Mastering Salary Cap Drafts: Part 2, Attacking Novice Draft Rooms

Note: This series is designed to take salary cap drafters of any ability and refine their skills to those of a seasoned veteran. The articles will go from simple concepts to the most advanced salary cap draft 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.

After Part I, you know what some common problems are for beginning salary cap drafters. Now you can start to focus on how to attack a room where you see these mistakes from inexperienced drafters.

Taking Advantage of Emotion

Part I talked about your emotions and how to not let them get the best of you. Taking the next step in developing your salary cap draft skills means focusing on others and how their emotions affect their actions.

In beginner salary cap rooms, emotion can have a big impact on how the draft goes. It can either make things wild where overspending is happening, or it can make managers timid and tight with their money. You can take advantage of either situation, but only if you’re watching for it.

Capitalizing on what is happening requires a grasp on the prices players might go for ahead of time. Prices fluctuate depending on the room, but you can still have an idea in your head that can guide you as the draft starts. For example, if the draft starts and the bidding slows down on Justin Jefferson at $48 ($200 cap, 12-team league), you know that the beginners in the room are unsure of themselves, and you need to act fast. In rooms with a lot of green drafters, this timidity can endure for large parts of the draft. Before they realize that they have way too much money left and not enough impact players for that money, you will have hopefully scooped up a bunch of top talent at a discount. The key here is to not hesitate, get aggressive, and land some players while the rest of the room is asleep at the wheel.

On the other hand, in some beginner rooms, the emotion coursing through new drafters makes them spend indiscriminately. Taking the Jefferson example to the other extreme, if a manager has $60 allocated to land this year’s consensus top receiver, when the bidding gets to $65, the alarm bells should go off that things are getting too hot. At that point, backing off and waiting for the spending to settle down is the right play. The golden rule of salary cap drafting is that when spending is higher than it should be, bargains will always come. The question for you to decide in the room is: Can you continue to pass and wait for prices to come down as the elite talent flies off the board? It’s a balancing act and a judgment call in the moment that only you can make, but sometimes you have to jump in and overpay for a player or two to avoid being shut out of top talent. But otherwise, patience is the name of the game in a room full of excited beginners spending wildly. When prices correct themselves as the draft goes on, you will be positioned to take advantage and land a bunch of bargain purchases.

Poor Situational Awareness

Beginning salary cap drafters are notoriously poor at keeping track of what is going on around them. They almost certainly won’t know what money the other managers in the room have left, they won’t be keeping track of everyone’s rosters, and they might not even know how much money they have left for their own team. You should be aware of which managers have access to this information because they’re using a computer program like the Draft Dominator or an Excel spreadsheet and which ones are consistently unaware of what is happening around them. There are a couple of things you can do to take advantage of players like this.

• Clog their roster – Teams that don’t have a strong grasp of what is happening will often draft too many players at a position before they realize what they’re doing. For example, they can’t pass up a deal on Anthony Richardson (only $5 for all that upside?!), so they draft a third quarterback. If you notice them bidding on Richardson when they have two quarterbacks already or a high-priced starter, then let them have him and waste a roster spot. Or perhaps they can’t pass up a deal on Tyjae Spears, so they fill their last bench spot when they have a bunch of money left for a much better player. It is a good strategy to target nominations at those managers or, better yet, let them land a player too cheaply to kill a roster spot. Sometimes this can take them out of contention at a certain position or handicap their overall chances to compete with you in the latter stages of the draft.
• Box them in – Later in a draft, the managers who don’t keep track of the money in a room are at a disadvantage that continues to increase as the draft goes on. When money gets tight and the player pool is drying up, each dollar and each decision becomes more critical. You can often find situations where they will be bidding near their maximum bid and don’t know it. Know when to stop and let them spend their money. Or, when the end of the draft is near, you’ll save precious dollars by watching their max bid and if they can only bid $4, don’t ever say "3". Then you end up paying $5 instead of $4. Be acutely aware of what they have left and try to craft your bids to take them out, or box them in.

There is also a tendency for inexperienced salary cap drafters to make impulsive decisions that can massively impact their draft. They can get upset when they can’t bid because they’re out of money and a player is about to go too cheaply, or they can attempt to price enforce on a top player because they paid market value, and they get frustrated because someone else is about to get a deal. Here’s an example.

Travis Kelce is up for nomination. The bidding is down to Teams A and B. Teams A and B have no tight ends on their roster. Team C already has Mark Andrews for $29 and only has $51 left while still needing an RB2, WR2, and the rest of their backups as well. Team C is not in on the bidding. The back-and-forth between A and B slows at $27 for Kelce. Team C is upset that he isn’t going for more money and jumps into the bidding by yelling, "$30!" Team C made an impulsive, unwise bid. All that manager knows is that they feel Kelce should be going for more than Andrews, and they are petulantly making a snap decision without understanding the consequences. Team A is keeping salary stats meticulously and realizes instantly that if she stops bidding, then she is going to stick Team C with two high-priced tight ends and effectively take him out of the draft because he’ll only have $21 left to fill most of his team. But Team B is not keeping track of the money. Instead, he just knows that he wants Kelce and bids $31, thereby letting Team C off the hook.

In this scenario, which team do you want to be? Team A, right? It’s forgivable to be Team B, but not desirable. And being Team C? You’re not in control of anything that is happening to you, and you’ll likely end up with a poor team. Beginners lack situational awareness at all points during the draft, and if you’re watching for it you can use it to help make the draft come to you.

Broadcasting Intentions

New salary cap drafters often fall into two different traps when it comes to nominating and bidding on players.

Trap #1 - Novice drafters will nominate players they want or players they don’t want. You can’t know which managers in the room are which when you first start. But your job is to figure that out in the first hour of the draft and then use it as the draft goes on. More often than not, beginners will tend to simply call out players that they are interested in. You’ll notice that they either end up winning that player or they’ll bid to the late stages before dropping out. This is an easy one to spot if you are paying attention. Once you spot it you can use it to squeeze extra dollars from people because the risk that goes along with bidding someone up is vastly reduced.

On the other hand, some novice drafters only call out players they have no interest in. As the draft goes on, you’ll see that they never end up with a player that they nominate. In fact, most of them don’t even put up the pretense of bidding on the player they just called out after their initial bid. Keep a scratch piece of paper by you during the draft and note which category your fellow managers fall into.

Trap #2 - Bidding only when interested in a player. New salary cap drafters find themselves in a situation they have never been in before. The draft is longer than a serpentine draft, they need to pay attention more than they ever have, and they can’t drift in and out of focus, or they’ll miss things that are happening. But they will lose focus, they will get tired, and when they hear a name they don’t care about, they’ll tune out. For you, this means it is extremely easy to know when someone is serious about a player because they’ll be bidding. It’s that simple. When you spot this happening, it is your job to squeeze some extra dollars from these drafters. They likely won’t even know that they spent $42 instead of $40, and that can happen 6-8 times in a draft. Bleeding off $12-$16 from the beginners in the room because they are giving away their affinity for certain players is an easily exploitable advantage for your squad.

Conclusion

Drafters without much salary cap experience usually have some predictable behaviors and patterns. Paying attention to what they do during the first few rounds of the draft can pay dividends over the last half of action. An important facet of understanding how to attack these tendencies is also identifying those same tendencies in your own salary cap game. Make sure you are not only attacking others’ mistakes but fixing your own as well. When you combine mastery of your actions with exploiting the typical errors from beginners, you’ll be able to handle all but the most advanced salary cap draft rooms. Part 3 in the series will tell you all about what you need to know to prepare for your salary cap drafts.

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