Let me just start things off here with this: If you leave money on the table at the end your fantasy football auction, you’re doing it wrong. It’s really as simple as that. There are several different ways you can handle your auction draft. You can go stars & scrubs, you can spread your money around, you can short different positions while bulking up with elites at another. Whatever your strategy is, great, but you better spend every last dollar you have if you want to walk away looking like a champion.
The beauty of an auction, at least what makes it better than a snake draft, is that every single person in your league walks in exactly the same. The playing field is completely level. You all have the same amount of bid money and you all have the same number of roster spots to fill. You’re not picking 10th and have zero shot at rostering Antonio Brown or David Johnson and you don’t have to sit and watch 24 coveted players come off the board before you get to make your next selection. You have just as much chance to acquire a specific player as anyone else in your league. So why would you even think about shorting yourself on bid money? The guy next to you is spending $210 on 16 players but you’re only spending $195 for the same number of guys? That’s just bad form and the overall quality of your team is going to suffer in the end.
If you want to play it conservatively in the beginning of your draft and not drop sacks of money on players like Todd Gurley or Odell Beckham, then by all means, play it cool early on. You’ll see a number of others in your league jump into an early bidding war and drop half their budget on two guys which should leave you in the driver’s seat for the next couple of player-tiers. But when that happens, you need to take advantage and spend the money they don’t have on guys like Sammy Watkins, Latavius Murray or even LeSean McCoy. If you don’t, how else are you going to compete? Are you saving your money for tiers four and five?
It’s like we’ve got a bunch of fantasy hipsters here who won’t be caught dead blowing their bankroll on the elites because they think they’re smarter than everyone else in the room and are hoarding their money in order to lock in their “sleepers” later on in the draft. The notion that you don’t buy Julio Jones so you can outbid everyone for Tyler Boyd and Tajae Sharpe, to me, is inane. Who has the track record? Who’s the one putting up top-flight fantasy points? I’m much more confident in Jones posting 1,000-plus yards with eight touchdowns this year than I am in Boyd or Sharpe even seeing five targets a game, let alone any red zone work.
But it’s more than just saying that my big-money receiver is better than your two middling guys. It’s also about how you are managing your bankroll throughout the entire draft. You keep hoarding those bid dollars and you’re going to suddenly turn around and realize that the top 40 players are off the board and not only do you not own any of them, but you’re also now in a bidding war for middling talent with that other douchey fantasy hipster in your league and spending more for guys like T.J. Yeldon than I spent on Eric Decker. Or worse, which is how this whole article began, you’re the only guy in your league sitting on a ton of money and by the end of the draft, because no one else has more than $7 to spend on a player, you find yourself with $30 left and only a kicker needed to close out your roster. It’s not like you get to carry that money over to your in-season FAAB budget do you? Wouldn’t you have rather spend that extra $29 to lock down A.J. Green and Allen Robinson instead of going into Week 1 with Jordan Matthews and John Brown as your top two wideouts?
I just finished off a pair of “experts” auction drafts and I was stunned – absolutely stunned -- to see multiple owners sitting on piles of bid dollars at the end. Even more ridiculous was watching some of them trying to hide their gaffe by throwing down $26 on Torrey Smith and $22 on Devin Funchess. Hell, I won’t name names, but one guy actually threw down $29 on the Patriots defense just because I was razzing him in the chat room for leaving so much money on the table and he wanted his final budget to read zero. And these are experts! These are guys you want to look to for fantasy advice? These are the guys telling you how to auction properly?
Now I’m not telling you to go make it rain in your draft room and haphazardly blow your 60-percent of your budget right from the onset. Well, you can if you want to and I certainly wouldn’t begrudge it as that’s what I like to do, but you also don’t need to be a miser. The player pool is a lot deeper than you may think and the less teams you have in your league, the better it is to be aggressive early. In each of the auctions I just completed – one was a 10-team 2-QB league with a $300 budget and the other a 12-teamer with $200 to spend – I dropped big bucks on three or four of the elites and still managed to pull in a number of mid-tier complements as well as a few $1 bargains like Sammie Coates, Terrelle Pryor, RG3 and Tyler Gaffney. My teams have proven talent, great role players and both also have great upside picks. I spent every last dollar I had and while yes, anything can happen over the course of an NFL season, both teams are easily considered front-runners heading into the year.
Don’t be a fantasy hipster. You can be both smart and aggressive. You can spend big and still find key bargains late. You just need to grow a pair big enough that they won’t fit into those stupid skinny jeans you’re probably wearing.