Salary Cap Confidential: Startup Auction Strategies
If you read the last entry in the Salary Cap Confidential series, you already know that preparation is the first key to dominating your startup auction. Now that we’ve created a budget and taken the time to craft a cheat sheet, it’s time to execute the plan created in that preparation.
Throughout my years of trying to navigate the landscape of salary cap startup auctions, I’ve learned some valuable lessons on what it takes to execute a game plan once bids begin to fly. This article will focus on those lessons.
Nominations
If you remember back to the preparation article, the first suggestion for getting ready for your auction was to learn the rules. Knowing how nominations are done is a big part of that.
Whether you’re participating in a live or slow auction, all owners should have an equal opportunity to nominate players. In a live auction, there’s usually a pre-determined nominating order so the nominations will be done one after the other. During a slow auction, every owner typically gets to nominate a set amount of players in a specific time frame (usually one or two players each day.)
No matter what kind of auction you’re taking part in there are two strategies to use when it comes to auction nominations: the aggressive approach and the passive approach.
Those that employ the aggressive approach will nominate players they intend to bid on. The primary benefit of this tactic is that the bidder ensures that he or she has the money available to attack the players they’re interested in acquiring. Meanwhile however, the biggest negative to the aggressive approach is that other owners are more likely to have a high percentage of money available to bid on the player with an equal amount of aggression.
The passive approach to nominations is crafty and takes a bit more willpower to execute. The intent of this technique is to nominate players you’re not necessarily interested in paying a high price for. The trick to using the passive approach is to identify players that the fantasy community values at a higher level than you do, or pinpoint players that will bring high bids but do not fit into the budget you laid out in your preparation.
Personally, I use both approaches. I just use them at different parts of the auction.
At the onset of a startup auction, everybody has their entire bankroll to spend so I prefer the passive approach to nominations. This doesn’t mean that I just find the top-rated player and make somebody pay big money for him. Instead, I like to find players that have spiked in value recently which I don’t believe will hold that value. In all reality, I’m looking for “sell high candidates.”
As the auction progresses, I try to stick to the passive approach to nominating as long as possible. In a live auction especially, it’s also good to keep a close eye on how much players are going for to assist your passive strategy. For example, if there was an intense back and forth between a few owners for a highly rated rookie quarterback that ended in him going for more that you expected, it’d be a good idea to nominate the next highest rated rookie passer to try to keep those high bids rolling in.
Although the passive approach is my preferred method, there comes a point in the mid to latter parts of the process that being aggressive will pay off.
Once all the elite and second and third tier talent is already on rosters and you’re filling out the end of your bench, it’s important to attack players you’re interested in with your nominations – particularly near the end when the minimum-priced roster fillers are being nominated.
Reading the Room
The most important moments of an auction come as the opening round of nominations are made. Whether you’re at an in-person live auction or online, watching the first round of auctions closely is imperative to learning how the room is going to treat elite players and what to expect as the auction progresses.
In most auctions, elite talent is the first to be nominated so having some expectations of what players should go for is critical to responding correctly with your bids. In my experience as a salary cap owner in startup auctions, I’ve found that elite talent – no matter what position – costs between 15% and 20% of a team’s cap space. While this can change slightly based on starting lineup requirements, scoring settings, or the experience level of the group of owners, it’s a relatively dependable expectation at least until the first player is being auctioned off.
In most auctions I’ve been a part of, the top tier of players go in the ball park of what they were expected to go for. There are exceptions however.
Using the 15%-20% expectation for elite players, the number one overall wide receiver on your cheat sheet should be expected in a $400 cap league to go for between $60 and $80. Sometimes an auction room will be filled with especially aggressive bidders, hell-bent on getting elite players and willing to pay whatever it takes to do so. So there are auctions where all of the top eight wide receivers go for between $88 and $100, or around 25% of the budget.
The best way to react to a situation like this is to sit back and allow it to happen. After the first 12-18 players are scooped up, the owners that spent early will have to watch their pennies while you’ll get cut-rate prices on multiple tier two and three players.
Every now and then there’s an auction where the opening players go for massive discounts because owners are leery of spending due to market value not being set. Typically this only happens in leagues full of inexperienced players or in extremely unique formats where owners are unsure how to value players early. No matter why it happens, if it does, you want to be able to take advantage by swooping in and grabbing at least a couple elite bargains. Doing the preparation we covered in last week’s Salary Cap Confidential article will put you in a position to do that.
Bidding
Perhaps the most exhilarating part of participating in an auction is putting in bids. No matter if you’re in an proxy auction with Ebay-like bidding or a classic auction where your high bid is available for everybody to see, there are two ways to go about your bids, by creeping your bid up slowly one dollar at a time until you’re either the high bidder or can’t bid anymore, or by immediately putting in your high bid and letting the chips fall where they may.
Either is a fine strategy and I’ve been known to use both, but I will say that using the creeping approach to bidding will give you flexibility in slow, proxy auctions for when another player you’re interested is nominated. Meanwhile, I’ve found in both live and slow auctions that placing the highest bid my budget will allow on a player I don’t expect to get for that price – particularly early in auctions – has worked many times and is one of my favorite bidding strategies. There’s nothing better than expecting to get a tier two running back as your RB1, but getting a tier one player instead because everybody else in the room is bidding one dollar at a time, tentatively waiting for the market to be set.
No matter what bidding philosophy you use, always consult your budget before submitting a bid.
Price Enforcing
If you like to gamble, price enforcing may be your game. If not, it’s most likely something you want to stay away from.
The age old rule for price enforcing has always been, “don’t make a bid that you’re not comfortable winning.” In all honesty though, if you’re comfortable winning the auction at the bid you make, you’re not price enforcing at all, you’re simply trying to win the auction.
All things told, if you took the time to read this series as well as made the commitment to preparing properly for a draft by creating a budget, making a cheat sheet and building a plan for the auction, you worked too hard to throw it all away by attempting to make a fellow owner pay a dollar or two more for a player you don’t necessarily want on your roster.
Tracking
If there is nothing else you take from this third article in the series, I sincerely hope it comes from this section.
It’s imperative to a track the progress of the auction as it happens, and it really is simple to do. Remember the cheat sheet you created in your preparation that looked something like this?
In the price column, keep a running total of how much each auction ends for. After a bit of time, you’re cheat sheet will look something like this:
Updating your cheat sheet will help easily identify bargains. So when Amari Cooper gets nominated and looks like he could end at just $55, you know you value him equally to players like Mike Evans and Stefon Diggs, who went for $76 and $82 respectively, earlier in the auction. Bargain!
Budget Adjustments
Now that you’ve identified the bargains and are in the process of building the next great cap dynasty, it’s time to edit your budget as you win players. Here’s the original budget (top) that we used as an example while preparing for the auction, as well as an updated version of the same budget (bottom) after winning a few auctions:
As you can see, a few adjustments have been made from the original auction budget. Saving money on Russell Wilson at $69 and Amari Cooper at $57 allowed me to add a couple extra dollars to land David Johnson and Calvin Ridley. I edit the “budget” category to match the “cost” category after winning auctions so my total budget stays accurate at the bottom. Here, I also adjusted the superflex spot in the budget with the remaining savings.
As things continue, I also like to include my current bids in my budget, so I’m completely clear on what I have available when looking at my plan. I usually differentiate things by putting auctions I’ve won in bold. I also like to earmark other spots in my budget for specific players that haven’t gone on the auction block by listing them in gray, as seen below.
Conclusion
There are many ways to build a quality team during a startup auction. Some can build a winner by winging it. Me, I’m not a good enough to do that. I need to out-prepare my competition to get a leg up. Diligently updating my cheat sheet and budget throughout an auction is the only way I know to create the optimal roster.
We’ll progress next week in the series with Salary Cap Confidential: Managing the Cap.
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