2021 Auction Strategy Guide
There is no better way to start your fantasy football season than with an auction draft.
You’re not constrained by draft position. You don’t need to conform your plan to recent shifts in ADP. Everyone is in play.
That fact makes it more important for you to be prepared, though.
If you’re experienced enough, you could likely head into a common snake draft at this point and fare decently just by using up-to-date ADP as your guide.
Not so at auction. You need to know what you’d like to spend and where. You need to be even more aware of what’s going on around you in the draft room. And you need to be ready to make in-draft adjustments when your plan meets an unexpected hurdle.
We’re here to help you with all that. So let’s get started.
The Basics
I assume that most of you reading this article have done auction drafts before. But just in case you’re not familiar with the format, here are the basics:
- League owners take turns nominating players to be purchased.
- Anyone interested bids on the player until the bidding stops.
- High bid wins the player and loses that amount of money from the owner's preset bank.
- Repeat until all rosters are full.
- Realize when it’s over that you couldn’t have spent those 4 hours in a better way.
Auction drafting is great because it gives everyone in your league a shot at every available player. You’re not subject to the luck of draft position. You’re limited only by your own strategy.
Some of those limits are necessary, of course. You can’t buy every player you want. But you can choose from many paths to build the team your way. And we’re here now to prepare for just that.
The Approach
When you set up your War Room for your auction draft, you’ll need to select an “Auction Strategy: 1 of 5 options.
This will affect the dollar values assigned to each player on your board, especially those at the top. To show you what I mean, here are the top 50 dollar values from a board I just synced with an upcoming “expert” mock auction (12 teams, 16-man rosters):
You’ll see that there’s much wider variation in the top prices, with the numbers evening out the further down we go.
In no setting should you consider a player’s assigned value to be a spending limit -- or even necessarily what you should be spending. Christian McCaffrey isn’t likely to command $87 at auction in this format … perhaps ever. But that’s the valuation vs. the rest of the field.
Basically, if you want him, spend almost whatever it takes. And know that if you really want McCaffrey, then you’re pretty much choosing the “Build Strong Starting Lineup” path. Unless you’re playing in a best-ball format, you’ll probably want to go with 1 of the first 2 strategies.
One of the best things about auction drafting is that a number of different approaches can work. You’ll just need to know how to go about your specific strategy.