Auction Draft Strategy in Fantasy Football
Never ask a guy about his fantasy football team because you will have started a conversation that you’ll never be able to end. Around this time every year, fantasy football owners start hunkering down for a seventeen week bloodbath on the virtual gridiron. You may be wondering how fantasy football relates to networks and the curriculum within this course. However, you’d be surprised at the parallels between auction strategy and the fantasy football auction draft. A lot of the strategy that’s used in auction drafts is consistent with basic auction strategy.
Fantasy football auction drafts are a hybrid of both standard fantasy football drafts and ascending bid auctions. In a normal fantasy football snake draft, a person selects a player on the draft board at their assigned position. The picks are carried out in the order of the draft positions until every person’s team is filled. In auction drafts, a player is nominated to the auction block and every team owner can place bids on that player until the highest bid is placed and consequently, the highest bidding team owner will win that player and pay the highest bid value. Usually, each owner starts with about $200 to auction to fill about 15 team slots. The objective is for each team owner to draft players that maximize the expected point totals and performance. The captivating aspect of auction drafts is in the strategy. Do you play aggressive or conservative? Do you spend a majority of your budget on starters? Or do you sit and wait until a majority of teams have spent a lot of their budget and go in on players at lesser value? And overall, what is the best way to draft to ensure success?
The source listed at the top of the blog post is an article in 4 for 4, which is a fantasy football website that provides draft insights, player rankings, research tools and betting information. The article by John Paulsen is titled, “How to Approach 2020 Auction Drafts (Tips & Tricks).” If you want generic fantasy advice, you can usually find it pretty quickly. But, if you are looking for auction draft advice, good resources are less common. This source dives into the different mindset’s and strategies to play when you are auction drafting your fantasy team. It includes various strategies that include but are not limited to stars and scrubs, sit and wait and the hybrid approach. Additionally, it provides numerous tips on how to evaluate decisions and control impulsive drafting tendencies. There are many high risk-high reward approaches to implement, but it requires patience and proper execution just like a regular ascending bid auction. A majority of these concepts and strategies coincide with strategies of ascending bid auctions that we’ve discussed in class.
In class, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about dominant strategy. A dominant strategy is is the best response to any other player’s move; and in this example is the best response to any other bidder’s actions. The biggest question in an ascending bid auction is, how long do you stay in? The same question applies to your fantasy draft, how long should I stay in on a player and at what value? The dominant strategy in an ascending bid auction is to always stay until your value is reached. In order to fill about 15 roster spots, you should have a mental model of how you plan on dividing up your money but it is important to NOT stay in past your expected valuation for a player. As mentioned by Paulsen, a successful fantasy team usually has one to two star players and a bunch of remaining good valued players. There is no need to stay in the past what you value a certain round selection at. You can find solid talent at your value in later positions and player nominations. In the article, Paulsen included this graphic. It describes the ADP, average draft position data that corresponds with auction budget valuations. 
As seen above, you have the average % of budget that should be used at each round pick. If your sum is $200 then you should be spending around $48 – $68 dollars on your first rounder. It is important that you do not succeed this valuation as the dominant strategy in this type of auction is to not exceed your value. If you stay in on a player who exceeds your value, you are paying more than it is worth to you. Stay in on a player if the bidding price is below your value because you may have an opportunity to pay less than your value for a player. The same logic that applies to general ascending bid auctions, applies to strategy in fantasy auction drafts.
In the numerous strategies mentioned by Paulsen, he always includes how most are high risk high reward. This is an important concept because auction strategy requires patience and self-control. For example, in Paulsen’s hybrid approach strategy, he suggests throwing a bid out on a player to incite a “social frenzy” of bidders. It’s essentially an attempt at putting the pressure on others to feel as if they need to be raising prices to compete for a player. The value is socially determined as the bids escalate. If you can maintain patience and not feel pressure if you are outbid early, you can succeed in auction drafts. With double digit roster spots, the pressure isn’t on you to get that one player, as mathematically he won’t make that much of a difference in comparison to paying beyond his valuation.
In a fantasy football auction draft, you have one dominant strategy and a set sum of currency to spend on players. There is no incentive to under-spend but there are pitfalls with aggressive tactics. You need to be mindful of your valuation in each round because ascending bid auctions can cause social anxiety and cause bidders to act under pressure. It is super interesting how auction theory connects with one of male America’s guilty pleasures. Many of the concepts discussed in the auction chapter of this course go hand in hand with fantasy football strategy. In your next draft, be sure to stay in until your value is reached because that is the best strategy to play to ensure you succeed on the virtual gridiron this season.