My First Auction Draft

The day of the draft...
1) At least 25% of teams don't subscribe to the late round quarterback strategy.
2) No one is afraid of Arian Foster's injuries or lack of a preseason.
3) You can buy a kicker in the first round.
4) Mock auctions are kinda boring and not that useful.
5) There are still people that love Darren McFadden.
6) There are a lot of guys I just don't want on my fantasy teams.

Those are a few things I learned by mock drafting auction style over the past couple days. See, I have my first ever real auction draft tonight (Friday Aug 23). I don't play in a ton of leagues, but I am passionate and competitive about the few I have, so obviously I want to draft well tonight. If you find yourself in a similar spot I cannot recommend enough the RotoViz Guide to Value Based Auctions. Thus armed with some strategies to test, I started mock drafting and well, stopped. I shouldn't say they're totally useless, it's good to get a handle on the format of the site you're using. The problem is that some guys only stay in for the first few rounds, blow their budget on 3-4 guys and leave. It doesn't give you an accurate picture of current value or allow you to fully play through a strategy. It's perfectly understandable, because this type of auction takes a LONG time to get through, but still.

I have, however, managed to figure a few things out. My draft tonight is a 12 team PPR league (otherwise standard) that starts QB, 2RB, 3WR, TE, RB/WR/TE, and D/ST, with 7 bench players on a $200 budget. I am all in on LRQB, so I'll be passing on the top 5 (Rodgers, Brees, Peyton, Cam, and Brady) for sure and maybe more. I'd love to land Wilson, but I'd be ok with Ryan, Stafford, or Vick or some kind of Bradford/Smith/Weeden tandem. My budget is $15 or less at QB, regardless of whether I take one or two. I'm willing to spend $100 on RB and I want 6 of them. I'll go pretty high for McCoy or Rice and hold off on the other top 10 guys. I'm interested in Forte, Bush, Sproles in PPR of course, and am finding that you can get a pretty good deal on Lamar Miller or Daryl Richardson. I like Danny Woodhead for a super cheap RB5. For my WR I'd obviously love to land the PPR studs: Amendola and Welker lead the list. I figure to spend about $70 on 6 WR. At TE, another position riddled with question marks, inconsistency, and more so this year, newness in the form of rookies or new situations--I'm also willing to be patient. While in PPR it'd be great to get Graham or even Witten, I'm not going to spend the money. Guys like Myers, Bennett, Sudfeld, and Cameron are on my radar and I'll probably take two TE for $12 or less if I can swing it. This league has no kicker, leaving me with up to $3 for a D/ST.

The reason I wanted to get this whole strategy down before the draft is that we, as humans, are famous for a bias that might be called outcome bias, or framing bias, in some cases. What it means if we employ outcome bias is that we judge things by the way they turn out, rather than by how we intended, or expected them to turn out. I could write this after somehow drafting Philip Rivers and Joe Flacco and tell you that I meant to do it and explain how it would be good for my fantasy season. We do this kind of re-interpretation of our actions all the time to protect our self-identity. It's advantageous for us to think highly of ourselves, so we find a way to re-work events in such a way that we feel good about them. Framing is just a variation where I present the facts in a partial or biased way so that you end up believing what I'm trying to tell you. Either of these biases might make me look better amongst my friends and followers, but neither really serves me or them. See, another reason we employ cognitive biases, unconsciously of course, is that our brains our designed for congruity. We want to see and believe the same things. Incongruity distresses us. Drafting a player we hate simply because he's next in line on some site's ADP or our own projections can cause that kind of distress. So can missing out on good value due to our own preconceived notions of what value is this year. What it comes down to is simple. I want you to like and respect what I say here, so one the one hand, if I write everything after I draft, I can make myself seem smart and savvy. But if I write down my pre-draft thoughts and compare to my actual draft, you might learn something that can help you with your own drafts this week.

6 hours later...
Well, surprise! I chose the latter, and my draft is done now. Here's how it went down. In an auction, you end up waiting a lot. I finally jumped in for keeps at QB. Russell Wilson fell to me at $15 as the 19th player nominated. I know above I said that was my total QB budget, but I love Wilson, so I was happy to blow it early. In a 4 pt per passing TD league, I like to get one of the dual threat QBs. I then passed on another slew of RB1's, until Ray Rice came up. I was bidding heavy until about $50, when I dropped out and he ended up going for $53. Then I knew I wanted McCoy at basically all costs. In my mind they are the most consistent PPR RB1's out there. I ended up getting McCoy for $49. Now, I have mixed feelings about this as I have owned McCoy a LOT in his career, including last year. But I'm an eternal optimist, so let's go Chip Kelly running game! Speaking of, on the heels of that pick up, I was able to snag Michael Vick for $9. Now, I didn't intend to draft a QB2, since I had spent the whole budget on Wilson, but Vick at $9 was too much upside to resist for me. Now I've got McCoy, R. Wilson, and Vick, and $127 left to spend.

A number of other RB1s and WR1s went off the board in the next few minutes. Calvin and Dez went for over $50, and Marshall, Green, and Julio went $41-42-43 respectively. TRich and Forte were both mid-$40s. Foster, in contrast to what I had seen earlier, was the 10th RB taken at $37. I jumped in and perhaps overpaid for Reggie Bush at $40. But he fit my budget, was on my target list, and I have a hard time finding anyone else with that kind of PPR strength at RB. I'm happy with the expenditure. I thought there might be a little more value for Sproles, but he was off the board at $34, way too rich for my budget at this point. There were a lot of guys I bid on in the ensuing rounds, but most went quickly out of range for me: Amendola ($28), Lamar Miller ($20), Gronk ($17) and many others. Having passed on the top WRs I was able to stack a few mid-range guys with upside pretty quickly. I got Welker ($13), James Jones ($12), Bowe ($16), and Givens ($11) with little competition while many teams seemed intent on drafting QBs. All in all, I was able to target some of the guys I wanted at each position and stuck to my budget pretty closely: QB $24, RB $108, WR $62, TE $4, and D/ST $2.

My biggest questions going in were about the value of QB, rookie RB/WR, and injured/suspended players. There were some great values at QB: Cam $20, Peyton $17, Brady $16, Luck $15, RGIII $14, to name a few. Although my own rankings have Wilson at QB6, I think I'd rather have paid $1 more for Brady. I hope the rushing yards and TD's pay off. The rookies flew off the board. Kembrell Thompkins and Giovanni Bernard went for $15 and $14 respectively, around the same time. Cordarelle Patterson went for $8 (too many people read this Auction Value piece), Tavon Austin and DeAndre Hopkins were $11 each, Eddie Lacy went up to $20. Josh Gordon and Justin Blackmon were slightly discounted, with Gordon at $17 and Blackmon at $9. Someone took a $5 flier on LeVeon Bell's foot, and Jordy Nelson seemed a bargain at $18. The Foster-Tate combo went for a combined $42, which should turn in great value either way. You can see the full results of the draft here.

Ultimately, I loved the auction format. I write a lot about Cognitive Bias and how your brain can negatively impact your decision making in fantasy sports, but going into an auction draft with a solid plan allows you to avoid a lot of those biases. Although it's a lot more interactions with leaguemates, I found my decisions were not pressured by what other people were doing as much as they are in a snake draft. And with a list of guys in front of me to target, I didn't worry about any position shortages. Everyone loves their team on draft day, and with an auction you really can build your dream team. I'll definitely be doing more of them.