Designing Your Own Auction Draft Strategy

The great thing about auction drafts is you can plan out your team in advance. As a fantasy owner you can create a strategy for your purchasing that’ll give you the players you want and maximize your chances of taking advantage of a good deal.

So how do you design a draft strategy? There’s no one right way to do, it’s an exercise in managerial creativity. Just think about what you want in a team. Do you want the #1 quarterback in the draft? And maybe an elite group of wide-outs to go with him? And then you figure you’ll just skimp a little on running backs and buy some unproven guys with potential? Right there is your plan.

Here’s how to organize it. Make a small chart like the one pictured to the right here. You see all the starting positions of your roster are listed. Then next to them are columns for tier ranking, projected point production, and finally expected cost (I always assume a starting amount of $200). Use your cheatsheet to fill it out.

If you don’t know, tier ranking is where a player fits in within his particular position. It’s useful when you make your cheatsheet to mark it off by tiers, so you can make sense of the list quickly and easily. For example, if I’m listing running backs, I might say the first four are in tier 1 because they are all projected to make between 260 to 290 points this year. Any player after that is projected to see a significant drop off in production compared to one of these top four guys. And you just rank them by tier on down the list. That way when I’m planning my team, if I decide I want a running back who will score around 200 points I can look at my list and see that would be a tier 3 guy like Rashard Mendenhall or Ryan Grant.

Now start filling out your team chart. You can build it however you want. Let’s say to start with you want an elite running back. So under that first running back slot you fill in the columns, for example here, tier #1, 275 points, and $60. You know that means you’ll probably be drafting Chris Johnson or Adrian Peterson but you aren’t committing specifically to any particular player yet, just a level of player.

From there you decide maybe you’ll take a third tier quarterback like Matt Schaub or Philip Rivers. So next to quarterback you fill in tier #3, 250 points and $20. Continue filling out the roster like this. You might decide to change some things as you go, figuring that you’re spending too much at one position and not enough at another.

Once you’ve got the roster filled out, you’re all done! Don’t forget to save a remainder of your money to spend on your bench. I’d recommend $20 to $35. The lionshare can go to your starting roster to build a good solid team on known producers. And once you have the whole chart filled out you can add up the projected point productions to get a figure for your whole team. Divide the team total by 16 and that will tell you how many points a game they might get. Remember to take projections with a grain of salt, they are there just to give you a rough feel for how well you’d be spending your money. I can’t honestly say that a team with a projected per game points total of 105 is really going to do better than a team with a projected total of 100, but it might help guide your decisions to more efficient spending.

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