891: Simplifying Your Auction Draft Strategy

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zachariason.

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason in this episode 891 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. The fantasy football content space is filled with snake draft content. It's filled with the standard 12-team, you pick a guy, then I pick a guy, then our league mate picks a guy, that type of content. And that's because the vast majority of fantasy leagues use snake drafts. As a content creator myself, I'm going to want to make stuff that people want to listen to. I'll definitely dig into more niche topics, but I'm trying to help as many people as I can win at fantasy football. Snake drafts rule fantasy football still. But as we know, a lot of people play in auction drafts too. In those drafts, a team nominates a player to be bid on like an auction, and league managers bid that player up until no one wants to bid them up anymore, and the highest bid then gets that player.

That means that if you don't want a top 10 running back or a top 10 wide receiver on your fantasy team, you don't have to. You don't need one of those players. If you want to get multiple top five wide receivers, you can do that if you really want to. There's a little bit more flexibility with auction drafts. That's something that a lot of people enjoy, myself included. Now, I've gotten questions about auction drafts for years. I get them every single summer. And the main one that I get these days is, is there auction draft information in your draft guide as well? And the answer to that is no, there isn't, at least not directly.

After talking to so many fantasy managers through the years, I think there's a big disconnect happening. People seem to think that auction drafts are just so totally different than snake drafts, that I'd almost need to write an entirely different draft guide that's catered specifically to auction drafts for things to really be worthwhile for their draft. But auction drafts don't have to be as mathematical as you think. People always want auction prices in cheat sheet form. And I get it, truly, I get it. But even more so than what you see in snake drafts and in auction draft, being reactive is your number one priority. Being able to respond to what the draft is doing, your ability to be nimble, that's more important than what my auction prices might say. On today's episode, I'm going to simplify things for you. I'm going to show you why snake draft content can still be beneficial for your auction drafts. I'm going to hopefully give you a process that you can use in your auction drafts that's easy to understand and easy to implement. It's time to stop complicating things so much.

Now, before getting to the info, I want to send another reminder to check out Underdog Fantasy. There are best ball drafts going on constantly over there, and you'll often find me in those drafts, because I've been drafting hundreds of teams this off season. But there are tournaments and league types of all sizes. There's probably one out there for you. And I've got a special offer. If you're new to Underdog, go sign up and use promo code LATEROUND. When you make a deposit, you'll not only get a deposit offer on that deposit, but you'll also get a late-round draft guide sent to your email for absolutely free. That's a $25 draft guide to your email inbox. So check it out, underdogfantasy.com, promo code LATEROUND. Make a deposit and you can get that draft guide.

So my goal with this episode is to put myself in your shoes. I play in a lot of auction leagues myself. I actually used to write auction content for a while for Rotoworld and their magazines back in the day. I used to really, really dig into this stuff and I still do to some degree.

So I'm not coming into this without any sort of background on the format. I want to be clear there. Okay, now that that's out of the way, if I'm you, how would I approach an auction draft? Well, the first thing that I would do is take a step back and really evaluate the landscape. Part of the reason me giving you dollar values for an auction draft and why that's not always worthwhile is because those dollar values can change pretty dramatically from one league to the next. Honestly, it's not a whole lot different than rankings. I write about this in the draft guide, but a problem with snake draft rankings and how they completely take over the fantasy football conversation in August and really any month is that every league is different. People are so concerned about half PPR leagues and full PPR leagues, and if these rankings are for half PPR or full PPR.