Fantasy: The Art of The Auction - Part 2

Yesterday we started our auction strategy roundtable by asking if players go into their drafts with a price list on players and how they came up with those prices. Everyone had some very interesting answers, and there was a lot of great advice. It seemed that everyone had some way to price out players, and all seemed to agree that it’s a valuable tool to have a guideline of what to spend on a player when you’re in an auction.

Today we move on to the next step in your auction preparation as we see what a fantasy manager does once he’s put together his prices. With that, let’s get to our next question:

2) What type of budget distribution do you have at each position (IDP included), if any?

Austin Lee — If you do nothing else, budget distribution is the most important thing to prepare for an auction draft and keep up with during the draft. It keeps you from under/over spending your total budget and lets you stay flexible with the flow of the draft.

I'm not a big IDP guy, but my typical distribution in a $200 draft with 8 offensive skill position starters is RB1:$55, RB2:$35, RB3:$10, WR1:$37, WR2:$33, QB:$20, TE:$2, and everyone else $1.

I rarely draft two QBs or TEs, so the rest of my $1 picks are used for RB depth and finding that last starting WR. I will usually land on a regular starting WR3 within the first few weeks of the season either from my draft picks or from scouring the waiver wire.

Chad Parsons — Every season I have a general approach to each position based on the number and quality of underrated players I have identified. In general, I go cheap at quarterback and this is a year where I will spend a quite a bit on Jimmy Graham, my top tight end.

Kevin Greenstein — This is actually a great example of a situation where you'd want to adjust your strategy as the market moves. If, using an IDP dynasty league as an example, you go into the auction needing a defensive end and a running back, you might alter your positional budget if the value plays exist in one area or the other. So for example, if you find that you over budgeted $20 for a defensive end and realized that you could get away with spending $10, it gives you another $10 to add to your running back budget. And if that causes you to spend a little more than you'd initially intended, that's not a problem.

Alex Miglio — I do budget on a positional basis going into auction drafts, but I tend to do it by percentages. Generally speaking, my budget will be divided something like this:

• Running backs: 40 percent
• Wide receivers: 30 percent
• Quarterbacks: 15 percent
• Tight ends: 10 percent
• Variance: 5 percent

Scott Spratt — I will say, first, that I never enter a draft with the mentality that I will spend ‘X' dollars on a specific position. I prefer to allow the league to set prices and bid on the players in the positions and tiers that I feel are being undervalued.

In a more general sense, even if every manager in the league approached the draft like I do, some positions would have more total value than others.

This is an excerpt from my article about position pricing. It demonstrates the recent trends in the relative value of positions, but in auction dollars rather than fantasy points. You can see that in 2011, quarterbacks were more valuable and running backs and receivers were less valuable than in recent seasons.

Scaled to the individual player instead of the position, you can get a better idea of what an average player is worth at a specific position.

Eric Yeomans – I think my budgeting goes hand-in-hand with my predraft planning when I price out players. You get a sense of how much you’re willing to spend on a position and what kind of production you can get from that budget. It’s also somewhere that I keep a running budget of how much I’m spending at each position during the draft so I know how much I have to allocate to other positions. I don’t like to go stars and scrubs so much as I like to spend a majority of my budget on scarce resources. What that means is I have absolutely no problem spending 50% (or more!) on RBs, because I know I can probably get a good enough QB and TE, and a solid stable of WRs with what I have left over. It’s why I also generally budget $2 per IDP position, with the intent of spending no more than $1 on any LBs or DBs. I usually have what’s left over from that $2 per position going to securing high end DEs, and sometimes have even more going there. But I know that IDPs are much deeper than offensive players, so I don’t have a need to spend a whole bunch there.

This has been a little bit more interesting, as the answers seemed to vary in terms of how important budgeting is for a draft. Everyone seems to agree that it’s good to have a plan, but some map it out and swear by it while others go in with a general idea of how much they want to spend and where they want to spend it. The trend that’s becoming clear, however, is flexibility. With both prices of players and budgets, it seems best not to handcuff yourself, as you could end up with a subpar team or, even worse, the dreaded money left on the table after the auctions over.

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