June 29, 2017

Stephen Halupka explains why auctions are the way to go for dynasty league rookie drafts and gives advice on how to approach such drafts to build your team.

One of the most exciting times in every dynasty owner’s season is the annual rookie draft. Hours are spent watching film, dissecting combine times and determining which college statistics will help a player translate to the NFL successfully. After tirelessly crafting a draft board and mocking how each pick will fall, it’s finally the day you’ve been waiting for since the end of last year’s Super Bowl, the rookie draft.

Picks start to fly off the board just as you’ve mocked 30 times in your head. The countdown is on, three picks, now two, and finally it’s time to draft the missing piece to a championship team. Suddenly the realization comes over you that those mocks were exactly right and what’s left on the draft board resembles the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers roster. Panic sets in and the newest member of your dynasty team is a third-string tight end from Whatsamatta U. All of your excitement vanishes as you realize your upcoming season will finish the same way as last season did, without a fantasy championship.

There is a simple and easy way to alleviate the heartache from missing out on a favorite player during a rookie draft and that’s to make your upcoming rookie acquisition period an auction. Here's how to do it:

Auction Format Refresher

For those unfamiliar with the auction format, it differs greatly from the traditional snake draft. Instead of selecting players via a draft picks, owners are provided a set dollar budget that they must adhere to. There is a nomination process where each owner will nominate a player to be put up for auction. At that time, all of the owners, including the one who nominated the player, have a chance to add that player to their team by bidding the highest amount of their budget for that player. Once the bidding ceases, that player is placed on the owner’s team with the highest bid. This continues until all owners have full teams or run out of budget. Auctions typically take much longer than a traditional snake draft due to the bidding process, but extending draft day by a few more minutes or hours is well worth it and just deepens your personal investment even further.

Auctions allow more flexibility for owners compared to the traditional snake as well. For example, if an owner wanted to spend 60-65% of their budget on both David Johnson and Le’Veon Bell, they have the opportunity to purchase both of those players in an auction, whereas in a snake draft both of those players would be selected in the top three picks. Let’s see how some of the differences between auction and snake drafts lend themselves to rookie selections.

Evening the Odds

There is not one fantasy owner who likes to finish in last place. Nobody plays to lose, after all. Besides the ridicule from your leaguemates, you have to sit and stew for an entire offseason about what went wrong, and how to get your team out of the basement. Just as in traditional snake rookie drafts, those who finish lower in the league should gain an advantage when adding rookies to their team. A sample structure for this budget advantage could be in a 12-team league:

This would allow owners to restock with talent in an easy manner than those who are better positions from the previous season. An auction would allow for those owners who take pride in their rookie research process a way to stock up perceived talented players and turn around their team in the way that they see fit. A last place owner could throw their entire budget into two or three top players and hope they start the turnaround or completely turn over their roster with numerous selections from their large auction budget.

Diverse Team Building

As alluded to earlier, every fantasy owner has their own methods for building their ideal roster, and this is certainly the case in the dynasty world of fantasy football. Some players would rather have high risk, high potential reward players as their rookies, while others like rookies that could have an immediate impact for the upcoming season.

The great news about the auction format is that the choice is yours as the owner of the team and budget. Spending the majority of your budget on a single player with a seemingly set-in-stone role like Leonard Fournette comes with the risk that he might be the only selection you are able to add to your team in a pool of talented players. Other owners may choose to attempt to win a selection of mid-priced players that have some upside down the road such as Chad Williams and Kenny Golladay, or even a combination of both strategies to fit the current needs of a team and the ones for the future as well.

Pivoting from Convention

While it is widely considered conventional wisdom to build a dynasty roster through obtaining young wide receivers and letting them mature on your team until they peak, but not all owners may see it that way. If an owner believes in a crop of rookie running backs like many do for the 2017 class, they would be able to allocate most or all of their entire auction budget to selecting the running backs that they believe would be most helpful to taking their team to the next level. As an example, if players like Corey Davis, John Ross and Mike Williams are all off the board, a savvy owner in an auction would potentially take one of two next steps. First, they could nominate the next WRs on the board like Zay Jones or JuJu Smith-Schuster to try and reduce the auction budgets of their opposing owners while keeping their budget as large as possible for the next big running back. The 2^nd option would be for the owner to pony up and big the majority of their remaining budget on the running back of their choosing. Changing strategies and pivoting mid-draft is much easier mid auction than in a traditional rookie snake draft.

Conclusion

Shaking up a dynasty league by introducing an auction rookie draft would be a welcome diversion from the norm. It would allow owners to build their dynasty team in whichever fashion they see fit and have the potential to bid on “their guys” versus what is left to them from ADP. Owners can spend their entire budget on one “stud” player or spend their budget on a plethora of players to impact their roster. The important takeaway is the choice comes down to the individual owner and is not in the hands of the remainder of the league. Commissioners should give their owners the freedom to build a dynasty team the way they would like to build it and a rookie auction would no doubt allow that to occur.

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