Today’s post shows how to create auction values from projections + a plug for Reality Sports Online

Interested in doing an auction draft? You should. It’s one of my favorite ways to play fantasy football. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend you try Reality Sports Online’s auction/league management site.

Reality Sports Online  is a website that is designed to emulate actual NFL front office operations and create a realistic general manager experience:

• Negotiate multi-year contracts live online in the first ever Free Agency Auction Room.
• Scout players
• Draft rookies
• Manage salary cap
• Trade players for draft picks
• Utilize a franchise tag
• Fully customize league settings (rosters, lineups, scoring, contracts, and more).

I am running a RSO dynasty league with some of my favorite fantasy writers while writing monthly updates about my team, the league, and other thoughts with keeper league implications.

This is the list of competitors as we enter Year Two.

1. Jeff Tefertiller – Footballguys
2. Ryan McDowell – Dynasty League Football
3. Sigmund Bloom – Footballguys
4. Mike MacGregor – FFToday
5. Bryan Fontaine – Pro Football Focus
6. Tim Stafford – Dynasty League Football
7. Matt Papson- Reality Sports Online
8. Matt Waldman – Footballguys/RSP/Football Outsiders
9. Jason Wood – Footballguys
10. Mike Clay – Pro Football Focus/NBC
11. Bob Harris and Mike Dempsey – Football Diehards/Sirius XM
12. Rivers McCown – Football Outsiders
13. Jim Day – Fantasy Taz
14. Lance Zierlein – Sideline View

Want to try it yourself? Here’s a review of the site and if you start a league, a promo code where you get 20 percent off the fee for starting a league: RSP20%OFF.  Like last year, I’ll cover this league at this block throughout the summer and fall.

Before I wake up these writers from their offseason hibernation, I thought I’d discuss how to create auction values. Although the contract values with Reality Sports Online are more realistic to real football, it never hurts to develop values based on projections. RSO has a salary cap of $123 million with the option of multiple year deals for player.

Despite the use of millions of dollars and multi-year contracts, projecting values is for the most part like any other league. I’ll be creating another auction value sheet this year in my Gut Check column at Footballguys, but today, I’m going to sahre how to do it at home.

There may be better ways to go about it, but I’ve had success with this method in a variety of leagues:

1. Determine the VBD (Value Based Drafting) score for each player.  I suggest using Footballguys VBD Application/Spreadsheet to determine VBD/projections.
2. Create a spreadsheet with every player and his VBD score.
3. Sort by high to low VBD score.
4. Create a Cap Value based on VBD score.
   1. Determine a percentage of VBD that your highest valued player is worth.
   2. Create a sliding scale from that highest value to the lowest value.
   3. Multiply that VBD of the player with the value and the format the product of those two numbers as dollars.

In essence, I view VBD as gross dollars and then use the percentage scale to refine that total into budgeted dollars for my auction list. For instance, if I had Adrian Peterson as my top player with a VBD of 242 and I was willing to spend 31 percent of my cap on the top player on my board, then the equation for my maximum spend for Peterson would be  242 (VBD) x 0.31 (cap allocation percentage) = 75 — or $75.

For RSO leagues it means I would be willing to spend $75 million of the $129 million of the cap on Peterson last year if I used this exact value sheet for the league. For RSO I would have created a different VBD based on the rules of the league. My league places more value on receivers so I’m almost certain Calvin Johnson would have been the top player on my board. So you know, I spent $68 million on him last year, so my valuation wasn’t much different in terms of dollars.

I created my sliding scale by feel–a little trial and error. Here are some guideposts for the sliding scale I used last year.

• No.1 overall = 31 percent
• No. 12 = 24 percent
• No.24  = 17 percent
• No.36 = 12 percent
• No.48 = 9 percent
• No.60 = 7 percent
• No.72 = 6 percent
• No.84 = 4 percent
• No.96 = 2 percent
• No.108 = 2 percent

The deeper into the rankings, the smaller the difference in value between players. You can determine the values as you wish. This is how I did it.

Here’s a draft where I used these allotments last year in a non-RSO league. Here’s my team:

This is a mock, but you can see I had a solid foundation to build on with Peterson(RB6), Le’Veon Bell (RB17), Wilson (QB9), Brown (WR7), Boldin(WR15), Hilton (WR19), and Gates(TE9). This was a competitive team with room the add depth from the waiver wire despite Doug Martin, Dustin Keller, and Shane Vereen getting hurt early on.

Here’s last year’s sheet to play with.

2013 Auction Values

Again, I can’t stress how good the RSO league is if you’re seeking a quality experience.

As for an updated spreadsheet of values stay tuned in late July or early August at Footballguys.com