How to Prepare for a Fantasy Football Auction Draft

The biggest day of your fantasy year is draft day. Or if you’re like the Fantasy Coach, the biggest 15 to 20 days of your fantasy year is draft day. Let’s face it, after any fantasy draft it’s easy to look over everybody’s roster and pick out the ones who have no chance to earn to the title. Sure, luck can pick up the lowliest of rosters and owning the waiver wire might turn an underdog into a contender, but do you really want to be the guy digging himself out of a hole from week one onward? Of course you don’t.

So what you gotta do is plan. You gotta get to know the players you’re going to be drafting. Don’t just rely on those lousy player ranking lists they include in the online draft room. Those lists were probably worked out in April by some committee of professional nerds. They aren’t looking out for you, you are looking out for you.

The first step is to read up on this year’s fantasy season. Check out ESPN’s fantasy football home to start. They’ve got more fantasy columnists than anybody else, which means more analysis, more projections, more updates coming out of preseason camp. Also ESPN has regular football coverage right there on the site as well.

Also be sure to check out Yahoo! and their fantasy football draft kit. It includes player rankings and draft strategies. CBS, Fox Sports, and NFL.com have draft kits too. Reading several allows you to see a variety of strategies and opinions for when you’re selecting your own, plus one or two of their experts might be reporting some inside information that the rest miss.

The easiest information these sources will give you is their pre-season player rankings, where they project who will do what this upcoming year. Obviously guessing the future is necessarily tricky business, which is why it’s so important to compare all these lists together. Note the discrepancies they have ranking certain players and then Google the punk to get the whole story of why.

Oh and before I forget, Sports Illustrated puts out a special fantasy football edition you can pick up in about any bookstore for $8. Just in case you also want to have a solid book of information you can read on the train and the like. I’m a fan of Sports Illustrated because their regular sports coverage can tip you off about players and team situations that the fantasy guys don’t.

Speaking of which, read regular NFL coverage too! Many fantasy players have said they went from chump to league champ when they started ignoring all the fantasy coverage and started paying a lot more attention to mainstream football coverage. I think part of that is because doing the lionshare of your research through mainstream coverage forces you to not be lazy. However, fantasy analysts tend to be number guys looking into the past so they can identify future trends, and they miss the boat on looking forward using only the information at hand right now to build their rankings. And you know how nobody has ever discovered a formula for figuring out what is going to happen next in the stock market? Well nobody has ever figured out a formula for figuring out what’s going to happen next in professional sports either. Be forward looking, let the information out of preseason camp, current player buzz, and up-to-date depth chart information have the final say on which players you want.

Once you’ve looked over the data and reacquainted yourself with all the important players, it’s time to make a cheatsheet you can have with you at your draft. A cheatsheet is just your own personal player rankings list. How you want to organize it is up to you, but consider splitting players up by position and include relevant information beside the names, such as average draft cost and expected point production this year.

Even if you’re playing through a website host who provides you a ready made list, make your own! Only you can make the right list for you, and you can never trust a single source of information. I mean over on CBS.com you can pick up Matt Forte in the 13th round of a snake draft because they have him listed so low! Don’t be the guy who lets Matt Forte, Jahvid Best, or Dez Bryant go for 2 or 3 bucks because you don’t know their actual value.

A cheatsheet is also helpful because you can use it before the draft to work on your draft strategy. One of the biggest advantages of an auction draft over a snake draft is you get to plan what kind of team you want. It’s entirely up to you. For example, do you want a top three guy for all of your QB, RB, and WR positions? Look it up on the cheatsheet, what’s that going to cost you? Then budget out the rest to your remaining positions. Who can you get for the money you have left and are they good enough? If not, move money around, see what you can build, find the good values.

Auction drafts let you target specific players, unlike snake drafts where you usually just get who you get. And that really lets you take advantage of the people you perceive as undervalued. For example if you think Shonn Greene is going to haul the rock for 250 points this season, then the going price of $30 is a steal, about $20 less than he’s worth. You can take that $20 and upgrade your WR corps from tier II guys to tier I guys.

Many fantasy owners don’t create player specific plans, preferring a more general approach and waiting for the good deals to pop up. This is a fine way to go, but I recommend you think as specifically as possible, no matter how general your plan. Know if you want two tier one WRs, or if you’re saving for a third tier QB. Knowing what you want and having a team plan lets you bid with confidence, which is crucial! Bidding with confidence keeps you from getting weak knees when Peyton Manning is going for two dollars over value, only to wait and overspend six dollars for Philip Rivers.

Finally, a little bit on bench strategy. If you’re buying a team in a standard $200 auction draft I recommend you save somewhere between $20 to $35 for your bench. Leaning more toward $20, with a greater willingness to overspend to get great starters than to underspend and pay good money for benched players who don’t score you points every week. Now, how the later bench rounds of the draft play out depends on the league you’re in and the kind of guys you’re playing with. Sometimes you’re playing with super aggressive owners who spend themselves so deep on big starters that they don’t have the money left to challenge for good bench guys. In which case having $20 left over pretty much gives you the pick of the litter. Other types of guys underspend on their starting lineup (often weak-kneed owners who didn’t bother to make a pre-draft plan) and go into the bench rounds with $50 just to spend on scrubs and sleepers. Those guys can spend $15 on people like Clinton Portis—let them. Ration your money out, nominate players already guaranteed to go too expensive for you, and wait for everyone to spend themselves down to your level.

Split your bench funds inequitably, spend $6 to $10 on a genuine backup starter for RB or WR, then let those sleepers come to you for $1 to $3 each. It’s acceptable to get a back-up QB if you think he might have a breakout year and you can trade him, but don’t get one just to have one. There will be plenty on waivers for your main guy’s bye week. Please don’t waste a bench spot for a backup TE, K, or D/ST. When you need one pick them up on waivers! Running backs and wide receivers are where the real value is. Look for guys with potential to overperform at either of those positions. You never know, scrubs turn into top guys all the time. And if one of your scrubs does break-out, you can start him or trade him for somebody else you can start.

So try out the strategies above and be confident that you’re well prepared for your upcoming draft day. Remember, a good draft is the first step toward the winning league championship. Good luck!

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