The vast majority of fantasy football drafts will be snake drafts. While snake drafts are functional and easy to grasp, there is another way…a better way.
Auction drafts are not as easy to navigate or master, but they are superior to drafting fantasy teams. Whether you’re an experienced snake drafter looking to dabble in auctions or new to fantasy football entirely, here is a basic primer on how auction drafts work.
Fantasy Football Auction Drafts
If you already know how an auction draft works, this article is probably not for you. Today’s goal is to get newbies prepared for their first auction. If that’s you, please don’t feel bad. Every single person to ever do an auction draft in the history of fantasy football was, at one point, a newbie.
Every year, the fantasy football community grows. New managers enter the fold. Last year’s novices become veterans. Some of those managers may be looking to expand their fantasy horizons and join an auction league for the first time.
For those of you just starting to learn about auctions, here are all the basics you need to know about how the draft functions.
What Is an Auction Draft?
This article will assume the reader has no idea what an auction draft is. This article will also assume the reader knows the definition of the word “auction.” Even without an explanation of how it works in fantasy football, you can probably figure it out.
Just like a snake draft, there is a predetermined order in which managers select a player. The difference is, in an auction, the player you select when it’s your turn is not necessarily a player who will be on your roster. Instead, you’re deciding which player will be next to be drafted onto someone’s roster.
When you’re on the clock, your task is to nominate a player. Your nomination places that player on the board for each manager to bid on (referred to in draft rooms as offers).
As managers make their offers, the price of the player increases. Each bid must be at least $1 more than the previous one, but you can bid whatever amount you want (as long as you have enough funds to do so).
You’d figure this part out after the first player was nominated, but the bid timer doesn’t just count down directly to zero. There is no race to be the last person to bid at one second on the clock. After each bid, the timer resets to 10 seconds.
Once the price reaches the point where no one is interested in paying more, the bidding will stop. The clock will hit zero, and the manager with the highest bid wins the player. This process will continue until every team has filled every roster spot. Comparing to a typical 12-team, 15-round draft, that means 180 players will be drafted.
What Are Key Things To Know About Auction Drafts?
I don’t think it’s fair to call auctions complicated. It won’t take long to understand how they operate. However, they’re definitely more complex than snake drafts.
This is admittedly an oversimplification, but in snake drafts, all you really need to know is which players are available leading up to your turn to pick and which ones you want to draft. There’s obviously more strategy than that, but at its core, you can successfully navigate a snake draft doing nothing more than that.
In auction drafts, there’s much more going on and more to keep track of. If you just jump into one having no prior knowledge of what is happening or how it works, you may feel overwhelmed and will likely struggle to know when to bid and when to stop bidding.
Let’s go over the most important things you need to know to hit the ground running.
The Nomination Process
This part of an auction is nearly identical to a snake draft. Each team nominates a player based upon a set order. When it’s your turn to nominate, you set the opening price for that player. Every player will be nominated at $1 unless the manager changes it.
Managers can nominate (mostly) any player they want at any time. There are some platforms that won’t let you nominate players at positions you can no longer draft, but that’s specific to the end of auctions. For 90% of the draft, you’ll be free to choose any player to nominate.
This is the first major difference between snakes and auctions. In 100% of snake drafts, the caliber of player drafted is linear. We start with the best players, and as the draft progresses, the quality of players selected gradually gets worse.
Auctions can work this way, too, but they never do. The ends of auctions will always have $1-2 players similar to the types of players taken in the final few rounds of snake drafts. However, in the early rounds, you could see plenty of guys that typically don’t get taken until the second half of snake drafts be put up for nomination. As a reminder, once a player is nominated, he’s guaranteed to be drafted.
The best players could get put on the board first, or they could last for several rounds of nominations. Those late-round dart throws you draft at the very end — you could see those guys pop up at any time. Always be on your toes.
Offers
Offers or bids are the dollar amount a team is willing to spend to draft a player.
Much like a real auction, the item is placed up for auction (in fantasy football, that would be the player). Once nominated, budget permitting, each team has the same opportunity to make an offer on that player.
Everyone is free to do so until they decide the player is too expensive or they run out of money. Then, the player is awarded to the team that made the highest offer.
Budget
This is the most challenging aspect of an auction draft. Managers must properly manage their budget to maximize value and ensure they’re able to get the players they want.
Each team starts with a set dollar amount — the default and most common total is $200. I’ve done dozens of auctions, and they’ve all used $200. If you think of your $200 budget like your set of draft picks, you can really understand the difference between snakes and auctions.
In snake drafts, every team will have a first-round player, second-round player, third-round, and so on. Comparing that to dollar amounts, for simplicity’s sake, that would be every team having a $50 player, a $40 player, and a $30 player.
But not every team has to allocate their funds the same way, and they assuredly won’t. That’s the beauty of auction, where there is no requirement as to how you must allocate your funds.
The only mandate from most fantasy platforms is you must draft a full roster. Other than that, managers have complete freedom to spend money as they see fit.
In snake drafts, each manager has the same available draft capital at all times. In auction drafts, once the first player is selected, the balance of power has forever shifted and will never be equal again.
As you win players, your remaining budget will decrease. This inevitably affects your buying power.
At some point in drafts, you’ll find yourself unable to bid on players because you simply don’t have enough funds. That’s okay. If you budget properly, you’ll already have a team you like.
The trickiest part of an auction draft is the difference between real life and fantasy football. If you attend an auction in the real world, your goal is always to buy whatever it is you’re bidding on for the lowest price possible. If you’ve ever used eBay, this is built into their system.
In fantasy football, your goal is to spend exactly $200. No more, no less.
It can be very easy to overspend. Early in drafts, when you have all this money and you see the top players, the compulsion to bid can be hard to resist for newer auction drafters.
In my experience, though, the far more common and more detrimental error is underspending. Never, and I truly mean never, leave an auction draft with even a single dollar left.
Price Enforcing
This is a little bit more advanced and not at all essential to successfully navigating your first year in auctions. If you don’t fully grasp the concept right away, that’s fine.
Price enforcing is intentionally bidding on a player you don’t necessarily want for the express purpose of driving up the price to make someone else pay more. Your goal is to further deplete the funds of another manager to better your own chances of getting the players you want later in the draft at better prices.
Early in the bidding process, this is always going to happen, as everyone knows there will be more bids. Once a player gets close to what he typically goes for, things get a bit hairy.
It’s easy to understand why it’s beneficial to force other managers to spend more money, especially on players you don’t want. At the same time, this move has risks. In an attempt to force one other manager to spend $2 extra, you don’t want to get caught winning a player you don’t want.
Price enforcing is an inherently risky move, but if done correctly, it can benefit you later in the draft. If you see another manager constantly bidding on players once it gets down to just two or three teams, they may be price enforcing.
What Else Do You Need To Know About Auction Drafts?
In snake drafts, you can get away with watching TV, texting, or even doing multiple drafts at a time. Even if the pick timer is merely a minute, you can quickly review who was taken since your last pick, who is available, and make a selection, even if you weren’t fully paying attention the entire time.
I wouldn’t recommend doing anything else while you’re drafting. However, in an auction, you absolutely cannot be distracted. You can’t just make your pick and check out until you’re almost on the clock again. If you zone out for a few minutes, you’re going to miss players being drafted that you may have wanted.
After a player is drafted, a new one will be nominated within 10-30 seconds. Since it could be anyone, there’s a chance you want that player. You have to be on your game at all times. You never know when that player you’ve been eyeing up will be on the clock.
Even when a player is nominated that you don’t want, you still need to pay attention. There’s plenty of information to be gathered with each player.
Who is bidding? Who isn’t? How much are they spending? Are there any noticeable patterns in how someone bids? How much did the player go for? There’s a lot to know that can help you later in the draft.
Auction Drafts Require a Larger Time Commitment
I don’t consider this to necessarily be a negative, but auction drafts do take a bit longer than snake drafts. Nevertheless, I understand we all have different lives, and not everyone quite literally does this for a living. So, if you can’t dedicate as much time to fantasy football drafts, I completely get it.
It”s worth knowing that most auction drafts will take around 2.5-3 hours, but there are ways to speed it up. For example, since it resets with every bid, the bid timer should never be longer than 10 seconds. But there’s nothing you can do to make it go faster than a snake draft. Don’t jump into one unless you have the time to dedicate to seeing it through.
Preparing for an Auction Draft
The biggest criticism I can offer for this format of drafting I love so much is it’s impossible to mock draft. Doing mock snake drafts without real humans isn’t the greatest, but at least you can learn something and gauge draft strategy.
You cannot do auction mocks with the computer. And finding 11 other people to dedicate 2.5 hours while actually caring the entire way through is a challenge. The only way to truly prepare is to do the real thing. For me, that usually means the last couple of auctions I do are much sharper than the first.
The best way to prepare is to find a good set of auction values catered to your specific league settings, which is easier said than done.