid the overpriced players. There's a general feeling that when you get the chance to open the bidding, you're doing it to start driving up the price of a player you don't want.

That's a good early strategy to make some other drafter exhaust his or her budget while you keep more for you a player you really want. The best way to build a successful team in an auction draft is to have a solid base of knowledge regarding the expected auction values and then acquiring the best players possible for each auction dollar.

AAV simply gives you an idea of what each player could cost, but not exactly what they will cost. The beauty of an auction draft is the ability to build your team however you see fit. Someone will overpay to make sure they prevent that roster from occurring. Unless this is your first season, you should have some experience with your league mates draft styles from previous seasons.

If it is your first season in the auction, you can still get a good idea of how the league will value players. Starting lineup requirements will play a major role in the pricing of players in the auction.

Leagues with shallow starting requirements will typically see higher prices for the top players as owners attempt to build the strongest starting lineup possible. Deeper starting requirements will see slightly lower price points on the top players as everyone tries to spread the same money over more players. A great example of this is a 1-QB vs a 2-QB league. Knowing the scoring settings will also impact the spending.

There is a common budget concept that simply applies a dollar figure for each position, similar to the projected total spend we looked at above. This type of budget would give you the freedom to spend across the position, with little regard for which players and what prices. Unfortunately, this budget is not specific enough to keep your spending under control in the heat of the moment. Using that as a baseline addresses of the remaining players.

Again, reviewing basic roster construction would project that teams will draft a few more WRs due to the 3 required starters along with the flex position allowing a 4 th possible starter. Drafting with a savvy group of auction experts in a non-TE premium scoring format tells me that there may not be a lot of spending done beyond the top-5 TEs.

The Final projections work out to be:. With these position level numbers established as a guideline, I will work through the UDK rankings to establish my own projected values for each player. As a simple example, here is how my pricing projections are created:. As you pull funds to the top, you must remove them from the bottom ranks.

From there up, you allocate those extra funds to the QBs all the way up to QB1. If you find that you simply do not have enough funds to reach reasonable values for each player, perhaps your initial projection was too low and needs to be re-calculated.

Remember, no matter if you increase or decrease your overall spending at one position, it will have an inverse impact on the other positions. Increased QB spending reduces available funds for other positions. This process of moving funds from the bottom of the rankings to the top of the rankings, allows you to create a value chart that is consistent with your overall positional spending and producing real, actionable values for your specific draft.

Here is where personal preferences come into play. Just remember that it is always a sliding scale due to the finite limit of total spending available. If you add to RB, you must remove funds from another position. In other words, focus on the over-arching concepts and ignore the player names.

If you spend significant auction funds on two or three top-ranked players, you will not be able to afford the price point for second-tier players, as other managers will have the funds to roster those players.

Using an example based on the league format for this league, you might feel that your QB1 should be no lower than Tom Brady overall. Additionally, you want your second QB filling the Superflex position to be no lower than Matthew Stafford. At this point, you will reference back to your projected values to begin filling in your first draft of your budget. The same process plays out at each starting position until you find that happy medium of the best possible player for the available salary-cap spend.

Conversely, you may roster Tom Brady , but at a lower cost than budgeted, which will allow you to reallocate those savings to another position.