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So, your league has decided to do a salary cap draft. It may seem daunting at first, and it is natural to have some anxiety about it, but there are some simple things you can learn right from the start that help you become a proficient drafter, even if you have little to no experience. Using the salary cap draft format demands a different skill set than drafting in a normal serpentine fantasy draft. It requires a level of attention that serpentine drafting does not, and a lot of emotion is also involved. Controlling that emotion with preparation and sound strategy is how you win your salary cap draft. Here are some basic concepts to learn to get off to a fast start.
Salary Cap Draft Concept #1 – Budget Management
If your salary cap draft is online the website software does a lot of the heavy lifting for you by keeping track of everyone’s money, how much their maximum bid is, and how many roster spots are still left to be filled on everyone’s teams. But if you’re drafting in a live salary cap draft you will have to do some extra preparation.
It cannot be undersold how important it is to keep meticulous records as the draft proceeds. Keeping track of everyone’s cap situation with a pencil and paper is possible, but that’s not recommended. Instead, using a computer spreadsheet is the way to go, or better yet, the Draft Dominator from Footballguys is the best piece of software out there to track a salary cap draft. To become a top-tier drafter in this format, you must know what every player in the room is doing, or your rosters will never reach their full potential. You will bump up against most, or all, of the other managers in the room as you bid during the draft and your decisions can’t be informed unless you know everyone’s cap situation at every moment. Make this a priority before you learn anything else.
Another essential function of budget management is learning to spend your money at the appropriate time. That may sound easy, but walking the fine line between spending enough but not spending too fast is the eternal struggle for drafters in a salary cap draft. Some managers get carried away buying too many top-level players when the draft starts; others shrink from the moment and don’t spend enough. The best way to walk this fine line is budget management and meticulous record keeping. Every time someone lands a player, you should see what that does to that manager’s team, their ability to buy players going forward, and how it shifts their needs. Those factors are then internalized so you can call upon them the next time that drafter is bidding for a player. Remember that the salary cap format doesn’t have big lulls like a serpentine draft. Instead, you’ll be forced to constantly assess and reevaluate every drafter’s positions (as well as your own) as you go because there is no time to go through that process when the bid timer is ticking down.
The final thing to mention is one you’ll hear a lot about, but it’s important enough to warrant a comment. You must spend all your money. Even if you get near the end of the draft and there aren’t many players left that you care about, you should still spend all you can on whatever is left. You may not need a third quarterback or a second defense, but sometimes rostering a strong player is less about your roster and more about keeping them from someone else. Landing Tua Tagovailoa or the San Francisco defense when you don’t need them is still correct if you have money and roster spots to burn. Spend. The. Money. If you finish the draft and find that you have a small amount of $4-$6 left, it’s still a mistake because that money could’ve easily gone towards upgrading a position on your team. Failing to be aggressive in spending your whole cap will hurt your team’s upside.
Salary Cap Draft Concept #2 – The Need for a Plan
Doing a salary cap draft requires an altogether different level of preparation than a conventional draft. Printing out a cheat sheet or looking at some rankings on a phone may be an easy and even somewhat reasonable way to pick players in a serpentine draft, but that is not the case in a salary cap draft if you want to succeed. If you’ve only done serpentine drafts in the past, your idea of what a plan looks like going into the draft is quite different from a salary cap plan. There will be a more in-depth discussion of preparing for a draft in this series, but for now, understand that the need for a plan is magnified in a salary cap draft, and that extends to your pre-draft preparation.
This part of the process is magnified because there is so much freedom in a salary cap draft. You can build your roster any way you want, and that doesn’t depend on what draft pick you draw or what players are left when it’s your turn to pick someone. Instead, you get to drive your roster construction by what you do during the draft. Therefore, you must spend much more time figuring out what that is before the draft starts. For example, if you want to go cheap at your RB2 slot, then you’ll need to have a strong grasp of how the various RB2 candidates compare with each other before the draft starts. That’s different from a serpentine format because in a salary cap draft, one of those players could be nominated at any time, and you have to be ready to act when it happens! If you’re blowing off your RB2 spot and Zack Moss is nominated, you’ll need to know what to do if the bidding stops at $8. Does that work for your cap situation? For your current roster situation? Do you even like Zack Moss at all? What other RB2-type players are left that could be cheaper or more expensive than Moss, and what is your opinion of their worth relative to Moss? There are many more questions that you need to have answers to when trying to succeed in a salary cap draft room versus a serpentine draft. That hard work starts with pre-draft preparation to nail down your plan of attack.
Salary Cap Draft Concept #3 – Eliminate Tough Decisions
Salary cap drafts are emotional roller coasters. You can’t walk into a serpentine draft and get Christian McCaffrey and CeeDee Lamb, so it gives you a heady, excited feeling when a salary cap draft starts. In most drafts, people will nominate the top guys immediately, and you’ll be tempted to spend your money because they’ll be quickly flying off the board. However, controlling your emotions and impulsiveness during the draft's beginning stages is key to remaining relevant going forward. The best way to do that is to avoid ambiguity in what you want to spend. This is an important concept for any skill level in salary cap drafting. The more difficult decisions and guesswork you take off your plate ahead of time, the more successful you’ll be.
So, instead of saying, “I want to spend 40% of my budget on wide receivers”, come up with exact dollar amounts to spend on each wide receiver on your roster. If you say “40% for wide receivers,” that’s $80. But if you don’t break that down further for all the wide receiver slots on your team, it’s easy to spend $58 on your WR1 and not realize how hard this makes it to field a deep, wide receiver corps. You have left yourself with only $22 and no shot at getting any upper-tier pass-catchers to go with your top guy. If you come up with exact numbers for each position on your roster before the draft, you don’t have to follow it exactly when you get in the room but having it to guide you when the high-dollar bids start flying is the best way to control your bidding and keep you on the right path.
Salary Cap Draft Concept #4 – Control What You Can Control
There aren’t many things you can control in a salary cap draft room, but there are some things that you can do to try to steer things where you want them to go. The three most prominent things you do control are your pre-draft attack plan, how and when you spend your cap dollars, and when and who you nominate during the draft.
Far too many drafters nominate the top player on the board when it’s their turn and spend their time during the draft reacting to what everyone else is doing. The better way to go about it is to try to get others to react to you instead. Focus your efforts on putting the pressure on them. That means pushing the bidding when possible so they are the ones on the clock having to decide if they can afford to bid. It also means sometimes nominating players that you want to land, but other times nominating players that put them to a decision for their roster construction.
Since you have a plan ahead of time, you should also focus on making your early nominations to define how your draft will go. Do you want a top running back? Don’t wait to nominate one of the top guys. Instead, get him on the block and see if you land him. If you don’t land him for the price you wanted, it frees you up to pivot strategies. But if you wait four rounds into the draft and discover that your strategy isn’t working, you likely have lost the opportunity to grab impact players at other positions. Resist the urge to be passive with your nominations and instead focus your early strategy on figuring out which way your draft is going. In general, your goal in a salary cap room is to focus on what you can control and then use those things to either help your roster or pressure others. Passively letting the draft happen to you as a meek participant may not be disastrous, but it is a beginner mindset, and it won’t yield top-shelf results.
These concepts are a great place to start when you’re trying to learn how to draft in a salary cap room. The mindset of drafting in this format is vastly different than a serpentine draft, and you’ll have to throw out what you know about fantasy drafts to start learning how success comes in a draft room with so many variables. Now that you’ve got some of these basic salary cap ideas in your head, be on the lookout for Part 2 this weekend, where you can learn how to start using these concepts to beat your draft room.