Last week, the Footballguys staff held a mock auction for a 12-team, PPR league with a $200 cap. Here’s how I prepared plus third-party coverage of the auction.
Below is an excerpt from the article that goes through a list of questions to owners of each team in the league. Read the rest at Footballguys.
1. Explain your strategy going into the auction. Were you able to maintain that plan throughout?
If you know your league it’s a good idea to use that information to your advantage. At one time or another I’ve faced two-thirds of these owners in an auction draft since 2009 and most of these auctions were “fantasy writer/expert leagues.” The few I haven’t faced before stated that they were inexperienced at the format.
Combine the setting of an “expert league/mock where we’re going to write about what we did” with a smattering of less experienced auction drafters and there will be one prevalent dynamic among most, if not all of the room: They’ll open the auction very tight and make conservative bids.
Some owners are tight because they are inexperienced and they don’t want to make a mistake. Others are conservative drafters who believe in trying to control the auction at the final phase of the draft where they believe they’ll land great value. And, as human nature dictates, sitting in the back of some owners’ minds is the fact that they will have to write about their strategy and they want to look good to readers.
Regardless of the motivation I was betting that my competition would be tight at the beginning and it would make the auction ripe for going hard to the hole with a “Studs and Duds” approach. I took the values from Sigmund Bloom’s auction article and tweaked them to fit my ADP Desirability rankings. Then I adjusted the curve so that the values would be much higher at the top tiers compared to the middle and bottom tiers.
I made this adjustment because ADP Desirability allows you to cut through the red tape of conventional thought-gymnastics with rankings and arrive at a closer truth to how you value a player. In an auction draft where in theory, you have the opportunity to pick the players you value most, why not base your values on a desirability index that gives you a bigger separation among players like Adrian Peterson and Jamaal Charles, two players more tightly grouped in traditional rankings?
If I’m going Studs and Duds, my top 3-5 tiers should have a little higher monetary value than my competition’s top 3-5 tiers, especially when I know that most of them are playing the middle and end game in an auction.
As a result, I had 7 tiers with a total of 49 players. ADP Desirability rankings aren’t convention rankings so what you’ll see below may see really odd, especially combined with my aggressive players values, but here are the top 49 players and how they fit into my tiers at the time of the auction: