My second of three auctions wrapped up Tuesday evening, and it’s no surprise that for the second time in as many auctions I did not leave with the team I expected to get.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
You can’t go into an auction without a plan; I’ve tried “winging” it, and you wind up with a team that lacks focus. You spend the whole time in scramble mode, which leads to poor choices. And that, in turn, leads to playing catchup on the waiver wire the entire season.
So prior to each auction, I sit down with my projected player values—based on previous year’s auctions, other auctions I’ve been in, mock auctions I’ve done, and values from The Huddle’s auction cheat sheet—and try to plug the pieces into the puzzle. More often than not I follow a “silo” approach (as opposed to the top-heavy “pyramid” or “studs & scrubs”), and I’ve found that it’s generally cheaper to acquire elite wide receivers than running backs. I also have a tendency to not spend much early unless I see a tremendous value, opting instead to hold money past the first third when I usually find myself in position to control the board.
With all that in mind, I’ll plug in players that I like and see what kind of team I expect to construct. Then I’ll bring that budget to my auction on a separate grid from the one I use to track my (and every other team’s) players and remaining money. When I get a player, I’ll put him in the appropriate budget slot and determine if I need to redistribute the wealth one way or another.
And thus far this year, that budget page has had a whole lot of scribbling and redistributing.
Without divulging too much of my game plan (because I still have one auction remaining, and that group isn’t afraid to quote back to me things I’ve written on certain players when I throw them out for bidding), I can safely say that the elite running backs aren’t going for the premium prices they usually do. However, that means the mid-tier backs—the ones those who spend big on wideouts usually expect to get in the low- to mid-teens in a $100 cap auction—are pricier than expected. You have to dig a little deeper—and incur a little more risk—to get some RB values; that said, spending $8 instead of $12 does free you up to spend a couple bucks more on those elite receivers—turning, say, Dwayne Bowe or Marques Colston into Calvin Johnson or Greg Jennings.
There also seems to be a sharper line between the mid-tier and bottom-tier guys. More owners are inclined to spend heavily on their core group of starters, then rely on $1 and $2 finds for backups. If you’re fortunate enough to fill your core group on the cheap, saving enough for three or four late $2 bids will not only give you the run of the board at the end of the evening—in essence, playing “name your sleeper”—it also drives those who made an early visit to “dollar days” into an absolute tizzy.
And a frazzled bidder makes mistakes—mistakes you can capitalize on.
If, of course, you’ve got a Plan B… just in case.
