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Fantasy: The Art of The Auction - Part 1

Over the course of this week, we’ll be sitting down and talking with some of PFF’s best and brightest from each corner of the fantasy universe. We have Jeff Ratcliffe, our resident IDP editor; Austin Lee and Alex Miglio, our redraft aficionados; the dynasty duo of Scott Sprat and Chad Parsons; and IDP expert, Kevin Greenstrein, all joining myself.

The topic of discussion is auction drafts. With the draft season starting to warm up with the temperature, and the increasing popularity in the auction draft format, we felt it fitting that we discuss auction strategy.

Everyone goes into a draft with some sort of strategy, but unlike a standard snake draft, that strategy goes way beyond simply ranking players and targeting a couple each round when it comes to an auction. So with that, we have seven major auction strategy questions to discuss, with one question each day.

1) Do you assign players certain dollar amounts, and if so how do you come up with your amounts?

Scott Spratt — I do assign dollar amounts to players, which I base off of value over the replacement-level player at every position. I find it easiest to explain with an example.

Position Player Standard Points Standard VBD Standard Price
RB  Ray Rice

296.8

195.9

$52

WR  Calvin Johnson

264.5

189.8

$50

QB  Aaron Rodgers

397.42

182.22

$48

RB  LeSean McCoy

282.4

181.5

$48

QB  Drew Brees

394.2

179

$47

QB  Joe Flacco

215.2

0

$0

RB  Ryan Grant

100.9

0

$0

WR  Dezmon Briscoe

74.7

0

$0

TE  Fred Davis

97.6

0

$0

This is an excerpt from my articles about value-based drafting. The premise is that the fantasy points scored by a player are important only in their relation to the points scored by the best available option on the waiver wire. In the league in the example, Aaron Rodgers scored 397 points, which was 182 more than Joe Flacco, an available replacement option. Ray Rice scored 296 points, 100 fewer than Rodgers. However, Ryan Grant was the best waiver-wire option at running back at 100 points, which means that Rice was worth more than Rodgers—195 points to 182—above replacement.

To find the auction price that represents the value over replacement of every player, you need to divide the total league budget by the total value over replacement of all players. In the example, the league has 10 teams with $200 budgets, which sums to $1,840 in available budget (the missing $160 are the $1 minimums that must be spent to fill every roster). The total value above replacement in the example is 7032 fantasy points. 1840/7032 is 0.26, which is the price factor. Multiply the price factor by VBD to get the auction price.

The example is of the 2011 season. You have a few options to get you to 2012 prices. You can complete the VBD exercise using your favorite projection system—we have a good one—or you can use previous system price ranges to identify tiers and decide for yourself which players fall into which ranges.

Austin Lee — I rank my players and draw a line for each position where I'm not willing to pay more than a dollar for all of the players below the line. Then I price out all the players above the line until the total value of the players equals the total amount of money in the auction.

For example, a 10-team draft with a $200 budget has a total of $2,000 in the auction. I will allocate $1 to roughly the bottom 40% of the players that I think will be drafted (which are below “the line”). The remaining money is spread amongst the top 60% of the players.

Chad Parsons – I use a VBD-based approach and overlay that with a general ADP list to target potential value players pre-auction. I definitely have a range for every player, but it depends greatly on what I project as their upside in term of production.

Kevin Greenstein — You have to have a ballpark figure that lets you know what you're willing to spend on a player. Otherwise, you end up letting the market spend your money. There's something to be said for that if you're uninformed and playing against more savvy competitors, but if you believe in your convictions, you want to take some control of the process and establish budgets for the players you're pursuing. There will certainly be instances where you should tactically change your approach based upon the market's movement, but try to impose your will on the process whenever possible.

Alex Miglio — I do generate player values based on player projections, with my own take on VBD. The values are graded according to a player's rank relative to his projected points, and each position has different gradations. For example, Aaron Rodgers is worth $46 according to our latest auction values, but he is the only quarterback to crack $40. I think of it as value relative to ADP — Rodgers is the only quarterback worth drafting in the first round in my book, and his value reflects that. Similarly, running backs carry higher values than other positions in the top 20 or so because there is a bigger scarcity in the position.

Of course, my personal values differ because I have different opinions on players — for example, I do not feel Cam Newton is the second-best quarterback in this year's fantasy drafts. (Do you really expect Newton to score 14 rushing touchdowns again?)

At any rate, as Captain Jack Sparrow might say, these values are more like guidelines than hard and fast rules. You absolutely must be flexible in your auction drafts, otherwise you will go nuts trying to stick to your value sheet. You do not want to overspend on a player, but you do not want to handcuff yourself either.  I do not make my values hard caps, though you must also be wary of overspending on multiple players.

Creating values for players is vital to preparation for auction drafts, just do not make it the lynchpin to your strategy.

Jeff Ratcliffe — I do. For IDP, I have a spreadsheet that I used for essentially everything – projections, dynasty rankings, auction values. It even does my laundry. But I plug my values into the spreadsheet, and shebang, it spits out the values. I’d tell you more, but I’d have to kill you.

Eric Yeomans — I have a couple different tools in my arsenal to price players. The first is having a Value Based Drafting approach where dollars are assigned to each player like in Scott’s example. I then look at ADP numbers, like Chad, to see how much players are going for. I also compare price lists to those that are out there, like PFF’s, because you know others are looking at those lists too.

One of the other approaches I have — and one that’s rarely talked about — is looking at past draft’s results from leagues with returning players and/or similar scoring and settings to leagues your going to be in. It really helps you get a sense of past tendencies. The final thing I do is have a second set of values that are slotted for each ranking rather than each player. So with the ADP dollar values, the auction price values from lists like Jeff’s, and the past values (which is where these are much more valuable than past values of specific players), I have them set at each position regardless of name.

For example, if the top RB is valued at $60, and I think Chris Johnson is the best RB, then his slotted value will be $60. It may sound kind of confusing to have a bunch of different prices for a player at once, but it’s all about being prepared and knowing not only what you value a player at, but what everyone else may value a player at as well.

Evidently there’s a consensus: it’s a good idea to go into an auction with some sort of price list into. Whether they’re strict prices, flexible to a certain degree, or completely dependant on the ebb and flow of the draft, that’s for you to decide. As everyone involved knows when it comes to an auction, you can be as prepared as you possibly can in terms of pricing out players, and it could turn out to be completely irrelevant. It’s just all about how you determine that you’re able to get the best value for your auction dollars and how you’re best going to put them to use when you enter the draft room.

Part: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 567

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