Note: This series is designed to take auction drafters of any ability and refine their auction skills to those of a seasoned auction veteran. The articles will go from very simple concepts all the way to the most advanced auction theories. Each article is designed to build on the previous articles in the series. For best results read each article before proceeding to the concepts in the next article. For a breakdown of auction mechanics and strategies see Footballguy Jeff Pasquino’s excellent 8-part Auction Primer Series.
Other sections of this series:
- Part 1: Beginner Mistakes
- Part 2: Attacking Beginner Auctions
- Part 3: Beginner Preparation
- Part 5: Bidding Strategies
- Part 6: Reading Your League
- Part 7: Inflection Points
If you have followed along in this series, or you have some auction drafts under your belt, then you are ready to take your next steps to refine your auction skillset. To this point, the strategy has argued strongly for preparation in advance that gives you a reliable backbone to fall back on as you draft. But as you become more experienced, the beginner techniques become more second nature and you can begin to slowly loosen things up. You can begin to explore mid-draft changes in strategy, nominations that target specific owners, and price ranges instead of exact values. This series will hit all of those before it’s over, but for now focus on something that is entirely within your control: Nominating a player for bid. In an auction, the one thing you can always count on is that unpredictability will rule. So when you are faced with uncertainty you must find your edge wherever you can. Nominations are one of those edges. It is quite possibly the only thing you have that you control completely, but that also gives you the power to drastically affect what other teams are doing. Here are some vital concepts to be aware of when crafting your nominations.
DEFINE YOUR DRAFT EARLY
It is sometimes easy to make the mistake of coming up with players you want and then attempting to sit on those players as long as you can to try and find a lower price. But while it is rarely correct to simply call out every player you want, on the other hand, if you want to execute your strategy there are going to be some key players that will send your draft off in different directions. You must nominate those players as early as the draft allows in order to avoid missing opportunities along the way if you’re waiting for “your” players to be called out. Some common situations:
- Top Quarterback – Aiming for a player like Patrick Mahomes II or Lamar Jackson
- Running Back Heavy – Aiming for 1 elite running back and another top 12-15 running back as your RB2
- Wide Receiver Heavy – Aiming for 2-4 top 24 wide receivers
- Top Tight End – Aiming for the truly elite options, in 2020 this is limited to Travis Kelce or George Kittle, and to a lesser extent Zach Ertz and Mark Andrews
In each of these situations defining your draft looks a little different, but it means doing the same thing: Picking one or more key players that will tell you if your strategy is viable right from the start. For example, you are set on owning Patrick Mahomes II this year and have budgeted $42 to land him on your team. But if you don’t get Mahomes you have decided you are going to switch to a Top Tight End track instead. Your first nomination needs to be Mahomes 100% of the time. This performs a very important function for you. If you have $42 set aside for Mahomes you need to know immediately if that number is going to hold up. With top players, there is no need to wait to nominate them because you aren’t going to get much value, if any, on the elite guys. So if you wait on Mahomes and nobody gets around to nominating quarterbacks you might watch Kelce, Kittle, Ertz, and Andrews come off the board before you know if you’re getting Mahomes or not. That puts you in a tough spot because if the bidding stops at a reasonable price on a tight end you have to make the call whether to jump ship on the top player you had targeted. If you choose to do so then you may see Mahomes go for $40 and then you have yet another tough decision to make. Take the guesswork out. If you want top receivers? Get Michael Thomas or Davante Adams out there and see if your idea is going to work. Define your path early through your own nominations.
SNEAK THROUGH YOUR FAVORITES
You’ll notice that the auction settles into a rhythm at various points in the draft where people are nominating a bunch of one position group in a row, or they’re nominating the top players at each position. Your nomination strategy at that point should include some attempts to sneak some of your favorite late targets through cheaply. The best candidates for that tactic are players who are ranked extremely low relative to the point in the draft, players who have had little preseason buzz, and players you believe will go cheaper than they should.
Your job when you put your nomination sheet together (according to Part 3 of this series), is to have candidates from all three of those groups on your sheet to use when you need to. If you are planning a bargain quarterback strategy you can take advantage of positional runs to try and get one of your top quarterback targets while people are focused elsewhere. Therefore, if you have faith that Carson Wentz will have another top 12 quarterback season you can wait for the inevitable wide receiver run and throw out Wentz in the middle of it. You just may find yourself with a $5 starting quarterback and then you can completely ignore the position the rest of the way.
These three categories of nominations are somewhat risky but can be effective. Remember that nothing is ever certain to work, but this is a fairly advanced approach that requires you to read your room, read the other owners, and pull the right player out of the hat. The key in this tactic is not to fall in love with any of your players you are attempting to sneak through. Have a handful of them and if it doesn’t work then try again the next time the opportunity arises. One of them should work and accomplish the goal.
START THE DOMINOES
So you have executed the strategy above. You nominated Wentz but he went for too much at $14. Then you tried Josh Allen and he too went for too much at $15. On your third try, you manage to land Daniel Jones for just $3. But nobody else is worried about nominating quarterbacks. You are three rounds deep and nobody has paid any attention to the position except for your nominations. Instead, they are continuing to hammer away at the top running backs and wide receivers. You can let that go on for a little while, but eventually, you need to start the quarterback run. Let the top running backs and wide receivers go, and when things start to turn towards the WR2 and RB2 tiers it is time to push the first domino and get Patrick Mahomes II up for bid. People will be in a trance trying to grab the top guys elsewhere and it takes your nomination to snap people back to the fact that there is top talent still left on the board. This can work for almost any position. This year it’s very possible that the beginning of the draft will be a quick run on running backs. If you want some of the second tier backs you’ll have to start the wide receiver dominoes to shift the focus.
DON’T TAKE EVERY DEAL
There is a point in the draft at which the money is starting to run out in the room and raw player prices start to drop precipitously. It is in this zone that you start to see some of the better values in the draft. The draft room will be awash with comments like, “gosh that’s a good deal”, or “boy I thought he’d go for more”, or simply lots of head shaking and mumbling. It’s a curious case of human psychology that will constantly be present – people will grumble about the good deals people are getting all the while having the ability to bid but choosing NOT to do so. They are waiting on certain players. You want to be active during this time, but a common mistake is to be *too* active and start jumping on every deal. Most leagues have a limit to how many of each position you can draft or it will have bench spots that are a bit limited and force you to make decisions about who you want on your team. Your nominations should capitalize on any of those limitations by attempting to fill other team’s rosters with players that are good but are not the best available players. You may be surprised at how often you can nominate the 7th best available wide receiver and teams with money fill their final wide receiver spot by buying that player instead of waiting on a much better option.
When teams are unable to pass on a deal often what happens to them is that they fill up their roster with deals like Brandin Cooks for $6 and Julian Edelman for $7. Those are good prices! But if you have $31 left and all you need is two receivers you’ve made the critical error of taking two deals instead of keeping your roster open for the better players still available. You’ll have to get used to seeing players go cheaper than you want them to. Resist the urge to bid and keep your roster spots for the better players left. Roster flexibility at that point is more important than taking every deal you see. Turning down Cooks for $6 is clearly the play when you can have Robert Woods for $19.
Once you see these situations playing out during a draft it will be much easier to take advantage of them instead of merely conceptualizing it in this article. Here’s a good example of a situation that happens in drafts fairly often and a way you can put your cagey nominating approach into play.
- Team A – Remaining cap - $38
- Team B – Remaining cap - $31
It is late in the draft and these two teams have the most money left and are also the most in need of key players. For purposes of this example, assume nobody else can afford to bid above $16 so these two will go at it. Team A is you. Your WR2 slot has a gaping hole to be filled, but there is just one wide receiver left who is an acceptable fit for that spot – Calvin Ridley. Team B also needs a WR2 but needs a running back as well. The tendency for most drafters is to simply sit back and wait in order to possibly get Ridley super cheap. After all, you have the most money, right? Nobody else has your buying power at that moment. The fallacy in that process is that while logical, it will play out much differently in reality. Why is that? Because most teams are acutely aware Ridley is still available. And while there are some decent running back names left, between the two position groups he is clearly the highest-ranked player still on the board. So even if it takes someone’s last dollar, Ridley is good enough that any of the owners who don’t have enough money will still bid to their max to see if they’ll get lucky and get him. That guarantees he’ll go for at least $16. With that baseline, you can play out the two scenarios in front of you.
Scenario 1
You attempt to play the waiting game. Save your money and see how long you can go before Ridley is nominated. Your hope here is that he falls far enough that people are completely tapped out and you get him for a massively discounted price. Unfortunately, this strategy has a couple of problems that people tend to miss when employing the waiting game.
The first is that most auction rooms will contain various levels of drafters. There will be guys who are clueless and are working off a couple of wrinkled sheets of paper they printed off at the office before they came to the draft. They’ll be trying to find a name to nominate, will not have thought about it before someone tells them it’s their turn, and they’ll look down and notice that Ridley isn’t crossed off their list. Invariably the question will come out, “oh! Calvin Ridley? Is he gone yet?” That casual question will tear out the heart of your plan to wait any further.
On the other hand, if you don’t have someone like that in the room, you will have some more experienced drafters (or there will be a mix of both). If the experienced drafters are running out of money they will usually be looking to do one thing and one thing only when it’s their turn: Get you to spend your money. In that instance, the Ridley nomination could come even quicker than from a novice. The veteran drafter will realize that they aren’t going to own Ridley and won’t attempt to sit on that big of a name. Instead, they’ll throw him out there to kill some money from one of the cap leaders and attempt to bring the draft back to them.
In either instance, it is unlikely the waiting game will be successful. The other side effect of this strategy? You’ve taken yourself out of the draft at this extremely important point because if you bid on another player you will lose the advantage that has you in the driver’s seat for Ridley in the first place. You can, and will, get Ridley, but until you do you have almost no flexibility to do much of anything. As a result, you’re likely to see several excellent deals pass you by that you can’t bid on for fear of losing your edge to get Ridley. At that point, your ability to get him will effectively limit any move you can make until you get him on your roster and see what he will cost you. Getting him is important, but you’ll lose some buying power at the end of the draft and your overall team strength will suffer. You can have your Ridley and eat it too! Scenario 2 tells you how.
Scenario 2
When it is your turn to nominate you focus on one thing – how to get Team B to buy a running back. It doesn’t matter what they spend, it’s just important that they buy that running back. Examining your list you see that Raheem Mostert is still available and is in a tier by himself over all running backs left. That’s likely to be who Team B is waiting on, and even if it isn’t, they can’t afford to pass on Mostert because they will have effectively shut themselves out of the top running back left and they know you can still outbid them on Calvin Ridley. The prudent move for Team B is to pay whatever they have to pay for Mostert and take the next best wide receiver they can with what is left. Otherwise, they’ll lose both Ridley *and* Mostert. Now, auction drafters aren’t always prudent, so the move won’t work 100% of the time, but your job is to make the best plays you can and hope for the result you want. They can always pass on Mostert and then bid their max $31 for Ridley and kamikaze right into your chances at pulling this off, but that would be a spiteful move not made out of self-interest and unlikely to happen.
Now assuming the nomination for Mostert works, the other teams should make Team B spend up to the $16 max and it’s likely that Team B is now effectively removed from the Calvin Ridley equation. Instead of having to pay somewhere in the mid to low $20s for Ridley because Team B bid until they were forced to drop out, your new price point is $16. And with a little luck, that number will drop before it gets back to you for you to nominate none other than Ridley himself. At that point you buy Ridley and it’s entirely possible that you still have the highest maximum bid in the room for the final stretch of the auction.
What you have seen here is a simple but repeatable situation in which your identification of a key nomination at a key point in the draft can make or break how you finish your team. If you blow off your nomination and fail to isolate the right player to put up, you can cost yourself valuable players and cap money. The average auction drafter in this scenario thinks, “don’t nominate someone you want”. But the move in Scenario 2 – identifying it, isolating the right player to pull it off, and executing the plan – is an advanced play and it should become part of your skillset if you can remember these key concepts.
Nominations are a massive part of any auction draft strategy when you want to continue to grow as a drafter. Don’t hesitate to try and be the one to steer the draft. It is very likely nobody will have any idea that you are attempting to drive the bus, and even if they do know, there is little they can do about it because your nominations are going to work for YOU, and that’s why they’re so important. Use them wisely.
For more on Auction Drafts and strategies visit the author's short video series, The Auction Brief, found here:
The Auction Brief - Episode 5: The Ripple Effect
For more from this author check out his other pieces found here.
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