Lessons Learned at 3AM
What I Learned At 3 am Thursday
(a/k/a Auction Values and Strategy)
Tim Stafford
My favorite dynasty league is a salary cap/contract league that has an annual free agent auction in late August. We’ve been doing this for years, so I’m no stranger to live auctions. However, it had been a long, long time since I did a start-up auction.
The new league is comprised of experienced dynasty players, plus most of the writers from DLF (pun intended). These folks know their players and player values, so I figured it would be a competitive draft. I sensed from e-mails and message board posts that maybe people were new to the auction process, so I thought that might prove interesting.
Note: sortable draft results are listed here.
Pre-Draft Valuations:
The less certain I am about player rankings, the more likely I am to use tiers rather than forced ranks. For example, I always use tier based rankings for rookies. It’s extremely hard to know right now if RGIII or Justin Blackmon is going to be a better dynasty prospect. So, they are in the same tier for me and I let team needs, gut feel, or whatever else break the tie.
I use the same approach for auctions.
Not because of the uncertainty with the player, but the uncertainty that the auction format itself brings to the equation. If you have the 1.05 pick in a start-up draft, all you need to do is rank your top-5 players and you are guaranteed to get one of them. In an auction, you have no such guarantee, so you’re better off to take your favorite ranking list and tier the players.
Each tier consists of players on which you’d be willing to spend a certain percentage of your budget. Within your tiers, you have to accept that the inherent unpredictability of the auction format means they are all fair game at approximately the same price. It’s quite possible that Calvin Johnson will not be the most expensive receiver in an auction even though he is the consensus WR1 for dynasty.
Example:
Tim’s WR Tier One (approx. 20-25% of budget): Calvin Johnson, Hakeem Nicks, AJ Green, Larry Fitzgerald, Julio Jones
Tim’s WR Tier Two (approx. 15-20% of budget): Greg Jennings, Roddy White, Andre Johnson, Brandon Marshall, Kenny Britt, Mike Wallace
You keep going like this until you get to the point where you can’t decide any more. The remaining guys are then basically the minimum bid or slightly more if you find yourself with excess cash when the auction moves to “roster fill out mode.”
Lesson One: People discount players for age a ton. The super elite guys went as I expected: AJ Green (22%), Calvin Johnson (24%) and Larry Fitz (20%). The aging studs however came at a serious bargain: Roddy White (9%), Andre Johnson (13%). That made White the 49th highest paid player and thus the equivalent of the 5.01! It’s good to keep that in mind because if you get outbid on the studs, you may be able to fall back to this level of player and build around them with youth.
Price Enforcement:
For those of you who are contemplating your first auction, you need to understand the concept of “Price Enforcement.” Even if you don’t intend to employ this approach, you want to be aware that others may. Essentially, the concept of price enforcement is that even if you have the players you want at a given position, you’d like to prevent other teams from getting silly bargains. Why? Because when it comes time to bid against them on players you do need, they will have less cash.
As you can imagine, there’s an art form to “Price Enforcement.” No science here. It’s essentially the fantasy football equivalent of a game of chicken. Because I felt there were some people new to the auction format, I suspected people would be hesitant to bid aggressively early on. So, I decided to price enforce pretty heavily. I wanted to make sure the top-tier RBs really bled people of cash.
By and large, my approach worked. As you might expect, most of the top echelon of running backs were nominated for bidding during the first hour of the auction. DMC was nominated early and I decided to use him to set the bar for running back prices. I kept driving him up because I was okay with owning him (although I would have preferred not to), but mostly to establish what it was going to take to get a top tier running back. He went off at 17% of the cap. Fair value, maybe a tad cheap honestly.
A bit later, LeSean McCoy, MJD and Ray Rice were all nominated close together. I pushed these auctions, too. I ended up winning Rice because the bidding stopped at 24% of the cap. This is about what I expected and I pushed the bid one too many times. Oh well, there are worse things in the world than owning Rice.
Now is when price enforcement gets scary.
I’ve rostered DMC and Rice for a total of 41% of my cap, but now MJD gets nominated. Being a gambler, I stick to my plan, but it backfires when MJD stops at 17% of the cap with me holding the highest bid. I think the lesson here is that I underestimated the discount that MJD (and DMC) carry because of injury/age concerns. My mistake is your gain.
I traded DMC/Mike Goodson/Marcus Easley for Jordy Nelson/Michael Floyd/Joseph Addai the day after the auction. So, the take away here should be that you can generally fix a mistake in the auction via trade. It’s fairly common in an auction that teams end up unbalanced at certain positions. If you are bidding purely on value (like selecting BPA in a rookie draft), you’ll end up with excess at a position. It’s just how it goes. Sort it out later. You don’t have to draft as if tomorrow is opening day in the NFL.
Lesson Two: I don’t have the stamina I had in college. For those of you who know me from the forums, you know I’m anything but a night owl. We started the auction at 9 pm ET on Wednesday. At 10:30 pm ET only 48 guys are off the board – so four rounds worth. And we are filling out 24 man rosters or a total of 300 players including developmental picks. Yikes – this is going to be a long, long night! Around 12:30 (with about 100 guys off the board), my brain comes up with the seemingly brilliant idea that I can rest my head on my desk during auctions that don’t interest me. This works for a while until the brain decides a pillow would make this an even better plan. I missed twenty auctions and ended up with Austin Collie as my WR2!! Of course, I was relatively tapped out thanks to the MJD mistake anyway and ultimately fixed this issue with the DMC trade. Still, try not to fall asleep during your auction. It’s bad form.
People Really Like Cam Newton:
I wasn’t surprised that Aaron Rodgers went for 20.5%, or Drew Brees at 18% or Matthew Stafford at 15%, but I was surprised that Cam Newton cost 17.5%. Compare this to some “value” players: Tom Brady 10%, Eli Manning 7.5% and Tony Romo 7%. So, you could have had both Brady and Eli at the same amount as Cam alone.
I’m not going to use this article (which is supposed to be helping you prepare for an auction) to bash Cam Newton, but consider what you want to do around Newton before you go in to your draft. Either way you should have a plan. If you are a believer that he is truly elite – be prepared to pay. If you are a doubter, you can probably sit back and watch the auction and be reasonably confident that he will get run up. Newton represents an extra opportunity to drain some cash out of a team’s wallet. That’s an important learning point for those who plan to price enforce.
Lesson Three: Beware of the “plus one” button on MFL. If you’ve never done an auction – the “plus one” button is a seductive mistress that allows you to keep bumping the auction up by one dollar. This annoys other owners as it resets the clock on the auction to the full amount for just a dollar increment in the bidding. Two things to keep in mind about the “plus one”: A) it’s fun to use so you might find yourself overusing it and B) on MFL it can have a delay, so you’ll hit it and a few seconds later your bid is registered. I have it on authority that Steve Wyremski (DLF staffer) highly recommends typing in your bid as opposed to using “plus one” because sometimes the “plus one” results in you getting Jordy Nelson for 15% of your cap because the delay allowed others to run the auction up before the “plus one” bid was registered by the system.
The Bulk of the Players will Be Nearly Free
Out of the 300 players or so drafted, 140 cost 1% of the cap or less. To put that another way, starting in round 13 of a standard 12-team draft, the draft almost converts to a regular draft. The person making the nomination has the upper hand at this point because people either are tapped out or just don’t like the players. The initial bid can dictate more at this point than earlier in the auction because there’s a reasonable chance it will be the only bid.
Our draft concluded at 3:14 am and during the final hour there were 104 players selected – only three of them were over 1% of the cap. That said, this is where some interesting sleepers lie. And remember this means that one-third of the rosters were filled out in the final hour of a draft that lasted over six hours. Maybe my cat nap was a good strategy – I was wide awake at this point!
The link to the draft is above, so I won’t go through this in detail, but here are some late picks that jumped out at me:
Guys going in the second round of dynasty rookie drafts: Dwayne Allen, Brandon Weeden and Greg Childs
Interesting flyer picks: Mike Goodson, Marcus Easley, Delone Carter, Mike Tolbert, Chris Ivory, and Brandon Saine
Sure, this isn’t murderers row, but these guys are the types who build out rosters and help teams win. Plus, I found it meaningful that people were able to snap up second round rookies at these prices.
An obvious corollary to the fact that most of the players are free is that the top tiers are really, really expensive. If you’re new to auctions, don’t let yourself get pushed out of the top guys because the bidding feels expensive. There’s a lot to learn in these numbers:
- The top-24 players (8% of total) accounted for 39% of the total budget of the auction
- The top-60 players (20% of total) accounted for 70% of the total budget in the auction
- The bottom-200 players (66% of total) accounted for 13% of the total budget in the auction
The point here is that you need to bid with confidence on those players who would be in the first five rounds of a normal draft start-up. A common piece of advice given by DLF staffers is to bulk up on picks in the first five rounds of a dynasty start-up. Experienced players used 70% of their cash on only 20% of the players – this is an important lesson for anyone doing a start-up regardless of whether it’s an auction or not.
Final Lesson: Keep it Light. This draft was grueling. Six hours of anything is a lot! I enjoyed that our group had a good sense of humor. Some funny moments from your pals from Twitter and DLF:
- @TheFFGhost: Learned that you can bid yourself up using the “plus one.”
- @SteveWyremski: Repeatedly reminding us that he had a train to catch –but seriously Steve’s train is at 5:15 am! And whining about Jordy Nelson to the point where I offered him a trade during the auction just to end the agony.
- @EmPuLSe: Taking periodic breaks to get cranberry whiskey. Does that even exist?
- @dynastytim: Spending the last twenty minutes alone in the draft room filling out my roster after everyone else went to bed. This is the price of napping!
- @TheFFGhost: Congratulating himself for a great value on Eli Manning, who he in fact hadn’t won. And then complaining about winning Brady before realizing that he’d stolen him for 10% of the cap. Again – avoid the “plus one!”
Good luck to those of you getting ready for an auction. Keep the cranberry whiskey close, but the diet coke closer. And whatever you do – no pillows or “plus-ones.”
Editor’s Note: Tim Stafford can be found @dynastytim on twitter and in the forums as dlf_tims.
